“ISN’T IT TRUE WHAT SMALL CAN DO?”: MARTIN CARTHY AT THE GREYS

Three days before he does the Royal Festival Hall, and the same day he’s interviewed in the Guardian, folk legend Martin Carthy plays in a pub less than ten minutes from my house. And it literally is a pub gig, with a grinning guy on the door and an impromptu ‘stage’ in the corner.

An appealing thing about gigs at The Greys is the sense of non-occasion. They put on acts they like, in the hope other people will too. You end up with the feeling that everybody is there for the music, right down to the guy collecting the glasses. It’s putting on a night the way it should be. Its putting on a night the way that was once fairly standard in Brighton, before it succumbed to the corporate clone crap you see infecting everywhere these days.

I did wonder, had some passer-by poked their head in the window, what they would have thought. Would they have guessed this was a folk world legend in the building, and not some regular Monday night? I mean this in a very positive sense - I’m not at all sure they would. Partly, Carthy is an unassuming performer. His attitude is that he might as well sing the songs as someone else, that the songs themselves are the stuff that matters.

But also it’s music which takes its time to work upon you. He’s not the greatest singer, not even greatly distinctive in the way of someone like Bob Dylan. And, heresy though it may be to say, his guitar playing at times can be almost awkward. But put the ingredients together and leave to marinade, and some invisible magic sparks between them.

As a nipper I lacked older brothers, so the only music I had to listen to was my Dad’s. I took to folk but took from it (and projected onto much subsequent music) the feeling that it was all about storytelling. Folk music was really just folk tales, the music there just to punctuate and illustrate the words. Folk instrumentals existed, but only as a means of testing the faithful. (This theory came in useful again as I grew older, and my brain became asked to explain Led Zeppelin drum solos.)

As I would finally discover, mostly this just missed the point. But I did find my old listening habits creeping back during some of the instrumentals. Perhaps Carthy really is a kind of storyteller, in the troubadour tradition.

Carthy’s importance is as a linking figure, a carrier of the folk spirit rather than the preserver of some imagined essence, an anti-Ewan McCall. He started out as part of the early Sixties acoustic folk revival, but inspired many from the subsequent electric folk scene, and even played awhile in Steeleye Span. I last saw him on these shores amid the multi-generational troupe of The Imagined Village. (A line-up which included his own daughter, Eliza.) And it's the linking figures who are important, because folk music shouldn't be about preserving the past but accentuating the continuum between the past and the present.

So it’s perhaps significant that only once did I notice him playing the now-common trick of ‘updating’ the lyrics - comparing a soldier crippled by a Napoleonic cannonball to one cluster bombed in Afghanistan. True, these aren’t songs which should be seen as fixed or in need of preserving. But it’s a smarter trick when it isn’t overplayed, or it just becomes a gimmick. It also risks the idea that the update somehow ‘politicises’ the old songs, as if dragging them out of retirement. A nice feature of this set was that it didn’t care to distinguish much between political songs and others. “There’s hardly such a thing as an apolitical song,” he told the Guardian. “They’re all political.”

Besides, if things are running right, we will make those connections ourselves. One example was when he launched into the folk original of Chumbawamba’s ode to a wifebeater’s comeuppance, ‘Stitch That’. As the track dated from their anti-pop-star era, I had no idea there even was a folk original! (Tho’ it’s notable that in this version the husband gets off with a warning, whereas in Chumbawamba’s he simply gets offed!) Carthy told us he’d long thought the tale a legend, but after one gig a stocky old Welshwoman had proudly told him it had happened in her village. The actions of one person who refuses to take the knocks become preserved by being turned into a song, a vehicle which passes easily from hand to hand and year to year. As the words go, “isn’t it true what small can do?”

Coming Soon!: Even older gig reports!

'THE PANDORICA OPENS', 'THE BIG BANG', UNCLE STEVE MOFFAT AND ALL

Funny how things turn out really.

It wasn’t the World Cup that was the proverbial game of two halves, but Steven Moffat’s two-part finale to Doctor Who. Russell Davies’ finales always felt like a film chopped in half. (Albeit spliced together with a contrived cliffhanger.) But here the two parts felt strangely unlike each other, like jigsaw pieces crammed together. The first was much closer to the Davis finales we know, all galloping horses’ hooves and spaceships filling the sky. And, as with Davies, it often felt like a shopping-list of set pieces put on film. Take the Doctor’s big speech to the amassed space fleets. Even if we are to accept they would bugger off simply from being barked at by him, what has this got to do with the rest of the story? Isn’t their plan to get the Doctor to open the Pandorica? For that matter, why is a Cyberman on guard?

