Day 3457: DOCTOR WHO: The Pandorica Opens

Saturday:


Auntie Caron wants Daddy Richard to explain this week's Dr Woo. Well, good luck with that! I think he's more likely to make your fluffy head spin even more!

Is any of this real?

At the end of "The Pandorica Opens", we pull out from a close-up on the end of Rory's universe, Amy dead in his arms at his hands, to the Earth from space as all around every star and every planet explodes instantly into nothing and we are left alone in darkness, the end of the Doctor's universe. Even the incidental music fades as silence falls.

The problem with cliffhangers like this is not, as Charlotte thinks, the lack of a decent ending.

Amy is dead. Rory is an Auton. River Song and the TARDIS are blown to smithereens. The Doctor is locked inside an inescapable puzzle-box. And the universe has been so utterly destroyed that it never existed.

If that's not enough of an ending for you then nothing ever will be.

If anything, it's the Reichenbach Falls without having to wait ten years for the Empty House.

What would be fairer to say is that we know that this ending is a cheat. Unlike "The Final Problem", there is no pretence that this is the "last" of Doctor Who. We know that there will be an episode next Saturday, and then a Christmas special, and then another series next year. So, unless we're very, very young, intellectually we know that all this will be undone.

And there are at least five easy ways that Moffat could bring back the Universe (and, indeed, the very title of "The Big Bang" suggests the start of the Universe not the end):

1. The Rusty Reset: either a case of "time can be unwritten" or "whatever can be remembered can come back", the Doctor uses timey-wimey powers and/or the time energy of the cracks to make the explosion unhappen or to recreate the Universe.

2. The Douglas Adams approach: "if ever the Universe is completely understood it will instantly be destroyed and replaced by something infinitely more complicated (this may have already happened)" – the destruction of the "Doctor Who" Universe triggers the creation of a whole new Universe.

3. Lawrence Miles in a bottle: similar to the above, the Universe is destroyed only to be revealed as a "universe in a bottle" nested inside a "larger" Universe; the Earth remains in the new Universe.

4. Neil Gaiman by any other name: suggested by the Dream Lord from Simon Nye's episode – one of the three episodes not (yet) tied to the others by a returning non-regular character or monster this week – the events of "The Pandorica Opens" are taking place either inside Amy's head, or in some kind of TARDIS projection. Either or both could explain some of the "does it ever worry you that your life doesn't make any sense" facts about Amy. Alex wonders if Amy's Roman infatuation is retrospectively significant to the Romanesque names of the "Byzantium" and Father Octavian in "The Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone". But I have to say that "the crash of the 'Byzantium'" was name checked two years earlier in "Silence in the Library", so it has to be a coincidence, or a foreshadowing of Russell's New Roman Empire.

5. The Seventh Doctor Gambit: (possibly using one or more of the above) it's all a great big trap-within-a-trap – the Doctor has set all of his enemies up and they're going to discover to their chagrin that they are the ones on the inside of the Pandorica.

Proper resolution is impossible anyway for any ongoing series, as the Doctor's travels can no more come to an end than Sherlock Holmes could declare all crime in London finally solved. Doctor Who will always have unresolved plot points, larger or smaller, that carry over from one story to the next.

And the "cliffhanger" has an honourable tradition in storytelling, stretching from all the way back to Scheherazade in the "Thousand and One Nights" to Jackanory – that tantalising signoff, "until tomorrow… goodbye", being as integral to my recollection of childhood as Wombles and Paddington.

Nor is the problem that the story lacks the required "beginning, middle and end" structure: in fact, what Steve Moffat has written here is, far more than usual for most Doctor Who multi-part stories, quite self-contained: we are presented with connected but disparate events which draw the Doctor into the story; we see him work out where he is, discover the Pandorica box and try to deduce what is going on; and we are shown the answers in the reveal that it is a trap by his enemies and they win and shut him in the box. Unfortunately for them they've made a literally cataclysmic error of judgement. Essentially, "The Pandorica Opens" is a miniature movie – Moffat's own private "The (Dalek) Empire Strikes Back" – with a sequel, not a conclusion, due out next week.

