Last Christmas

As I watched Last Christmas, I had the strange feeling that it was the first time since Runaway Bride that I had actually enjoyed a Christmas special. Then, someway through the episode, I realised why. Last Christmas is essentially a re-working of Field Trip, one of my favorite episodes of The X-Files.

In Field Trip, Agents Mulder and Scully investigate the mysterious death of a young couple and find themselves experiencing strangely unreal sequences of events. They later realise that they have been captured by a gigantic fungus colony that is digesting their bodies, while giving them dream-like fantasies. They free themselves, but then find that they are still imprisoned by the fungus creature and are only having a fantasy of escape. At the end, they are freed by their colleagues.



Despite the similarity of plot, what separates the two stories is the tone and atmosphere. The dream sequences of Last Christmas are, despite the presence of some horrific elements, gaudy sentimental fantasies, with the presence of Santa Claus and the idea of a perfect romantic Christmas day. In contrast, the dream sequences of Field Trip are realistic in tone, like standard X-Files episodes with somewhat offbeat plots; Mulder encountering the dead couple alive and then finding proof of alien life, Scully investigating Mulder's death and being congratulated on wrapping up the case. There is a sense of the mundane becoming oddly dreamlike in that episode. Where Last Christmas offers non-stop action and lots of running around, Field Trip is an unusually slow paced story, it takes its time and allows the strange dream-like atmosphere to build up.

The way in which the characters discover they are in a dream is different. In Last Christmas, the Doctor just tells them that they are experiencing dreams. In Field Trip, Mulder and Scully have to work this out for themselves. Mulder realises that he is in a dream when Scully accepts his proof of alien life without question, while Scully realises that she is dreaming when everybody uncritically accepts her rational explanation of Mulder's death. We also get in Field Trip more of a sense of just how horrifying the carnivorous dream-producing entity is. In the opening sequence, we see the young couple clinging to each other in their fantasy, before turning into skeletons, still wrapped in each other's helpless arms.

The resolution is also very different. With typical Christmas special sentimentality, the solution for the characters is to embrace the fantasy of the dream, hence the sleigh ride prior to their escape. In Field Trip, such an escape is impossible. You cannot will yourself to wake up from a dream. In the end, Mulder and Scully are helpless and have to be rescued by their FBI colleagues. It is perhaps not the strongest resolution to an X-Files episode, but it does fit with the more pessimistic tone of the show compared to Doctor Who.

I enjoyed this episode and feel it is one of the stronger Christmas specials the BBC Wales series has offered. However, the thematic similarities to Field Trip show it to be lacking in elegance of execution.

The Time of the Doctor

I watched this episode with my father. He's not a regular watcher of Doctor Who and he was very confused. Although I follow the show, I was almost as confused myself. This was a confusing muddle of a story. This story really jumps around, moving from one scene to another and introducing a muddle of plot threads and continuity references. It was really hard to follow.

There was a lot of silliness and clowning around in the first half of the story. The scene with the Doctor naked was embarassing. The stuff about Dr. Who and Clara being naked in the church beneath their holograms seemed odd too. Why have characters naked if you are not going to show it? It felt pointless.

It was difficult to feel anything about the Doctor's apparent impending death when we knew Peter Capaldi was going to show up. This episode established that Matt Smith was playing the 13th Doctor and in principle, the 'last Doctor.' We all knew the problem of the Doctor's final regeneration was hanging in store for a future producer. However, Moffat has made the odd decision to fix circumstances so the problem is his own burden. This smacks a little of egotism, not to mention his usual over-indulgence in puzzle-box plotting.

It turns out that Time Lords can destroy Dalek spaceships when they regenerate, which makes for a convenient conclusion. It also turns out that the Time Lords have the power to grant a whole new life cycle of regenerations, which makes it difficult to understand why Borusa was after imm-mortality back in The Five Doctors. I always thought the reason the High Council was able to offer the Master a new life cycle was because he had become a Trakenite through his posession of Tremas' body.

The Time of the Doctor faces the ultimate problem of the over-use of epic storylines. Every season finale has to be big and epic; the anniversary special had to be big and epic and now the Christmas special attempts to offer a grand cosmic opera. The more the production team deliver these grandiose cosmic dramas, the smaller and more mundane the Doctor Who universe feels. The Doctor has already destroyed and re-created the universe, making him in effect a god. There is simply no direction Doctor Who can go in now without looking utterly crass.

The Snowmen

*Spoiler alert*


Watching The Snowmen made me realize what a shallow Doctor Who fan I am. After watching most of the story with distaste, I suddenly got excited when I found out that the Great Intelligence was back. Of course, it is difficult to see how this story fits in with the continuity for The Abominable Snowmen, but I'm sure there is solution if you have time to think of one.