There’s been much fan comment over the Axis of Evil Aliens. I’m wondering if its source was the cover of the Radio Times Tenth Anniversary special. Certainly the image of the Third Doctor recoiling from all kind of baddies boggled my young mind. It was a long time before I realised that this wasn’t some episode I somehow hadn’t seen, but a specially composed photo-op. Whereupon I immediately wished it could be one, with all the monsters, all at once, surely the greatest ever. Yet of course it’s a fannish notion. I may well be wrong about this source, but they appear within the story much like that photo-op cover. You line them up and then there isn’t a lot for them to do but pose.

The second part was much more like a “time travel farce”. (In a way that even other “timey wimey” tales weren’t, for example ’Girl in the Fireplace.’) The standard farce trope is of course someone getting mistaken for someone else, repeated until convoluted. Here characters get mistaken for somewhen else. It was very similar in both tone and content to  ’Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban’. With his fez and broom, the Doctor even resembled a Potter character. His appearance to the grieving Rory at the very beginning seemed to sum up the lurch. “Don’t worry. She’s dead now. But we’ll just turn this into a completely different kind of show!”

But then the second part turns into a game of two halves all by itself, the frenetic zipping about is over and we’re left with a much more intimate, more psychological story. In fact we’re pretty much where we began, at the start of the season.

Here the oft-made comparisons of Moffat’s work to fairy stories really come into their own. Pandroa’s Box becomes kind of merged with the Tardis, and the girl opens the box to let all the good stuff back in. It also works like ’Sleeping Beauty’, again in reverse. Instead of Beauty and all in her castle being put to sleep they’re the only ones awake, it’s the rest of the universe which needs Amy to remember it into life again. There’s a wedding instead of a christening, in which the uninvited guest arrives to complete the festivities.

Of course it’s a metaphor for Amy remaining connected to her imagination, not throwing it away in pursuit of the adult life we saw in ’Amy’s Choice’. In a potent image the stars are no longer in the sky but only in her mind, and as any SF fan knows stars stand for imagination. But there’s also a strange association of imagination with memory. Amy states almost in the same breath that the “raggedy Doctor” was her imaginary friend and “raggedy man, I remember you!”

After not one but two strange leaps, it’s inevitable that much got left behind. We don’t know what became of the Axis of Evil Aliens, and I don’t suppose we ever will. But in the sudden shift to Amy’s mind a lot of plot resolutions are conspicuous by their absence. We still don’t know River Song’s “spoilers”, or even what caused the cracks in time. As with the note Amelia finds on the Pandorica, we’re supposed to “stick around.” The suggestion is that the chief villain, and cause of the Cracks, lies unrevealed. In fact he even gets forgotten for the whole second half of the episode. After all that hard work scheming, he must surely be seething at the affront!

Of course continued serials live by the rule of tease. But there’s more to this than simply feeling strung along. Moffat’s first story, the one that got us all excited about him, was ’Empty Child’, almost completely devoid of ”timey wimey stuff” and mostly remembered for the titular kid with the sinister catchphrase. Even after his embracing of time paradoxes, we still most commonly thought of him as the deviser of sinister adversaries – the Clockwork Robots, the Weeping Angels.

This time we got the Weeping Angels back, if somewhat streamlined for mass production. But he’s given us no real additions to the pantheon of creepiness. (Unless you count the Smilers. Which we don’t.) To merely dangle a Big New Foe and deliver no goods on him whatsoever leaves a hole. The reveal that the Pandorica was empty, if great at the time, feels all too telling in retrospect. Has Moffat’s cranium simply ceased producing creepy foes, and he’s holding off delivering in the hope that lightning will re-strike? What is the Doctor without his monsters?

Instead of the sinister, Moffat’s subsequent works have shown a greater and greater reliance upon time and all that ever wimed with it. After ’Big Bang’ we are surely gorged on all that, even if it once was a good thing. To follow this with some ever-more-tangled criss-crossing of timelines would just be like Davies’ device of having an even bigger Dalek fleet at the end of every season. It’s time for a clean break. Yet these two running plotlines are inextricably linked to the timey wimey stuff, which does suggest more of the same. (I’m assuming that neither plotline will be resolved in the Christmas special, but right at the end of the next season. An “Egyptian Goddess loose on the Orient Express in space” sounds too much like River Song to be her, particularly so soon after she’s done Cleopatra.)