No, the problem isn't that this is half a story. The problem is how do you follow that? Not next week. Next week there will be a resolution, one of the above or not, that is either satisfying or unsatisfying. But how do you follow it next year? How do you go on doing stories week in week out when the audience know that even the absolute destruction of everything can be got out of if you're clever enough?

Previously on Doctor Who (to coin a phrase), the Universe has been threatened with destruction on nine occasions: "The Time Monster"; "The Three Doctors"; "The Key to Time" season; "Logopolis"; "Terminus"; "The Trial of a Time Lord: The Mysterious Planet"; "Doomsday"; "Journey's End"; and "The End of Time".

(I've ruled out "Pyramids of Mars" and "Image of the Fendahl" because although Sutekh and the Fendahl might threaten all life in the Universe they wouldn't destroy the structure itself. The Doctor's temporal embolism panic in "The Two Doctors" doesn't count because he's speculating wildly on incomplete – and indeed falsified –evidence.)

In the best of these, the events are transformative for the entire series and the stakes just have to be that high. In "The Three Doctors" it takes a threat of the scale of Omega to put the Time Lords in the Doctor's debt that they might release him from his exile. In "Logopolis" nothing short of the end of the universe could stop the fourth Doctor, so the threat has to be that terrible and unstoppable. Whole planets, including Logopolis and Traken, actually die, and the best the Doctor can do is merely to delay the inevitable forces of physics, even paying the price of a life for doing so.

In the worst of these – "Terminus", "Mysterious Planet" – the threat is bathetic, an overblown statement that only underlines that we probably don't care about an explosion large enough to wipe out the characters to whom we've been introduced by the story. It's the same as last week's overblown "the explosion will blow up the Solar System (insert number of exclamation marks to your taste here)" threat only on an even more ludicrous scale.

Saving the universe shouldn't – can't! – be all in a day's work, not even for the Doctor. There has to be cost to these things.

(The interesting exceptions are "The Time Monster" and "The Key to Time", where the conclusion is an almost zen-like "doing the right kind of nothing". After investing a season of viewing time in "The Key to Time" this is slightly unsatisfying; but under Barry Letts, it almost works – it's certainly a lot more satisfying than other parts of "The Time Monster"(!))

For all that Russell Davies might horribly muff up bits of them – dancing Daleks, anyone? – he at least matches the epic scale of the story to the operatic scale of the emotional payoff. "Doomsday" costs him Rose; "Journey's End" costs him Donna (and Rose again, but never mind that); "The End of Time" costs him his dignity his tenth life.

Moffat has, so far, improved on Russell in as much as the spectacular imagery does match the epic scale of the story. The Doctor is the Lord of Time; only a story spanning all of time and space could be big enough to catch him. In "About Time, volume two" Lawrence Miles and Tat Wood ask: "how do you set a trap for this man?", and it's interesting that this is the first time that the Daleks have set a trap for the Doctor since "The Evil of the Daleks".

(Actually, that's doubly interesting because "The Pandorica Opens" follows on from "Victory of the Daleks"; and "The Evil of the Daleks" follows on from "The Power of the Daleks" which so inspired the Moffat-era Daleks first appearance. If we're playing "quote the Dalek story", next up I nominate "The Daleks' Master Plan" where they form an alliance with a dozen other alien races and then exterminate the lot of them. The sneaky bastards.)

It's the convolutions needed for four-dimensional thinking in order to set up how this time trap works that sign Moffat's signature genius across the season: the way that, if it's true, some of the apparent discrepancies in earlier episodes may turn out to be timey-wimey rather than continuity-cockupy; the way that guest stars from earlier episodes unexpectedly reprise their cameos to give you an alternative through-line to their histories.

