Other Doctor Lives: Wired: Episode 2 (2008)

Tody, I’m staying home for Rita Moreno.

I’d say this miniseries has picked up steam quite a bit since the first episode. Things are coming together more and the tension is ramping up. Conclusion next time – I’ll be interested to see how it all shakes out.

Louise is confronted by the consequences/dangers of the type of association Philip is trying to cultivate with her – she’s pulled equally in different directions by Philip’s threats if she doesn’t cooperate, her desire not to get further mixed up in anything dodgy, her fear of going to the police, and the temptation of a big payout. Crawford continues to investigate, but his interest in Louise is both professional and personal, which muddies the waters. Manesh and Philip clash over strategy as the preliminary elements to pull off their scheme start coming into place.

For starters, Crawford is getting up to all kinds of Bad Idea Jeans stuff over here. He was undercover when he met Louise in the first episode, and his attempts to pursue the investigation, maintain his cover, and look out for Louise’s well-being all at the same time are basically a mess. Both he and Louise cross some big boundaries in this episode, and it’s not a good look for either of them.

On the whole, I think this episode feels tighter and more fluid than the first one. I’m not sure to what extent it’s a tangible improvement versus just me getting into the swing of things more. But the minutae of the financial stuff feels easier to follow today – not that it was prohibitively difficult before, but I did have to work to keep track of what was going down, whereas here, it’s relatively straightforward. We’re also seeing more connections between the different sides of the plot, which goes a long way toward helping it feel more cohesive.

Louise continues to be my favorite thing about the story. I like her because she’s very simultaneously unequipped to handle her situation and impressively competent in a pinch. Clearly, she’s in way over her head, and in trying to deal with that, she’s making some spectacularly bad decisions and refusing those who could genuinely help her. I don’t really fault her for it, given the immensity of what she’s going through (this episode particularly puts her through the wringer,) and it’s believable that she would handle things badly plenty of the time. However, in the most crucial moments, she shows herself to be very capable, able to think on her feet to protect herself in dangerous situations. There are a few instances here where she really has to dig deep, and she comes through every time.

I appreciate that. Louise isn’t a superwoman or a damsel. She’s flawed but resourceful, messy but determined. Jodie Whittaker works nicely within that balance, such that, whether Louise is screwing up royally or pulling off an important move in a clinch, it’s believable either way. I look forward to seeing how things turn out for her.

Favorite Characters: Barry Berkman (Barry)

Today, I'm staying home for the immunocompromised students I used to work with.
 
Obviously, if a show bears the same name as its protagonist, its success will hinge in large part on the portrayal of that character. Barry hits the jackpot in that regard. When it comes to both the writing and the acting, the show’s leading man is firing on all cylinders (premise spoilers.)

A TV show asking us to sympathize with someone carrying out highly-immoral activities is nothing new. Over the years, the popularity of “antihero” stories has given us shows about gangsters, druglords, and serial killers, along with plenty of characters whose failings are more garden-variety but still result in a lot of people getting hurt. Getting us to become invested in the life of someone like this, not seeing them as a monster but not condoning their actions either, isn’t something every show can pull off, but the ones who do it well capture our fascination while making us question our own reactions to it.

Barry Berkman, a post-9/11 veteran who became a hitman after returning stateside, definitely fits the bill. Right from the start, the show introduces the tricky balance it asks us to weigh. Barry kills people for money, which is bad. But he killed people for the army, which was deemed, not only good, but heroic. Most of his hits are gangsters, criminals who are labeled “bad people” without much debate. But the people paying him to kill those gangsters are usually other gangsters, and by taking out their enemies, he helps allow their power to grow. By no stretch of the imagination could you really call Barry a good guy, or “just a misunderstood guy,” but by the same token, painting him as an outright monster seems off the mark as well.

A big factor here is Barry’s PTSD. He’s been struggling with his mental health since his time in Afghanistan, and his post-traumatic stress can seize him at crucial moments. These are the times when he causes harm or death without being paid for it, when his mind overloads and all he can see is red. It in no way excuses what he does when he’s caught in the throes of an episode, but it helps the viewer understand where it comes from. In those moments, we hope for a resolution in which Barry’s ultimate end emphasizes psychiatric care over retribution.

Even though his PTSD isn’t usually overwhelming him while he’s carrying out hits, it still informs his presence in that criminal world. After coming home from Afghanistan, struggling and rudderless, he was a prime target for Fuchs, someone who wanted to benefit from the money that such a criminal enterprise could bring. In Barry, Fuchs saw someone with both the skill he needed and the mental damage to be steered into doing what he wanted. The show hasn’t drawn clear lines to show exactly how mercenary Fuchs was in his recruitment of Barry, and Fuchs’s manipulations don’t exonerate Barry for his own choices, but Barry was still an easy mark. He was feeling adrift and alone, unable to effectively reintegrate into society, and along came Fuchs promising to smooth the way and offering Barry big money to do the only thing he knew of that he excelled at: killing people.