Reading other reviews, it seems that The Snowmen has gone down very well and I've seen little criticism of it voiced. I may well find myself being a lonely voice in saying I couldn't stand it.

Clara, played by Jenna-Louise Coleman looks set to be the most annoying companion ever. I hated every minute of her onscreen presence. I can't see why other reviewers seem to like her. In the role of both Victorian governess and tavern wench, Coleman is utterly unconvincing. She is just playing on overdone cliches. She is a walking Victorian trope for a theme park version of the Victorian era. Added to this, Clara is even more poorly characterised than other Moffat characters. A posh governess who moonlights as a low-life barmaid? Why? Once again, it looks like we are going to get a big mystery story arc about Clara's identity. Didn't we have enough of that with River Song?

Likewise, Dr Simeon, the human villain has no real identifiable motivation. He was just lonely and unhappy as a child, so he aided an evil alien entity. Richard E Grant's performance is as dull as his voice acting was in Scream of the Shalka. He acts very cold and menacing, but he brings no subtlety or depth to the character. Thankfully, Ian McKellan's vocal performance as the Great Intelligence is a good deal better.

The monstrous snowmen looked alright, if a little cartoonish, but their concept seemed a little too similar to the Weeping Angels and the Silence. This only adds to the sense that this story is a collection of Moffat set-pieces.

The Snowmen also sees the return of Vastra and Jenny, along with Strax the friendly Sontaran. I don't like any of these characters. They feel contrived and none has been given a strong enough background for them to make any real sense within Doctor Who continuity. I didn't care for the topical bombshell of gay marriage being dropped into this story either. That was really not necessary.

I'm getting a bit tired of the routine of the Doctor becoming cold, uncaring and reclusive following the departure of a companion. It's getting tedious and seems to throw out the development of the Doctor's character over the course of the show. In any case, this attempt to give the story a dark and angsty edge is rather undermined by the excessive and rather overdone humour of the story. If Moffat wanted to give us serious drama, he really should have trimmed away some of the gags here.

I mentioned earlier my childish thrill at the return of the Great Intelligence. One can't help feeling reminded of the return of old baddies like Omega and the Sea Devils in the 80s. With its re-use of characters, its heavy exposition and heavy reliance on previous stories, The Snowmen is very much reminiscent of the continuity-obsessed excesses of 80s Doctor Who.

I'll admit that this story is a good deal better than the last two Christmas specials, yet that is hardly good ground to build on. I don't hold out any hope for much improvement in the next season.

The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

Another year, another Christmas special, another story that I hate.

I am a massive fan of CS Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. I actually write fan fiction about Jadis, my favorite character. It was naturally of some interest that the latest Christmas special takes inspiration from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Doctor Who has often thrived when borrowing influences from other stories and genres. This works best when it is done almost unconsciously; this is quite the opposite. In The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe, as with the previous Christmas special, the influences are shouted out over the rooftops.

It is quite clear to me that Moffat does not have a clue what makes the Narnia books so amazing and enjoyable. For a start, the Narnia books are a parent-free zone. The Pevensie parents only make a brief appearance at the end of The Last Battle, they are absent throughout the Chronicles of Narnia. The Narnia books are all about the children having adventures on their own. In contrast, the two evacuees in this story are accompanied by their mother. Their mother enters the strange forest world and the story turns out to be all about parenthood. The last season has shown that Moffat has a peculiar fixation with the theme of fatherhood. While it is a relief to see motherhood getting a mention in this story, it jars completely with the Narnian theme. For Moffat, the idea of children existing independently of a parental relations is simply anathema. In his fictional world, children can have no real existence except within the smothering confines of parental affection. In his book, children just need their daddy and then everything is right with the world.

The second failure to appreciate the Narnia books is in the way the fictional world is presented. Narnia was fascinating because of it's strange inhabitants. The forest world of this story is undoubtedly beautiful, but it feels empty and uninteresting. In fact, it creates no sense of wonder or majesty, but quickly becomes a place of melancholy and terror. On the plus side, the wooden king and queen look amazing, with their delightful folklorish quality, but they are not sufficient to make up for the otherwise hollowness of the forest world.

It is refreshing to see some attempt to deal with the pain and loss in warfare; but this is completely undermined by the resurrection of the children's father. While it came as no surprise and made for an happy ending, it seemed hollow, and almost a denial of the reality of death. I am sure it would have been very upsetting to children watching who had lost their parents and who could expect no return of their lost loved ones. Going back to the issue of motherhood, it also seemed to undermine the attempt to present Janet as a strong capable woman. She was presented as strong and determined, but there was still the suggestion that she was lost without her husband. If you are going to praise motherhood, why not show that mothers can be strong and bring up their children after widowhood as so many mothers had to do in the Second World War?