Mind you, if Liz Ten – yes, it's the same Liz, the end credits say so, and also River refers to her meeting with the Doctor (saying it was "here" so the Royal Collection must be aboard the star whale or at least wherever Starship UK landed) – is still Queen in 5145, that makes her reign over two thousand years long, longer than all her predecessors' put together.

(Or was that a continuity error in "The Beast Below" and those solar flares should have been set in the forty-ninth going on fifty-third centuries as everyone thought they were and not the twenty-ninth going on thirty-third? Would have had to have had a three thousand-year-old Amy, though.)

Oh, and the very naughty cameo that wasn't: "Fry" particles at Stonehenge? Next you'll be saying the Minister of Chance has popped by, or possibly King Arthur.


An example of how Steve does this better than Russell, though: why didn't the Doctor come across this "lost" Van Gogh until the "right" point in his timeline?

Well, the answer is obvious: it didn't exist before he met Van Gogh.

Yes, it's the same sort of four-dimensional jigsaw reply that people hypothesised as an answer to "why didn't Torchwood just arrest the third Doctor" – unfortunately Russell outsmarted himself on that one by having Torchwood appear in both "Bad Wolf" and "The Christmas Invasion" before the Doctor went back in time and caused Torchwood to happen ("Tooth and Claw" – or "Torch and Wood" I suppose).

But remember, in "Vincent and the Doctor" the Doctor demonstrably changes history by his visit – in the original version, "The Church at Augers" has the face of a Krafayis in the window; in the new version, "Sunflowers" has "for Amy" written on the side of it. In the first version of history, Vincent never saw the TARDIS, with his unique vision, and so never painted it as "The Pandorica Opens".

And you can make a similar, though more tenuous, case for the visit to the diamond cliff to read God's last message to creation © Douglas Adams River's message to the Doctor. The Doctor himself says: "I don't know why I've never thought of this before". The answer, dear Doctor, is that until River went back in time and put it there, the message didn't exist for you to go and translate. Essentially, the idea of this has-to-be-solved mystery has only existed in his head for the few hours or minutes since River wrote it up there!

On the other hand, remember that it is Professor Bracewell who brings the painting to Churchill's attention and a nasty, nasty thought occurs: maybe he never did fully escape from Dalek control. After all, it's the co-ordinates on the TARDIS door in the painting – quoted by River in her gigantic graffiti (theta sigma, indeed) – that draw the Doctor to the Daleks' trap. Meaning that possibly Vincent's vision was forced into the poor man's head by the evil pepperpots. Or, more prosaically, Bracewell under Dalek control may have just altered the painting. (After all, it would make more sense if the date on the door had been the date of the TARDIS destruction, i.e. 25th June 2010, rather than 102 A.D.)




The reversal of the fairy-tale trope is a rather lovely touch: we are expecting – indeed, River cues us up to expect – that the Doctor is the "good wizard" who trapped the "evil goblin" inside the Pandorica. But far from Gandalf the Doctor, it turns out that this wizard is Dalek the White. And the fairy tale in question turns out to be Merlin and Nimue in the crystal cave.

Watched for the first time, "The Pandorica Opens" is an exercise in escalating tension and feverish speculation: even if you've probably already guessed that the obvious person to be in the box is the Doctor himself, it still winds up the tension to the moment of opening when, with all three main character plots coming together at once, the answer becomes blindingly obvious.

Watched a second time, it becomes a grand tragedy, as the Doctor does the Doctor-ish thing at each stage and each Doctor-ish thing that he does leads him one step closer to that box. Of course he works out it'll be under Stonehenge; of course he finds his way into the Underhenge; of course he persuades the "Romans" to help defend the site; of course he threatens the Alliance's starships into backing off, only buying himself the time for the trap to spring.

"Why don't I know about what's inside the Pandorica already?" the Doctor asks himself over and over.

Even such bottom feeders as Prisoner Zero have mocked him for not knowing (though Prisoner Zero probably learned it from the Atraxi, who we see are in on the deal). And the Weeping Angels laughed at him for not knowing. At least until they fell out of the universe.