Ultimately, if the empty Pandorica was a telling symbol, so was the Doctor zipping here there and everywhere. There were some great moments along the way, but the overall experience was disjointed - bitty. It was great in parts, weak in whole. I’ve commented before how Davies’ finales worked to his worst instincts for ‘event TV’, when it was always the smaller moments that stayed with you. The Tardis pulling along a planet was groansome. The Doctor walking out in the rain, unremembered by Donna, was heartbreaking. Similarly, I will remember the Doctor being late for Amy’s wedding above all the time paradoxes. Or the headless Cyberman above the whole amassed Axis of Evil Aliens.

One final niggle was summed up by the Doctor’s line “your girlfriend isn’t more important than the whole universe.” Which of course, by the standards of ’New Who’, means that for some reason she is.

Though it started in the Sixties, ’Old Who’ was still a product of the post War era. As dull as the endless Nazi analogy stories sometimes got, there was an upside to this. Life was about responsibility, about doing the right thing. This led to an almost obsessive focus on sacrifice, on ordinary people fighting and even laying down their lives if it led to a greater good.

Moreover, the ‘companion’ was always the audience identification figure, the one who saw and responded to things the way you would. Their selling point was that they were an ordinary person in an extraordinary situation. Now they are always ‘special’. In fact poor Martha is the only New Doctor companion not to have been (at some point or other) The Most Important Being In the Universe. It smacks of our me-first society, as if we have become infantilised - not quite learnt that the world in our head and the world out there are separate places.

There’s an equally observable shift in War films. Old War films typically start with a cast of quite ordinary people who step up, often quite reluctantly, to fight for freedom. They’d often feature a helpful voiceover at the end explaining that it was these men, and the thousands of others like them, who stopped fascism. Modern war films are almost always about crack bands of troops, embarking on a mission on which the whole War might turn.

Of course it’s a waste of time even talking about things like this. People will just shrug out of confusion and disinterest, or tell me I “don’t get” it. (Much like I “don’t get” why poor people have to pay for the bankers’ screw-ups.) But the way that, of all things, Doctor Who has turned so ego-gratifying seems supremely indicative.

Coming Soon! More of this sort of thing...

WHEN NO-ONE SEEMS AT HOME...

Whenever there are not updates here, it is because I am busily posting comments elsewhere that are extensive, sharply written and insightful.

That is normally two lies. At the moment it's only one.

(Andrew's comments are well worth reading in their own right. But you knew that already.)

DOCTOR WHO 'VINCENT AND THE DOCTOR'

“Have you heard about the writer Ritchy Curtis?
Who wrote the Doctor and did miss
No point sitting on the fence
That was bad in the English sense.”
(With apologies to Jonathan Richman)


Every now and again a long-running genre fiction series will decide to splash out and get a Proper Writer in. Healthy cynicism aside, this can sometimes work. Harlan Ellison wrote well for both ’Star Trek’ and Marvel comics. But he had half a foot in genre fiction to start with. More normally, this very drive will propel them into getting a Real Proper Writer – someone with no previous on their record.

At which point the results are almost inevitably lose-lose. It’s like bringing in a master chef to flip burgers. His Egon Ronay training isn’t going to help him flip any better, in fact the guy they just deposed, who knew how to flip burgers, he did it better. What people tend to be good at is the thing that they are good at.

This notion then married the New Who fixation with wheeling in Big Historical Figures. These have not worked well in the past. By bringing in someone to impersona... sorry, play this figure, some of their gravitas is supposed to rub off. But it’s like sticking a statue up, then trying to cast it in your drama.

Combining these two is a perfect storm of good intentions and bad outcomes. You end up with a historical drama about the last years of Van Gogh’s life with a monster turning up and running round at arbitrary points. It’s like the ’Red Dwarf’ episode where a tank turns up in a Jane Austin adaptation. Except risible instead of funny.

Before anyone rushes to the Comments section, yes I got the idea that the monster was some Bunyanesque manifestation of Van Gogh’s despair. In fact I got it with the full force of his stabbing easel. Only he can see it! He kills it with his art! But if the monster’s there to do anything, it has to give us some insight into that despair. So if you want to argue that a giant, badly CGI’d chicken is an illuminating metaphor for manic depression, then the Comments section is now open.