As for the Doctor, we are served up yet again another portrayal of the Doctor as a Mary Poppins figure who makes everything right for everybody and who appears whenever people wish for him. Does anybody else miss the days when the Doctor was bad-tempered, selfish and a bit scary?

Don't get your hopes up for the next season of Doctor Who.

A Christmas Carol

The plot of 'A Christmas Carol' recreated in the far future with Steampunk visuals and flying sharks.

I did not have high expectations for this story, but I have to say that even I was surprised at how bad this was. This has to be the biggest load of garbage we have ever seen from the BBC Wales series. What surprises me most is that this story seems to be getting so many positive reviews and on comment threads, critics of the special are being dismissed as 'scrooges.'

Critics of the BBC Wales series have harboured hopes that the producership of Steven Moffatt would be a major improvement on the RT Davies years. Well, A Christmas Carol has satisfied me that Moffatt has all the faults of Davies and more.

As with so much of the BBC Wales series, this story has been written with visual impact in mind. Moffatt wants a visual spectacle, so the plot is purely subordinate to making the wonderful things he has imagined happen.

A Christmas Carol is built around an utterly contrived attempt to re-create a classic story. It fails in this because it tries to translate the basic plot of a fairy tale-like story into a sort of science fiction disaster movie. Dickens' story was about the individual grasping with his conscience; it was about the responsibility of one man to his fellows in the human race. This Christmas special is about the Doctor trying to prevent a disaster by manipulating somebody.

There are two basic problems with the situation that we are given in A Christmas Carol. The first problem is that there is no plausible motive for Sardik's unwillingness to do anything for the spacecraft in peril. So he is a nasty, mean-hearted old man, but there seems little indication that saving the spacecraft will be any great loss to him. It seems unlikely that the Doctor could not easily find ways to persuade him to act, either through bribery or pressure. Does Sardik really want people to die merely out of spite?

Secondly, the Doctor's strategy of saving the spacecraft fails to work both in terms of continuity with the history of the show and purely on a narrative level. In narrative terms, it is jarring to see the Doctor leaving the scene of a life-threatening adventure to travel back in time and have a long series of light-hearted adventures over a long period. While time travel presumably makes that possible, it seems to trivialize the significance of the disaster and rather makes one wonder that the Doctor could not come up with a more immediate answer to the situation. However, what is even more worrying is that the Doctor's strategy is such a departure from the way Doctor Who normally works.

Steven Moffatt has shown a worrying tendecy to use time travel as a plot mechanism. We saw this in his spoof Curse of Fatal Death, though nobody would have taken that seriously. More recently, he had the Doctor interfering in his own timeline in The Big Bang, despite his insistence that this was not possible in Parting of the Ways. I'm a 'Rad' fan and all for experimenting with different kinds of stories, but completely re-writing the way Doctor Who works is not a good idea. Throughout the history of the show, the Doctor enters a difficult situation and he gets on with dealing with it. He never travels back in time and alters the past. If the Doctor can do this, he has a 'get out of jail free card.' We can no longer enjoy him as a protagonist. If he can do this, he is nearly a god. Are we to just ignore the fact that the Doctor has never worked like this before? Are we to ignore the fact that the Doctor has said that you can't change the past, as he did in the Hartnell era (a notion which while not carried through consistently, still makes sense within a lot of later stories)? Are we to imagine that the Doctor's alterations to the past would not have massive and unpredictable results, such as the machinery for controlling clouds no longer being available?

A Christmas Carol even features the Sardik the boy meeting Sardik the old man. I know the notion that meeting your self causes an explosion, as seen in Mawdryn Undead makes absolutely no sense, but surely the fact that we never see this happening in Doctor Who (except in multi-Doctor stories) indicates that it really is a bad thing? I don't think we can just ignore the way time travel works in the continuity of the show and imagine that the Doctor can do anything he likes. That is just too easy and if it continues, we may see some seriously lazy script-writing.

This story features the greatest use of Steampunk visuals in a Doctor Who story. Personally, I am not a big fan of Steampunk. It is all just a bit too knowing and consciously cool. There is something of an air of unreality about Steampunk, given that it is trying to visualize a past/present/future that never was or is likely to be. Surprisingly and refreshingly, however, the crew of the spacecraft are wearing very retro-futuristic uniforms. This makes a refreshing change in BBC Wales Dr. Who. I have commented before about the tiresome tendency of the show to always make the future look like contemporary earth.

In my mind the casting of Katharine Jenkins was a seriously bad idea. Clearly, the woman is quite unable to act, but this is hardly a surprise given that she has never played a serious dramatic role in her life. At least when they cast Kylie Minogue, they had somebody who had some considerable acting experience.

Finally, seeing a carriage pulled by a flying shark as though it were Santa's sleigh just made me want to throw up. Far too much icing...