Well, the simple answer is that it's because it's your future that is in there, Doctor. But also – unless you're Mitchell and Webb's self-aware Nazis again – you never see yourself as the baddy.

My ten-year-old nephew wanted to know if it was true that the Doctor was the "worst thing in the universe", which is remarkably sophisticated analysis from the target audience.

And I had to say that to the Daleks and the Cybermen and the Zygons and the rest, yes, the Doctor is that goblin, that trickster, that warrior, who drops out of the sky and pulls down their world. From a certain point of view. As Obi Wan Kenobi might say to get himself out of a tight spot.

This reversal of expectations is what "The Pandorica Opens" is all about: Moffat comments on, and then reverses his own trope of the Doctor facing down enemies by bigging up his own backstory (and it's also a reference to that famous quote of Paul Cornell's that Moffat keeps nicking: "I'm what monsters have nightmares about"). When he faces down the collected starships that he thinks have come to take the Pandorica, the music goes all triumphant as they back off, like he's won. But secretly they're all covering their mouths as they say to themselves "tee hee, he thinks he's got the better of us".

In the same vein, Rory returns from the dead (just an aside here to say I'm with Amy on this one: Arthur Darvill looks really good dressed as a Roman. Ahem) he returns but he's the one who has to deal with the grief because Amy's forgotten him. That's really harsh.

It was a really good way to bring Rory back: a return so obvious that even the Doctor overlooks it for a comedy moment; a miracle with a monstrous twist. You get the feeling that the eleventh Doctor is looking for miracles now, and that that gives him a blind spot to all the coincidences. Yes, I agree that it doesn't exactly make sense for Rory to remember everything up to the point of his death if he's based on a psychic snapshot of Amy's memories from the last time she was in her house (especially given the whole "erased from time" business, and the fact that the episode itself plays up how he's not in Amy's memories!) or maybe there'll be another explanation next week.

Of course, the first clue that he was not as he appeared was that he managed to kill a Cyberman using a sword.

…Yes, all this and a five-minute interlude to make the Cybermen actually frightening again, for the first time since, oh I don't know… "Earthshock", probably. Hmm, that killed a companion too.

And the Cyberhead scuttling around on its cables, and ejecting the shrivelled skull of its former occupant, were just brilliant. An even more grotesque form of Russell's Toclafane from "Last of the Time Lords". And, of course, a bit of Moffat recycling Moffat, too: the robot-form that wants the Doctor's human lady friend for her brain. But not in a good way. (See also "The Girl in the Fireplace", like you hadn't worked it out already.)

Incidentally, there's clearly a (no pun intended) deleted scene where the Doctor, River and Amy find the Cyberman's head – we only see the head as a relic discarded by the stone over the stairs to the Underhenge, but the Doctor refers to the Cyberarm as "probably belonging to that head we found up top". Oh, and while the whole scene from entry to the web-shrouded tomb to mummified heads spitting poisoned arrows is obviously Indiana Jones, the three-winged paralysing dart – like the ones Jango Fett uses – is another Star Wars nod, as well…

But of course as a human mind trapped in an indestructible artificial body against his will and not necessarily under his own control, Rory is very much another form of Cyberman himself.

It would be most impressive – though I fear highly unlikely – if the Doctor left at the end of "The Big Bang" not with a predictably-resurrected Amy but with a grief-stricken Auton Rory as his companion.

Tragically, I suspect Rory is for the heroic sacrifice to avoid all those Auton-y pitfalls any time the TARDIS lands in a Nestene time zone, but he does remain odds-on to feature as the one who gets the Doctor out of that box.

Yes, how to get the Doctor out of the box: the obvious answer is then one he gave himself in the course of the episode: it's much easier to break into a prison – yet another interesting sidebar: have you noticed how many prisons there have been this season? Literal prisons like the Atraxi Gaol in "The Eleventh Hour" and River's Stormcage; or more metaphorical ones such as the poor star whale in "The Beast Below" (brain accessible via the dungeon of the Tower of London) and then the Doctor, Rory and Amy trapped in dreams in "Amy's Choice". And now the Doctor incarcerated in the Pandorica. If it is all in Amy's head, that's one big Freudian complex about being sent to her room, she's got there!