The monster was such a poorly conceived afterthought that it didn’t really work on it’s own terms. Desperate to make it not just a giant, badly CGI’d chicken they launched a late-in-the-day campaign to portray “evil when I see it” as suddenly lost and alone. But the more they gave it it’s own identity the less it became Van Gogh’s embodied despair, there for him to slay and vanquish. It was lose-lose. (And was there any internal logic as to why only Van Gogh could see it?)

In fact, his despair is brought home much more in the scene where he’s unable to leave his bed. We all have moments a little like that, so we relate to him just as we realise his are so much more magnified. After such scenes, do we need all that stupid chicken chasing? I couldn’t help but think how much better it would have worked with all that rubbish removed, as a return to the old ‘true’ historicals.

Perhaps the time travellers are unable to give away their origins, and become convinced that if they could just explain how they know his art to be important... Perhaps there could be a left turn, when they realise they have just labelled his art “historically important” but when pressed can’t articulate exactly what is so great about it. Perhaps they finally desperately admit where they’re from and he just dismisses them as bigger absinthe drinkers than he is.



Alternately, the monster could have been made to actually mean something! There’s two all-too-brief suggestions of this, which might have worked if they’d been built on. One comes right at the beginning; as Van Gogh paints a wheat field, it rustles mysteriously amid the stalks. Later he part-enthuses, part-rages at the Doctor that nature calls him to “capture my mystery.” The appeal of his art is that it portrays nature not as a pretty scene for our contemplation, gardens assembled like a still life, but as a wild force, an entity in its own right. Trees thrust up through the ground, skies convulse. The monster could have become the nature he fought to capture in his art, a Captain Ahab always after the white whale.

But I’m forced to concede that, over at Behind The Sofa, Neil Perryman had the best idea. What if the Doctor had it right the first time? The invisible monster really was just in his mind, a for-real creature of the id. Used to encountering the real thing, the Doctor tests for it with ever-more-elaborate scanners fished from the Tardis’ closet. Finally he bleakly concludes that this is the one kind of monster he could never hope to defeat.

This might have even fixed that sickeningly schmaltzy ending. Some are those who have seen the particular soundtrack choice as a step too far. (A band called Athlete, whose market demographic seems to be anyone who finds Coldplay too edgy and challenging.) But the terrible truth is that it was all too terribly appropriate - it fitted right in with what was on the screen!

Yet the basic premise, underneath that Euro-mountain of saccharine, is actually quite a good one. Depression is a medical condition to be distinguished from a grumpy head day. It can’t be cured by buying the sufferer some nice things, any more than an evening out cures typhoid up.

So instead imagine this. Amy alone in the gallery, sobbing uncontrollably for the man she couldn’t save. Finally Bill Nightie happens by and agrees that, yes, these paintings really are quite moving. Or perhaps his despair is in some way cured, and Amy races to see the extra works only to find the room empty – with no demons to struggle against, he had no need of art and chucked his old easels on the fire.

Let’s gallantly close with some plus points about this episode:

1. It does try to get into the head of it’s historical subject (“hold my hand, Doctor, try to see what I see”) rather than just stand him up reverentially and have him say the sort of things he’d say. He becomes a character in his own episode.

2.The Doctor’s new-found fallibility was in evidence. He’s a genius at extemporising his way out of a crisis, but not someone you’d want by your bedside as you were beset by depression. His railing against waiting, and time dully passing “in the right order”, was masterful. And, thank heaven for simple mercies, his sonic screwdriver didn’t work!

3. Rory’s absence was well handled, alluded to but never laid on.

4. When they travel back to the future, the Tardis is plastered with handbills. As it rematerialises they immediately burn up. Yet Van Gogh’s art survives. It works precisely because the image is not laboured over.

GIG-GOING ADVENTURES 1: WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM/ TIM HECKER/ WOLF EYES

I seem to have been attending a surfeit of gigs lately, at a rate too fast to write them all up – and now there’s a bit of a backlog. Looking back at this list, I seem to have perversely decided to ignore chronology and post them in pairings which just seem to suggest themselves. This also means posting two of the most recent outings first...

(At least this proves I don’t only stay in and watch ’Doctor Who.’)

WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM
(The Engine Rooms, Fri 21^st May)

A band composed of radical environmentalists from Washington state, were even formed at an Earth First gathering and live together in a rural commune outside of Olympia. The track title ‘I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots’ might suggest their sound, which tends to longish soundscapes based in doom drone and even black metal. Partly, I was interested in the idea of political opinions being expressed through the music, rather than channelled into words shouted over some generic backbeat (aka the anarcho-punk trap).