It’s perhaps a sign of how desperate Barry is, for a way to fill his days as well as for an older male figure to direct him, that he becomes so immediately enamored with Gene’s acting class. After the barest hint of what the class has to offer (and its offerings are admittedly paltry,) he starts planning to retire from the hitman business and break into acting instead, hanging on Gene’s guidance and (middling) encouragement. Although less so than Fuchs, Gene is using him as well – he’ll eagerly bring up class fees at any opportunity – but Barry doesn’t care. He’s looking for something to do with all the upheaval and damage that his service evoked, and while Fuchs offers him a way to channel it into violence, Gene’s class offers him a way to channel it through acting.

It’s too soon to say how much hope there is for Barry, if he’ll ever be able to fully get out of the life he’s been living (since it’s a TV show, the smart money says not until the season finale, if that.) But he’s trying, and he’s doing it mostly of his own frantic initiative. I have my fingers crossed for him.

Doctor Who Series 12 Spoilers – The Timeless Child

This being the Sunday Who Review, I'm staying home for Tom Baker today.

 

While I discussed the rest of the series 12 finale last week, I felt that this particular aspect – the revelations about the so-called “Timeless Child” – needed a little more space to breathe, so I saved it for its own post. Today, we’re getting into everything around the Timeless Child and will be referencing spoilers from “Spyfall,” “Fugitive of the Judoon,” and “The Timeless Children.” This is your warning, so leave now if you don’t want to know about important stuff going down in these episodes.

(Also, note: I’m going back and forth with pronouns a little here. For both the Doctor and the Master, I’m using “she/her” and “he/him” respectively when talking about their current regenerations and “they/them” when talking about the characters as a whole, across the span of all their lives. This has been my go-to since we got our first cross-gender regeneration, but it comes up more than usual in this post, so I thought the extra clarification might be useful.)

At the end of “Spyfall,” when the Master reveals to the Doctor that he’s razed Gallifrey to the ground over secrets he uncovered about their planet’s past, promising, “Everything you thought you knew is a lie,” I’ll admit to being majorly intrigued. While Gallifrey being destroyed again, so soon after it returned after being hidden after being destroyed-but-not-really (phew!), felt cheap/lazy to me, I really wanted to know what made the Master snap like that. His vague statements hint at something rotten at Gallifrey’s foundations, something he couldn’t let stand, something he knew would devastate the Doctor to learn. Now, I had no problem believing there were secret atrocities in Gallifrey’s past, but I really wondered what it could be that the Master thought he and the Doctor would both find equally disturbing.

The basics of it align with popular speculation: that the Time Lords’ regenerative abilities came about thanks to this Timeless Child. I’d been theorizing something a little more horrible, like the ancient Time Lords wired the Child into some sort of machine and have been feeding off the Child’s regenerative properties for millennia, but that doesn’t mean the actual story doesn’t have a whiff of menace to it. When Tecteun, a Gallifreyan space pioneer, discovers that the abandoned Child of unknown origins that she took in can regenerate, she studies the Child over multiple regenerations, desperate to learn the secret and find a way to replicate those abilities in herself. It’s never said outright, but I definitely got the feeling that she was intentionally killing the Child, forcing them to regenerate again and again for the sake of collecting new data and testing her hypotheses.

The mere fact of this, though, isn’t what drives the Master to slaughter his own people. Rather, it’s the reveal of who that Timeless Child is: the Doctor. In this way, it makes sense that he feels this revelation stands to break both of them, only it’s for different reasons. For him, he can’t bear the thought of the Doctor being so “special,” instrumental in making Gallifrey the civilization it became, and what’s more, he hates that he owes his regenerative abilities to the genetic inheritance the the Time Lords mined from the Timeless Child/the Doctor millennia ago. He just can’t stand that “a little piece” of the Doctor is in him. But for the Doctor, the horror is in the realization that she’s so much older than she knew, that the Doctor has had untold lifetimes erased from their memory, something done to them by the Time Lords to maintain appearances of the Doctor being an ordinary Time Lord.

As soon as the Master said the Doctor was the Timeless Child, my brain went, “Ugh, really?”, and I spent the next chunk of the episode hoping there was some way that he was lying. As I’ve said before, I’m not necessarily opposed to a good “Chosen One” story, about a character who’s set apart/anointed/prophesied about from the beginning, the one destined to be the most important, but I also like what I call a “Spoiler,” someone that no one was expecting, who comes out of nowhere and defies what everyone thought was going to happen. Done well, I like either, and the Doctor has almost always been a strong example of a Spoiler for me. Though they’ve certainly gained both adoration and enemies over their lifetimes and have been the subject prophecies and so on (again I say: prophecy on a time-travel show? How does that make sense?), they’re ultimately “a wanderer in the fourth dimension,” “a madman with a box” running around “being daft and fixing things.”