As for the Doctor getting himself out of the box: well, without going too Captain Jack on us, he ought to have one thousand nine hundred and seven years (give or take a few months) to Houdini it before he catches up with the just-about-to-explode TARDIS in Amy's garden. If it still is in Amy's garden.

As to how: I noticed that River's hand-held gizmo recorded the entire unlocking sequence for the Pandorica. Now she clearly takes that with her to Amy's house and time, as we see her scanning with it, but the Doctor appears to have a similar gizmo through which he talks to her, like a telephone. Could this be the first escape by text messaging?

Of course that would be predicated on River not being roasted in the TARDIS.

There's certainly more to River's story to tell. People – yes, me included – had guessed that the events of the Pandorica would take place before her imprisonment in the Stormcage facility and would probably climax with her committing the murder that got her sentenced there.

Even if I don't buy it – and it's looking even less plausible now – I did like the theory repeated on the Eleventh Hour podcast that although it might be tragic for River and Pond to be the same person, if Amy is a younger Dr Song (notwithstanding being shot dead) then it would fulfil Moffat's promise on Confidential to tell us the whole of River's story, as we would have the beginning in "The Eleventh Hour" to match the end in "Forest of the Dead".

Clearly though, beginning with her already in prison (or at least "in the basement of the Millennium Stadium again") said that we've not got to that key part of the story yet.

And so River has to survive this. Yes, I realise that "in universe" time can be rewritten and unwritten, that older River's presence in "The Time of Angels"/"Flesh and Stone" (a story that itself deals with some of its protagonists being removed from history) cannot be taken as a guarantee of her survival (as demonstrated by the contradicting opening and closing scenes of "The Hungry Earth" and "Cold Blood"). But if Moffat is going to tell us the whole of River's story as promised, then he isn't going to do that by erasing her from time and saying "sorry, those other adventures now didn't happen".

Besides, as Alex says, he clearly loves her too much. I mean really: taking the Captain Jack's signature device, the Vortex Manipulator, from the "beautiful recurring character" of the Russell era and giving it to his own "beautiful recurring character" is just rude!

(Alex wonders if this is where the Face of Boe parts company with the Hand of Boe!)

I certainly think that the Doctor should rescue River in preference to the other way around, but it's not beyond Moffat to have each rescue the other (with or without paradoxical means).


Or the clue could be in the mythology, in the fairy tale. In the legend of Pandora's box, the box contained all the evils of the world. And hope. Obviously that's a two-edged sword: hope it what gives people strength to fight those evils, but equally if there were no hope then there would be no bitterness or despair. But the monsters do not understand hope.

Ah, yes. The Monsters. It's a bit of an odd alliance, this, isn't it? Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen, yes fair enough (notwithstanding my usual complaint that the Cybermen aren't really important outside of Earth's Solar System), but the Sycorax are distinctly B-List aren't they? And who let the Weevils in?

More importantly, what are the Silurians doing here? Or the name-checked Draconians, for that matter? They're not really enemies in the way that the Daleks or the Cybermen are; or if they are, then it's no more so than humans, who are notably not present.

UPDATE: In the comments, Mr David makes an EXCELLENT argument that the Silurians and Draconians aren't out to get the Doctor but are there because of the cracks in time and they are against that sort of thing.

And why aren't the Ice Warriors in on the deal? On past form, there's only a 25% chance of them being non-hostile, and they're at least as big players on the galactic stage as the Cybermen (who, as I keep saying, even if they are Doctor Who's number two monster, are really pathetically parochial monsters in universal terms – unless Nick Briggs has been re-writing their history again… oh I give up.)