You could certainly see their music as reflecting a view of nature apart from the pop music view, where it’s mostly held to be a twee place to snog in. Yet, though it would be true enough to say their sound reflects the elemental wildness of nature, there’s more to it than that. If you were in a fanciful mood, you could even describe it as having an ecology!

What really compels is the harmonics between the guitars, which bisect and throw up patterns which are so much more than the sum of their parts. You could try and reduce the resultant sound back to the constituent instruments, but it would be like reducing a forest back into the trees, birds and animals. The wood is more than the trees, and all that.

But for all the fantastic guitar harmonics my ears hit a huge stumbling block in the growelly grindcore vocals. (You know, the stuff that goes ‘MWUUUUUURGH! URRRRRGH!” a lot.) Though the set had long instrumental passages, whenever those vocals recurred I found it hard to do much except for wait for them to stop again. Yes I know they’re supposed to sound unmediated and irrecuperable, but by this point they actually sound about as generic as a Ritchie Blackmore guitar solo.

Ultimately I found myself wanting something more to happen. This may have partly been due to it being something of a short set, lasting an hour at most. Though it wasn’t just one-note heavy, their first album (available on Spotify) branches further into ambient and even folk passages. (Plus has a second, more folky vocal to counteract the grunting.) I’ve no idea whether they’ve now nixed those elements from their sound, or whether they just prefer doing the louder stuff live. Legend has it they prefer playing outdoors, so maybe it all works better in that setting.

TIM HECKER
(The Free Butt, Mon 17^th May)

I did, at first, have my doubts. We’re past the era where rock music is the default mode of music expression, but most venues are still set up like it’s the Seventies and Nine Below Zero are in town. This problem is actually more manifest in smaller venues, for larger ones often double as arts centres and the like. An intimate space like the Free Butt is a great place to see a band. But Tim Hecker’s an electronica artist. You don’t want to feel like you’re part of a sweaty, heaving crowd. Because you won’t be, for one thing...

As it happens, things worked out well. This was probably in no small part down to the venue judiciously dimming the lights, as if tipping us off to focus on the mind’s eye.

Everything that was good about this set simultaneously makes it difficult to write about. It worked precisely as a soundscape, to envelop and transport you. It didn’t raise any issues, coin any concepts or do anything that might be rationalised into words. Some prefer to see that as a limitation, as art for art’s sake. But art isn’t a newspaper, it doesn’t always have to be telling us something. I see it more as music doing something only music can do. A song can tell a story, but so can many other mediums.

It reminds me of a panel transcript from an old ’Comics Journal.’ Complaining about that newfangled abstract art, some curmudgeon grumbled he’d once asked a painter what his work was about – “and he couldn’t answer me.” A slightly wiser soul pointed out “well that’s why he painted it.”

Here’s a video of Hecker not doing very much...

WOLF EYES
(The Engine Rooms, Tues 1^st June)

Wolf Eyes, conversely, worked precisely because of what they were able to do with a rock format. It felt right seeing them in so ‘rocky’ a venue as the Engine Rooms, for they walk and talk (well, swagger) as much like a rock band as a noise outfit. They strike up a deranged cacophony which feels as elemental as being caught in a wildstorm. Yet at the very same time they’ll lay down what’s hazily recognisable as rhythm tracks over which the vocalist will intone - the CD I bought even came with a lyric sheet! By the very act of disdaining the strictures of rock music they feel just the way such music used to feel in days of yore – full of attitude, abandon and unconstrained by tradition, able to make up its own rules as it goes along.

We can of course want things both ways. Rock theatrics now feel tired, even ‘alternative’ rock may as well be Judas Priest. So we turn outside of it, only to find ourselves missing its visceral vitality. But every now and then our contradictory wishes get rewarded, with sets of such gut-punching physicality that chinstrokers would be thrown off like chaff!

Each member ‘triples up’ on stage between traditional rock tools, power electronics and home-made and extemporised instruments. (Including something which looked like a metal stool, down the legs of which they promptly started blowing!) But this didn’t come across as any kind of eclectic blend or statement about virtuosity.  Each new item, as soon as picked up, would simply shape to their hands. It was as if they were audaciously able to make their music out of anything. At times this might be something so apparently archaic as a guitar. Another, a contact mike dragged down a packing case would be all that was needed for a rhythm track.

