Rewatching
this episode, you can recognize the Moffatisms that Steven Moffat now employs
so liberally as showrunner – a flashy, sexy, larger-than-life supporting
character (hello, Captain Jack,) repeated lines, major nightmare fuel,
“gotcha!” dialogue, some weird gender dynamics, and a resolution that
effectively erases most of what came before.
When I first saw it, the gender stuff with Rose was the only bit that
bothered me, and this two-parter was in fact one of my favorite Ninth Doctor
stories. Now, I still like it, and there
is some excellent stuff here, but a little shine has come off the apple. (Just one episode-specific spoiler.)
Lots of
different plot threads pulling at once, so I’ll try to condense. The Ninth Doctor and Rose chase a dangerous
object through the time vortex to WWII-era London, where they, separately, both
encounter a big, fat Something Ain’t Right.
There’s a spooky little boy in a gas mask who keeps asking the same
question – “Are you my mummy?” – to everyone he comes across. The Doctor is warned off of the child by
Nancy, a spunky London girl who knows more about the situation than she’s
telling. Meanwhile, Rose runs into
Captain Jack Harkness, who, like her and the Doctor, is from another time and
way more knowledgeable about aliens than the locals.
First,
there’s a lot of excellent dialogue – the Doctor’s “mouse in front of a lion”
speech is gorgeous, and the Doctor, Rose, and Jack have good banter together –
and the supporting characters are terrific.
Having now seen more of Moffat’s action-figure-style characters, I can
see the parallels between Jack and River, Irene Adler, etc. (rewatching the
rest of the season, I was struck by how much more authentic Jack feels in his
later episodes,) but he’s still tremendous fun, and Nancy is a great,
fully-realized character. The Doctor is
in good form, I love watching him hanging out with a bunch of street urchins,
and Christopher Eccleston’s performance in the “everybody lives” moment is
flawless. Again, it’s something that’s
since been overused, but here, in this episode, it’s so perfectly executed, and
the Doctor’s hope resolving into elation is absolutely beautiful, and nothing
can ruin that.
On the
nightmare-fuel front, it mostly works.
Creepy little gas-mask boys asking, “Are you my mummy?” will always be
creepy, and the repetition never grates like it does with some later
monsters. I also like that there’s an
effort to explain why the child has
all the random powers that it does. In
that sense, the story manages to hold together pretty well. The “gotcha!” dialogue is less
successful. It’s undeniably clever, but
after you’ve seen the same set-up trotted out ad infinitum, it feels a lot less
so. I notice, though, that while it’s
used a few times here, it’s only in the second episode. Maybe Moffat figured he coasted on the
inherent creepiness of creepy kids in episode one and thought he had to up the
hair-raising ante the second time around?
Which
leaves us with Rose. Moffat’s
pre-showrunner episodes tend to reduce the companion’s role in order to focus
more on his invented character de jure
(Nancy/Jack, Reinette, Sally Sparrow, River,) and while Rose is still around for most of the story, she 1)
spends almost half of it in a completely separate plot from the Doctor, and 2)
she doesn’t do much to help. The first
point is just a bummer, since the Doctor/Rose relationship is easily the best
thing about series 1, and the second is problematic. Let’s see:
she makes a really stupid
mistake and quickly damsels herself, she doesn’t contribute much to solving the
mystery, and she just kind of goofs around distracting the Doctor when he’s
trying to get them out of a tight spot.
Plus, the way she goes so
giddy-schoolgirl over Jack is just weird.
Tractor-beam head-scramble or not, it’s like she’s taken over by her
attraction to him. I had flashbacks to
Amy trying to jump Eleven’s bones which, while great from an ace-ish Doctor
standpoint, is troubling from a so-does-Amy-just-have-no-control-over-her-libido-or-what standpoint. It bothers me there, and it’s not much better
here.
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