Most of all why aren't the Rutans involved? The Daleks are, at least post-Time War, established as the single most powerful threat in the Doctor Who universe (subject to resolving its current existential crisis), but the Sontarans and the Rutans are engaged in a war that spans galaxies and may well involve time travel as well (the Sontarans posses some kind of time technology in "The Time Warrior" so logically the Rutans must as well, or they'd be wiped out in their own pre-history). The Sontarans would certainly not break off their war unless the Rutan Host agreed to the ceasefire too, if nothing else for fear of being massively shot in the back.

The absence of the Dominators (self-styled masters of ten galaxies – check out the DVD in a fortnight) and the Krotons is also puzzling, if for no other reason than that with them in the line up the new Skittles Daleks would look slightly less embarrassing.

I'm afraid that the answer – necessitated, unfortunately, more by the available costumes than by proper consideration of plot – is that "we haven't done a Rutan story or a proper Ice Warrior story yet".

(To which the answer to the answer is, I'm sorry to say, "why didn't you do one of those instead of that pointless Chibnall two-parter, then?")

Oh, and Charlotte also asked: why didn't the monsters just shoot the bugger! That's an easy one, actually: if you kill him, he'll regenerate and come back as something that could have survived whatever it was that killed him. I think even the Daleks might figure that turning the Doctor completely monster-proof might put a kink in their no-doubt-colourful plans.

The big monster mash-up is the sort of thing that ought to be absurd, the sort of thing that hasn't been done since, well, that Dalek story in the sixties that I mentioned. The one where Terry Nation dropped off half-a-dozen pages of notes and left Dennis Spooner to wing it. It should be the worst kind of exercise in crowd-pleasing theatrics, even more than Russell's Daleks versus Cybermen grudge match (or rather: Cyber ass-whupping).

And yet the story works almost in spite of the rubber-mask Usual Suspects moments at the end. It's a story that relies on Moffat's vision of the Doctor as legendary. So of course it has to be "Murder on the Orient Express": everyone did it!

And yet again, the continuity adds to the air of unreality about the whole business. As though it's all one careful exercise in quotations.

Alex tells me how he was thinking of the novel of "Terror of the Autons". Which he's willing to bet the Grand Moff and his predecessor must have read. When challenged about getting into UNIT HQ, the Master tells the Doctor not, as he does on screen, "Don't bother with trivialities" but that "A number of UNIT sentries firmly believe that they have just admitted the Prime Minister!" which may have given Russell ideas. But there are two more points that make Alex think of the Mister Moffster. In the book, it's stated that were the Master ever to be caught by the Time Lords he would face their severest punishment: "the Master's life-stream would be thrown into reverse. Not only would he no longer exist, he would never have existed." That's the first time anyone ever talks about that. And then there's the Auton in the safe, too: it doesn't just have the door slammed on it, as happens in the TV version, but its arm is caught in the door and cut off, with that severed arm thrashing like a snake, "spitting out energy bolts"…

And it wouldn't be one of my reviews of Steven Moffat's work without pointing out this week's quotation from the works of Lawrence Miles, but I'll leave it to poster "Affirmation" on Gallifrey Arse [link may need registration] to tease out this summary of "Alien Bodies":

"Underneath an ancient Earth monument is a relic - in reality the Doctor - coveted by every race in the universe. As the Doctor races to understand what it is, mighty battlefleets approach. Someone from the Doctor's future is hanging around, but we never get to learn exactly what they know because of spoilers. We do know that the Doctor is a survivor from an epic Time War, though.

Meanwhile, everything we think we know about the feisty young companion (who has the hots for our hero) is turned on its head as we find out that she's been part of the set up."

For myself, I spotted at least two "Eccleston Moments", direct echoes of the ninth Doctor era: disabling an animated arm with the sonic; and "I am TALKING" while addressing (albeit unknowingly this time) the Nestene Consciousness.

And then there was Rory delivering the Tennant Moment: "I don't want to go!"

Is this all just fanboy homage? Moffat unable to resist the urge to add cleverness on top of cleverness, quoting just for the sake of fun? Or is there something more to it even than that?