This willful shaping of anything into their sound may sound very Faust-like, but there’s no sense of Faust’s devilish pranksterism.  Wolf Eyes seem more steeped in the in-your-face tradition of New York noise, such as Swans or Suicide, only pushed still further into the maelstrom. (At times they even blurted some Throbbing Gristle-style cornet.) While Faust provoke and antagonise their audience, New York noise would cow them into submission through the blunt instrument of their music.

But you might strike closer by calling them the Stooges of noise music. (Both band being Ann Arbor residents, after all.) Instead of adding influences, both preferred to boil (things down – only once having stripped the flesh from the ‘bones’ of chords and song structures the Stooges would stop while Wolf Eyes then boil down still further. There’s something gloriously unfinished about their raw slabs of sound, as if they’re first stirring up some blocks of noise then extemporising what to do with them. Rather than playing us their compositions, it was like they were unleashing forces they could themselves barely control.

It was like looking at some cut ‘n’ paste collage. Every element is in itself almost lumpenly simple, and the bold and jagged way they are sewn together part of the picture.

... in fact, let’s pursue that metaphor. I swear at times I felt that it was the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916, and everything I thought I knew was been remorselessly stripped away before me! This has felt like a good year for gigs already, not yet half-way through and the reformed Swans still to appear. But Wolf Eyes must surely rank high amongst them...

PS I have no idea about the sudden congruence of wolf-derived band names. Last year it seemed every other band was called Deer-something, now its all gone lupine. Psychic TV always had a thing for wolves, maybe it’s all down to them...

DOCTOR WHO: 'THE HUNGRY EARTH'/ 'COLD BLOOD'

I don’t have a whole lot to say about this latest ’Doctor Who’ two-parter, partly because I’m not convinced that Chris Chibnall had a whole lot to say when he was writing it. Of course that may well be down to me. I’ve most fixed on how Moffat has moved things on since the Davies era. So to reprise the Top Twenty Greatest Pertwee Scenes ain’t what I’m after right now. If I had to sum it up in a phrase I’d say “serviceable but generic.” It was certainly a more effective piece of teatime TV than it’s risible predecessor ’Vampires In Venice’.

I more-or-less agree with Frank Collins’ review, including the point about it being “an improvement on Chibnall’s previous efforts”, though that phrase possibly counts as damning with faint praise. (Please note Collins’ review was written after the first episode, so when he suggests “the meat of the story is in the second part” he can’t be held to account.)

After ’The Sontaran Stratagem’, Andrew Rilstone suggested we should take an indulgent approach when ’Doctor Who’ turns to the generic. (“If I'm offered 'cliff hangery flying saucery earth invasion stories', then I'm inclined to accept them as such.”) Perhaps he’s right. (And the subject is likely to come up again, after all.) But this is made harder when they insist on writing the same moral set-pieces into it; which, devoid of any meaningful context, become drearily sanctimonious. Chief offender here was the bright lad Elliott “getting” the Doctor’s speech about truth and reconciliation more than the adults – oh, please!

It was all rather neatly summed up when the captured Alaya has her warrior mask removed to reveal a reptilian but more expressive face beneath. As if to say, these are not the simple rubber-suited Silurians you remember from your youth! Yet nothing in the story’s content ever builds upon this image, it remains unearnt.

What surprises there are mostly come from things being telegraphed and then not happening. A big deal is made of Elliott reading ’The Gruffalo,’ but no Gruffalo is invented to defeat the foe. Elliott is pointed out as dyslexic, but there’s no follow-up scene where all depends on him reading something. Admittedly had these cod-obvious notions been followed up, then that would have been cause for complaint in itself. But without anything better to replace them, withdrawing them just comes to feel like sleight-of-hand. (In a story already full of manipulations. In the first episode the Silurians have already dissected several human corpses, the living Mo and are about to make a start on Amy. But all of that simply gets forgotten in the rush to make the medics goodies.)

The one exception to this rule is the Silurian Alaya’s prediction “one of you will kill me. Do you know who?” Naturally we assume it’s the tongue-lashed Tony, who’s already somewhat green around the gills. But it turns out to be Ambrose who, in a nicely chilling scene, is goaded by Alaya into killing her - thereby scuppering all chances of peace. (In fact the better scenes tend to revolve around the capture of Alaya, such as the Doctor’s interrogation of her.)

So, woman kills woman. A warring military against noble, truth-seeking scientists is scarcely groundbreaking stuff for ’Doctor Who’ or SF in general. (Think of the gorillas versus the chimps in ’Planet of the Apes’.) But having a female warrior class set against male doctors? Added to which Ambrose’s motivations are portrayed as rounded, and not simply stemming from weakness or fear. Perhaps nothing is really done with these notions. But they flicker with interest while they’re on the screen.

