Saturday 27 March 2021

The Long Game written by Russel T. Davies and directed by Brian Gant (dedicated to Roger)

 


This story in a nutshell: Essentially a 45-minute-long pre-titles sequence for Bad Wolf…

Northern Adventurer: Context is key and what is fascinating watching the ninth Doctor and Rose running rings around Adam in the first scene is that it is entirely different in tone to the tenth Doctor and Rose running rings around Mickey in the next season. Eccelston smiles gently, Tennant was sadistically dismissive. Piper clearly has great affection for Adam, whereas she treats Mickey appallingly. Honestly, this is the better approach and much easier to watch. The Doctor is all irreverence, with gags about Paris and snogging strangers until his companions are out of sight and then he has a look of absolute stone and a determination to find out why there is no racial diversity here. He’s got that Troughtonesque anarchist streak when Rose asks him if there is any trouble and he grins and says ‘oh yes.’ If there’s’ trouble, he’s going to bring it down. The whole idea of the companion that gets it wrong is fascinating and it does open up the awkward question of whether the Doctor only accepts people that pass a certain interview process and don’t make mistakes. I don’t prescribe to that but I can understand why this war torn, less patient version of the Time Lord might lack the tact to deal with those mistakes and choose instead to kick them out rather than to help them to learn. Father’s Day interestingly sees Rose make a similar mistake (exploiting the possibilities of time travel) and the Doctor is much kinder. Perhaps it has something to do with her being a pretty blonde. It’s a good thing that Tom Baker didn’t regenerate into Christopher Eccelston because Adric would have been out the door in no time. This Doctor’s raison d’etre this season is to encourage people to do better and to try and help themselves. He’s extremely passive in that regard (it’s considered a strength here and a weakness in series eleven and twelve but hey ho) but very aggressive in how he interacts with the people he is trying to inspire. We don’t realise it yet but the Doctor makes an almighty fuck up in this story by releasing the Earth from the shackles of the media and putting the world back into their own hands. They simply don’t know what to do with it. Boom Town introduces the idea of the Doctor’s mistakes coming back to bite him in the ass and then Bad Wolfe revisits this setting and lets that idea play out on a huge scale. It makes you sit there and think of all the times the Doctor has liberated a planet (say The Sun Makers and Vengeance on Varos) and really question whether that was the right thing to do without hanging around and making sure that some despot doesn’t start things all over again, or make things even worse. The look on the Doctor’s face when he walks towards Adam at the end of the story is the scariest he’s ever been.

Chavvy Chick: This is probably the episode in series one that is the least interested in Rose, her domestic life back on Earth and her emotional reaction to time travel. And I don’t think it is any the worse for it. To have her involved in a mystery, asking all the right the questions and being highlighted positively against a less savoury companion does her no harm at all. Essentially the idea is that this is business as usual, before the major fireworks start in the next episode. When they hold their hands in the lift as they go off to stop the monster, it serves a mission statement for series one.

Metal Mickey (umm, Adam): We should have known when Adam didn’t get an interior TARDIS scene staring agog at the interior dimensions that he wasn’t going to stick around for long because if he was going to be a new companion…why would you avoid that glorious moment. He’s so rubbish that he doesn’t deserve it. Replaying exactly the same sequence that Rose had in The End of the World with Adam witnessing the future as God looking down upon the Earth but having him faint is another indication that one is cut out for this line of travel, and the other is not. Let’s be fair for a moment. This is realistic depiction of somebody thrown off the deep into a universe of adventures that he was in no way prepared for. But how he tries to immediately turn the possibility of time travelling fun into an exploitable resource is what condemns and dooms him. You can see the pound signs in his eyes when he first watches a data spike, and from that point on he is on a one-way track of insatiability for the technology that would reveal his true colours to the pair that have offered him a trip of a lifetime. I don’t think he is a bad character, or badly played (I’ll spare you my opinion of the actor away from his profession) but that mix of naivete and abuse of his environment makes him hard to have any positive feelings about. When the Doctor sees Adam with the technology rammed into his head he looks desperately disappointed, as though he was rather hoping that he would work out. ‘It’s not actually my fault because you were in charge!’ means that he refuses to accept liability. He’s a child.

Sparkling Dialogue: ‘The fourth great and bountiful human Empire. And there it is; planet Earth, at its height. Covered with mega-cities, five moons, population 96 billion, the hub of a galactic domain stretching across a million planets, a million species, with mankind right in the middle’ Anyone that says that Russell T Davies cannot world build economically, go read that again. We don’t NEED to visit this world because with a description like that (the sort of description that Robert Holmes was the master of) we have conjured up something so spectacular in our heads that anything rendered in CGI would never live up to it.
‘What happens on floor 500?’ ‘The walls are made of gold’ A whole essay could be written about that exchange about capitalism, career progression and the rich feeding off the poor.
‘Don’t you even ask?’ ‘Why would I?’ ‘You’re a journalist!’ Ahem. Sarah Jane Smith would be appalled.
‘Your master and humanity’s guiding light: The Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe! I call him Max!’ I can completely understand why kids fell in love with the show all over again. It’s much more fun than names like Dorian Maldovar.
‘I don’t know how she did, sir! It’s impossible! A member of staff with an idea!’ is one of the most subtly funny lines in the first series. I howl every time I hear it.