It's just a thought, but the last time that the TARDIS exploded… okay, the last time on screen that she exploded… the Doctor arrived in the "Land of Fiction", a world where metatextual was a way of life… as I say: it's just a thought.


I don't think I've really answered any of the questions, certainly not any of the ones that matter. So I'll leave them with you until next time…

Why did the TARDIS explode?

(There seems no particular reason why it starts playing up in the first place. Why whisk River away to Amy's house? And why start to go bonkers at that point? Will we see events replay from a different point of view – that would be in keeping with the themes this episode has been developing – so that we understand what happened to the TARDIS?)

Who visited Amy's house, leaving those curiously patterned burns marks on the grass and tearing the door off its hinges?

(The burn marks might be a reference to the Daleks' landing in the playground in "Remembrance of the Daleks" but the door seems more… bipedal.)

Whose is the voice that wheezes "silence will fall"?

(Speculation says that it's Davros – because it does sound a bit like Davros… though of course the Beast sounded exactly like Sutekh so "sounds like" is no guarantee of anything. Speculation is no doubt fuelled by the way that the exploding TARDIS does appear to do the business that he wanted to do with his reality bomb. Besides, speculation always says it's Davros. Even when it is!)

Why does Amy's life not make any sense?

(How can she live in that big house with all those empty rooms? What happened to her aunt or her parents? Why didn't she remember the Daleks?)

And what is a duck pond if there aren't any ducks?

(Amy's duck pond. Without ducks. Amy. Pond.)


I thought "The Pandorica Opens" was awesome. But then my niece, who is seven, told me that the one with the invisible spaceship on the roof was much better. So maybe I'm just an old fanboy after all.

Next Time… Mostly harmless.

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Day 3456: A Tax on Gains is a Capital Idea

Friday:


Must answer my TWITTER correspondence…

@millenniumdome: "#HoTVote Returning the CGT rate to 40% is a sensible way of raising money from the better off to use to increase the personal allowance"

@jazzifull: "Raising #CGT to raise money for any other purpose is simply a way to disincentivise personal responsibility for omes future."

@millenniumdome: "no, it's a disincentive to pretending income is "capital gain"; if people keep more of their income how is that irresponsible?"

@jazzifull: "Playing Robin Hood! How do you think capital gain comes about? Money tree in garden? Investment by individuals, it costs!"

Arrgh! Need more characters! Must resort to a diary entry…

I'm going to take this point by point, just not necessarily in the same order because I'll leave the DIFFICULT bit to last ('cos I get a bit PHILOSOPHICAL in reply to Mr Jazzifull getting a bit INSULTING.)

But first, there's an UNDERLYING sense to most of the objections to the proposed rise in Capital Gains Tax of:

"How dare you put up taxes! Lowering income tax? LALALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU!"

IF you want the government to do stuff – and because I'm a LIBERAL elephant, not a LIBERTARIAN kitten, I DO think that there are some good things that governments can do – then you have to accept that you're going to have to raise tax from SOMEWHERE.

(Well, of course, Hard Labour had the idea that they could just INVENT money from somewhere, or at least that they could ALWAYS run up more debts in our name, but at some point we're all going to have to pay back the money that they spent on our credit cards…)

So if you agree that you have to raise SOME tax, it becomes a question of where it is FAIREST to raise that tax from: from everyone, regardless of how low they come on the earnings scale? Or from better off people who are better able to shoulder the burden?

The WHOLE POINT of the Liberal Democrat policy – and we were completely upfront about this – was to REBALANCE the tax system, so that people who are well off pay a FAIR share.

You remember the story that Rich City Slickers are getting a LOWER rate of tax than the people who clean their offices? That's because of Capital Gains Tax.


So…

First point first:

"Playing Robin Hood"

Yup, happy to put my fluffy feet up to that one. It was ALWAYS the Liberal Democrat plan to try to move some of the burden of taxation from the general taxpayer to the better off, particularly with an aim of taking people on the lowest earnings out of tax altogether.