The one telegraphed element which did happen was the death of Rory - an event about as expected as his eventual return will be. But this was given a nice twist by the Crack then causing Amy to forget him, with the Doctor struck unable to say anything. Dying is one thing, but the idea of being forgotten by those who loved us is excruciating. This both moves things on from ’Flesh and Stone’, where we didn’t actually care about those forgotten soldiers, and drew its strength from what wasn’t up on the screen – it’s Amy’s frisky obliviousness which is hard to take. This is so much more effective than the grief porn which Chibnall subjected us to at the end of the risible ’Cyberwoman’ episode of ’Torchwood’. It rather beggars the question, “If you can write, why don’t you?”

And we did get two whole episodes of Karen Gillan back in her miniskirt. Amy should be made to “dress for Rio” every week, methinks...

RAINBOW ORCHID DISCOVERED IN BRIGHTON

"I will edit that into some kind of sense!"

...well that never happened. But the increasingly freeform nature of this podcast is half the charm! It was caused by Garen Ewing, creator of the somewhat splendid 'Rainbow Orchid' turning up for "for an informal chat amongst fellow comic creators" at Cartoon County last month. It starts off nearer to a 'proper' interview and it's meandering away from this path does seem to coincide with my turning up part-way through!

MY LIFE AS DESCRIBED TO ME BY OTHER PEOPLE

"This neighbourhood's for the artists
So how come I don't see any art?
This neighbourhood's for the smartest
They wouldn't pay so much if they were so smart
I'm so BUSY
I'm so BUSY man
At Artland!"
- Jeffrey Lewis, Artland

DOCTOR WHO 'AMY’S CHOICE'

Picture the headlines. ‘Doctor Who Fan in “Not Worst Episode Ever” Shock!’ Because that was better than expected...

I may have initially been put off this episode by people continually claiming it would be “this season’s ’Father’s Day’”. Unlike the majority I didn’t care for that storyline, because whenever the show gets wrapped up in the mechanics of time meddling it pretty soon gets tangled up. But this seemed much more the episode that fans of ’Father’s Day’ claimed they had seen – where all the rulebending of reality was not some abstract philosophical query but very much a means to serving up something character-centred.

True, the psychic pollen was as empty a MacGuffin as the fast return switch in ’Edge of Destruction’. But that doesn’t really matter because this time it just was a MacGuffin – something to put the characters through so they can learn more about themselves.

In a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, the key line of the episode is precisely two words long. Sitting on the park bench, the Doctor asks derisorily what they do in such a dull village. “We live,” Rory replies.

Conversely the other reality, the cold star, represents life with the Doctor. What you might expect to be warming and dynamic is actually cold - a kind of un-life. The man who had travelled the universe for centuries and seen a thousand sights, who so ironically calls himself ‘the Doctor’, is completely thrown by Amy’s contractions. Real life is something that passes him by, a gap he covers by ceaseless adventuring.

The other plotline, where ’Night of the Living Dead’ was recast with old people, was actually pretty dull and routine. (And made scant sense. If the aliens were simply piggy-backing the old folks’ bodies where did their super-strength come from? And if they weren’t, why had they taken them over? Or stay inside them once uncovered?)

But if dull Leadworth was made no more exciting by their arrival, that wasn’t a major flaw. Unlike Prisoner Zero from the first episode, they weren’t central to the story. From the off it was fairly obvious which was the ‘real’ world (okay, primary dream world). It would even have been obvious had you not already seen the somewhat similar ’Forest of the Dead.’ Or without the hefty clue of the camper van numberplate. (ADW, presumably standing for A Dream World.)

I was, however, taken aback by the revelation that the dream world stemmed from the Doctor. Despite the clue of the matching bow ties, I had assumed it would be Amy. This didn’t come just from the title, but from the way she was forced into the deciding vote (the Doctor and Rory’s “competing” cancelling each other out) and her being isolated for the Dream Lord’s temptations.

By convention reviewers appear decisive, even when they’re not. But in all honesty I’m still mulling over whether this was a good move or not. As others have pointed out, creating a shadow self for the Doctor is hardly radical. What else was the Master? It’s not even news to make it explicit, what else was the Valeyard?