The Good Stuff: I’ve heard complaints that this is the least visually appealing story of the first series, and certainly the cheapest. In terms of visual style I think this a step up from Father’s Day (with it’s drab 80s aesthetic) and director Brian Gant enjoys throwing in terrific long shots to suggest the scale of Satellite Five, some stylish lens work and some lovely shots with layers of depth. Almost to go against the grain I might suggest in terms of lighting, set design and camerawork it is one of the best of the first year. Each episode in that first year is going for movie of the week and I would say that it is Boom Town that comes off as the one with the least resources (but Joe Ahearne is directing that one and so it is still marvellous). There’s money here; slobbery, salivating CGI, huge sets, horror set pieces, a bustling marketplace but it just isn’t being poured into dynamic set pieces like, say, The End of the World. There’s a similar ‘inside world’ feel to this as in The Beast Below but I think the scale of this story is pulled off much successfully. There is a claustrophobia to The Beast Below (which suits the story) but fights against the suggestion of the scale of a city. Conversely this is only supposed to be a space station but it feels the size of a city.

Very quickly, we realise that something is wrong with this period of time; the lack of non-human individuals and it is one of the only smart things that Adam says. This has aged well in a time of social segregation, Brexit and a frightening presence of racism. Is this where we might be heading in the future? The head technology is simultaneously grotesque and very cool, which is a nice balance to get right.

I’ve made the complaint that Simon Pegg is wasted in this episode and it is true that had he managed to fit in with the schedules and play Pete Tyler that he would have had a bigger part in the show and have more meatier material to play but (and it’s a big but) it is always more fun to play the villain, right? He is clearly relishing the role and has that magic that certain actors bring to the bad guys that he can underplay the villainy and still be spectacularly melodramatic and gorgeous to watch. The Editor (a spectacular name for somebody who is manipulating the social structure of the Earth with the media, ahem) having a law that insists that the news must be unbiased, is hilarious.

If The Face of Boe is pregnant does that mean there is something that Jack is not telling us? I love how RTD manages to out Moffat Moffat by introducing Boe before Jack, and then revealing he is Boe. It’s like the River and Amy scenario, but more fun.

I really like the cheat of the audience falling under the impression that it is the Doctor, Rose and Adam that turns out to be the disinformation in the system, when Davies is cleverly sneaking Suki in under the radar.

Don’t you just love the idea of the Daleks installing this enormous racist blob into Satellite Five to oversee the Earth, with the Editor ensuring that the news that is being broadcast moulds the planet into one of subtle xenophobia. It’s very much the Daleks way but it is them using their brains instead of their guns and literally playing and exquisite long game to build up a fleet from the humans and then murder the rest. Clever, evil bastards. You’ve got love a Doctor Who story that ends with a big bang…but this one ends with a big blobby bang. That’s even more fun.

Once upon a time I thought that Tamsin Grieg (one of the finest comic actresses this country has presented) was wasted in a bit part role in this episode. Now I’m convinced that this is the highlight of the episode, a sequence of understated comedy that gives a peek into the behind-the-scenes nature of this technology, does some more world building and manages to be very cute (the vomitomatic) at the same time.

The Bad Stuff: I’m not sure we needed the sequence with the TARDUS key. Davies wants to make this a threat to the whole timeline of planet Earth but it doesn’t quite come off because the episode doesn’t have the time to deal with that as a genuine peril.

Isn’t that Odd: This might have been the ideal time in series one to head off to an alien world, especially since we have a new companion in tow. It’s completely intentional that we do not and that this series as a whole rejects the typical trappings of an off-Earth Doctor Who adventure to welcome the entire potential audience into the fold, but it was around this point that as a season Doctor Who fan that I was longing to see a quarry, some beardy natives or some latex primitive aliens. Colony in Space, basically. The fact that I did not get my wish (which is often a good thing because the show would never go anywhere or do anything new if it did) means it caught on to the mass audience and was an enormous success.

Result: ‘You and your boyfriends!’ This plays out so much better now than it did on first broadcast because we know now that this wasn’t Doctor Who’s only chance of a series that could be snatched away at any minute. Without the danger of fearing that if an episode is less than spectacular falling away you can suddenly see that this is a biting satire on the media and the degree of control they have on public perception, a fascinating piece of world building that serves as a prelude for the end of the season, an attempt to look at the role of the companion from a fresh and uncomfortable angle and a fun Doctor Who adventure feature a giant, slavering blob that wants the Doctor and his friends killed. All packaged up in 40 minutes of atmospheric camerawork, lighting and music. That’s not bad going for the dud of the season. There’s an exciting fusion of Paradise Towers (the internal structure of the environment, the floors that suggest different horrors, the nasty force that is behind all of this at one extreme end of the building) and Vengeance on Varos (the scathing attack on the disinformation, a suggestion that the TV being broadcast is violent and keeping everyone in their place) and it has that look of a mid 80s Who adventure all set inside the studios with lots of space corridors. There’s a three-minute horror set piece in the middle of the episode that proves to be one of the scariest moments of the season. If there is a huge sense of dissatisfaction about the episode it is that there are a ton of unanswered questions, which at the time felt as though they were never going to be answered. What happened was that this was the most important episode of the season (posing as the least) with the whopping great clue to its importance in the title. Go figure. This isn’t perfect; Suki’s character is overplayed until we discover who she really is, there are moments where the story pauses for some odd worldbuilding (kronkburger, anyone?) and I think we are supposed to be impressed by Thatcherite Kafaka but I found her willingness to climb the ladder at the expense of all else loathsome, and thus her decision to ditch all of that and save the day simply because she didn’t get a promotion problematic. But it’s a thoughtful story, it’s doing things with the building blocks of Doctor Who that have never been done before (very season one) and it features Eccleston and Piper at their most relaxed, and Simon Pegg as the (delicious) villain. Criminally underrated, this is one of the episodes of the first year that feels exactly the right length for what it is trying to do: 8/10

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