This new framing of the Doctor’s past, however, is a character type I tend to get really annoyed by: someone who, though long presented as a Spoiler, is revealed at a late stage to be Chosen All Along, retroactively granted destined status. It’s a little different here, but it still feels like that. The Master laments that the Doctor is so special, griping that even back at the Academy, they always acted like they were above everyone is, and I’m not a fan of this “specialness” being conferred on the Doctor by their origins. I mean, I’ve always thought the Doctor was special, but it was about what they chose to do, the lives they made for themselves. Ever since One stole the TARDIS and ran away from Gallifrey, meeting Ian and Barbara and learning to get involved in the lives of other peoples and planets, roaming the universe in search of adventure and offering help to those in trouble, the Doctor has been special because of who they are. The Timeless Child reveal makes it more about the Doctor being special because of what they are, something they had nothing to do with and had no control over, something they didn’t even know about, and I can’t say I’m excited about that.

In spite of all that, though, I actually kind of like how the finale handles this reveal on a personal/character level. As I’ve already said, the interactions between the Doctor and the Master are just stellar here. I can fully believe that this knowledge would drive the Master to the edge, and the weight of it nearly crushes the Doctor until she’s able to get out from under it thanks to some help from a Matrix image of the Nth Doctor (who’s implied to be one of these earlier regenerations whose memories the Doctor has lost, but the fact that she calls herself the Doctor and her TARDIS looks like a police box seems to suggest post-One. Unless, no matter how many times the Time Lords wipe away the Doctor’s past and reset them, they keep stealing broken TARDISes and running away to Earth? There’d be something a little beautiful in that.) I love the scene of Doctor in the Matrix concentrating on the memories of her past selves that she does have, leaning into them while the show’s theme song plays underneath.

In that way, I still don’t necessarily like that the Timeless Child reveal happened, but I’m liking how they’re playing it so far. I like that the Doctor’s come down on the side of, “These new revelations about my unknown past can’t change who I am now.” While she may go looking for some of their past memories in the future and/or seek some kind of reckoning about what was done to them, I expect we’ll still see a lot of the Doctor just doing what she does, traveling the universe and helping out where she can.

News Satire Roundup: March 23rd-March 26th

Today, I’m staying home for Denzel Washington.

Monday, March 23 – In international news, the headline was the Olympics being postponed for a year; Trevor’s impression of athletes trying to compete over Skype was fun. We also looked at Italian officials yelling at people for not social distancing (greatly satisfying) and Spanish cops serenading citizens stuck at home (delightful.) Back in the U.S., it was more public figures testing positive, PPE shortages (with medical shows like Grey’s Anatomy donating the supplies they use as props!), and Congress stalling over a stimulus package. I loved Trevor’s description of what Trump could do with unmonitored funds to distribute to corporations (“any rival company, or anyone that makes vegetables, is going down!”) Trevor and Desi caught up, comparing Trevor’s experience of self-isolating alone with Desi’s of self-isolating with her young child. Finally, Roy and Michael updated us on the “Trump’s Best Words” bracket.

Tuesday, March 24 – Today’s good news included car manufacturers making ventilators and wild animals enjoying some leisure time while the humans are stuck inside. We looked at lockdown measures in South Africa (which won’t start until Friday, so the coronavirus gets to have one last hurrah) and the U.K. The latest from Trump featured his continued promotion of a drug that hasn’t been tested for coronavirus effectiveness (Trevor rightly called out doctors who are prescribing it) and his desire to ease up on social distancing sooner rather than later. The Lt. Governor who considered the lives of the vulnerable an acceptable tradeoff for a quicker resurgence in the economy was gross, and I hope Texas voters remember that. Michael and Trevor compared social-distancing beards and debated whether spying counts as “getting to know your neighbors.” The guest, DJ D-Nice, talked about DJing virtual parties on Instagram.

Wednesday, March 25 – We opened on the stimulus package (Trevor’s right – how sad is it that lawmakers saw the need to stipulate that Trump can’t use the money for his own businesses?), improvements in Wuhan, and Prince Charles testing positive. In the U.S., we looked at airlines spreading out passengers (who’s still flying right now?!) and Amazon asking for donations so they can hire more workers to meet demand. The big story was Trump’s dream of “packed churches” on Easter, i.e., America back to normal, despite every indication to the contrary. I nodded so hard at, “The only person who doesn’t understand how serious this is just happens to be the most powerful man in the world.” Ronny called in from Australia, blowing Trevor’s mind at how easy it was to get tested there. Dr. Vivek Murthy was the guest, discussing the situation on the ground and emphasizing how severely PPE shortages are affecting healthcare workers.

Thursday, March 26­ – First was mask donations from everyone from Joann Fabrics customers to Porn Hub. The international news of the day compared India’s response, locking down its 1.3 billion people, to Brazil’s, where gangs are stepping in to impose/enforce curfews because the federal government isn’t doing anything. The show scored the coup of guest Dr. Anthony Fauci, so much of the episode was dedicated to Trevor’s interview with him. They covered a range of topics – why this virus is an epidemiologist’s nightmare, sorting through misinformation (such as taking unproven treatments,) and why it’s so important for young people to do their part and social distance. Finally, we looked at states with quarantine measures for out-of-state visitors, and the show offered “anti-tourism” ads promoting that message. My favorite was its slogan for Alaska: “Come One Step Closer, and I Swear to God We’ll Blow up All the Oil.”