In one sense, it clearly does work. Secretly aware that Amy will choose Rory, the Doctor tries to perpetually defer this moment by extending the night before her wedding as long as he can. True, he doesn’t deliberately arrive at that time or even know of her big white dress, but it works in terms of an unconscious wish marinated in some fuzzy logic. The Dream Lord is simultaneously an expression of that desire and his guilt in indulging it.

But if we’re dealing with the Doctor’s shadow self, does it make much dramatic sense for Amy to be making the choices? Shouldn’t it be him volunteering to give her up for a life of Rory and Leadworth dullness? It’s like revealing this deeper level of psychology to the protagonist, showing us the self-doubt inside our hero, but then doing nothing with it. It’s wafted past us in a sophisticated sort of fashion, then life carries on as normal. (Assuming, of course, there’s no further ramifications in future episodes.)

And it also means the ending of ’Flesh and Stone’, when the Doctor realises the connection between Amy and the Great Big Crack, has now effectively been thrown away. ’Vampires In Venice’ nodded vaguely at it, though already reducing it to a soap opera response. Now it’s gone altogether. (Am I right in thinking this is the first episode not to feature the Crack at all?)

Also, it’s possible this episode may sap some of the energy from the finale. It’s been made abundantly clear that dream states play a large part in the overall story arc, with the Doctor cast as Amy’s imaginary childhood friend. The ‘Jacketed Doctor’ from ’Flesh and Stone’, which has set the net so abuzz, I imagine will turn out to be some kind of ‘dream Doctor’. (And not the ‘future Doctor’ popularly supposed.) But by making the dream logic explicit half-way through, will this mar the effect when it is done again? Isn’t this a bit like Davies foregrounding narrative conventions such as coincidence, then having to hide them again? As the saying goes, only time will tell.

Perhaps I’m subconsciously lowering my expectations to the point where they might be met, but I’m not expecting much from the next episode. The Silurians look cleaned up, much as I had to complain about the Sontarans before them. Plus, Chris Chibnal was responsible for the wearily derivative ’42.’ Perhaps what we have is a one-on-one-off pattern, in which case hope resides with no less a personage than Richard Curtis! Or perhaps this now is it till Moffat’s finale. But if so it’s one more than I expected...

ONE LAST WORD ABOUT THAT WEEPING ANGEL BUSINESS, AND THEN WE CAN ALL MOVE ON

Okay, last week’s ’Doctor Who’ was so unworthy of comment that I’m simply not going to. Comment on it, that is. I am not going to mention, for example, how the Doctor finally finds the crack is “all about” Amy, that “possibly the most important thing in the universe is that I get you sorted out right now” and this somehow translates into getting her back with her boyfriend. Nor about how it’s all such a tired reprise of Mickey as the metal dog. Not a whsiper about the annoying way that every line sounded exactly like a line. And I shan’t be making scathing gags about sequels, ’Werewolves in Worcestershire’ or ’Mummies in Marlborough’ or the like.

Instead I’m going to go back to talk about those Weeping Angels.

I pointed out that Moffat had craftily fine-tuned the rules from ’Blink’, to create a story in which the Angels fitted better. Everyone Else in the World complained how he had violated the earlier story’s elegant simplicity.

Upon reflection, I am willing to consider a rapprochement with the rest of the world by suggesting we’re both right.

Moffat himself has described the shift from ’Blink’ into ”Time of the Angels’ as the same as from ’Alien’ into ’Aliens.’ But as Everyone Including Me noticed, he was also riffing heavily off ’Ring.’ And indeed, you could equally compare the shift to the one from ’Ring’ to ’Ring 2’.

Like ’Blink’, ’Ring’ was an intimate psychological horror story built around an elegantly simple concept. “Don’t blink” equates to “don’t watch the video.” One comes from a child’s game, the other an urban myth, but that’s the only real difference.

But as soon as we get to the sequel, this very simplicity turns from selling point to albatross, from neat notion to constraint. There’s no way to retain the same set-up without retelling exactly the same story. It would be like reloading a gun, for the bits to fit together at all they need to fit together the same way. “Still don’t blink” is mere second helpings.

Both sequels wisely decide it is time to sidestep. ’Ring 2’ is essentially based around asking what happens if you catch a partial view of the video. ’Time of the Angels’ serves up monitor-screen Angels (the direct lift everyone noted), talking Angels, taking-over-people Angels, even moving Angels. From there they cram themselves so full of crazy ideas they virtually dazzle, but in the process becomes somewhat scattershot. Once everything locked into place with a chilling precision. Now we get so many more ideas. True, those more ideas equal less. But if the only way is down we may as well take the scenic route.