Very few people pay capital gains tax. Almost everyone in work pays income tax. Raising the personal allowance lets more people keep more of their own money and take more personal responsibility.

Thanks to Hard Labour running up a trillion pound overdraft, none of us get the option to opt out; we've got to raise the taxes from somewhere. I'd rather they were raised more FAIRLY.

And with the AUSTERITY budget that is coming, giving a generous tax cut to most workers, paid for by tax rises on those who could afford it, was our way of saying "we are all in this together".


Third point second:

"Investment by individuals, it costs!"

You do realise that Capital Gains Tax is a tax on GAINS, not on Capital, don't you?

You ONLY pay the tax when you have money to pay it. It's not like COUNCIL TAX (or the TV licence) where you have to pay it whether you've got the cash or not; you're ONLY liable to the tax if you make a profit on selling stuff.

It's not a tax on your HOME; your home is exempt.

It's not a tax on SELLING stuff (like VAT); you only pay the tax if you sell stuff for MORE than you paid for it and then you only pay the tax on the bit more that you get when you sell it. Whatever you put in in the first place – like on "Bullseye" – that money is SAFE.

And, in fact, if you know ANYTHING AT ALL about the way that Capital Gains Tax works you will know that there is a WHOPPING great tax exemption called "Entrepreneurs' Relief" that means that if you spend your life building up a business and then sell it, the first ONE MILLION POUNDS of the profit (yes, that's the PROFIT not the sales price) is tax free.

Think about it like this: suppose you've worked hard to build up a business – the people WORKING in your business, they're working hard too, and they get taxed on the reward for their hard work after the first six thousand pounds. You SELL the business and you get taxed on the reward for your hard work after the first MILLION pounds.

And at HALF THE RATE.

In order to raise allowances, if we can, so that we only tax your workers after the first ten thousand they earn, we want to tax you only at the SAME rate that they pay on their earnings.

Is that not FAIR?

So, perhaps a little less BLEATING about how it "disincentivises" people from investing in businesses that will create jobs.

You could by the same argument say that INCOME tax "disincentivises" people from working, particularly at lower incomes where people may even calculate that they are better off on benefits.

A fairer balance between taxing gains and taxing wages could encourage people to take jobs so that employers benefit too.

Capital Gains Tax is a tax that falls MAINLY on people rich enough to be able to buy and sell stocks and shares (or buy-to-let second homes) and taxes them mainly FOR buying and selling stocks and shares (etc).

As we shall see…


Finally, second (and insulting) point last:

"How do you think capital gain comes about? Money tree in garden?"

Well, at the most SIMPLISTIC level, ALL gains – capital or otherwise – come from someone putting something into an opportunity and getting something back.

Now, that COULD be as simple as putting in some of your LABOUR into a JOB and getting PAID.

Or you could put in MONEY into an INVESTMENT and get a RETURN.

Of course, ultimately all MONEY must represent LABOUR at some point. Just not necessarily YOUR labour ('cos you might have INHERITED it).

It could be that was the labour of making something to sell, or growing something to eat or digging stuff out of the ground.

Or maybe the labour could be the labour of calling yourself "king" and killing anyone who objects to paying you protection money.

Anyway…

Most "value" comes by exploiting the Earth somehow – only writers, artists, musicians, poets truly create something of value out of nothing, and even THEY need something to write or paint ON (not to mention something to EAT!) – so in a sense there IS a "money tree in the garden"; the "money" represents how much effort you've put into collecting the "fruit" of that "tree".

Though of course the suggestion was that I thought money came free from nowhere. Which is really only true of rich people with inherited fortunes. The sort of people who are most likely to be paying Capital Gains Tax on their Trust Funds, as it happens.

Anyway…

You get your money (somehow) and put it into a BUSINESS and get a RETURN. Or you could put your money into BUYING SOMETHING that will go up in value and make a PROFIT when you sell it.

That would be something like stocks and shares or gold or land or property or art. Stuff, basically. Because, obviously, MOST of the gains that Capital Gains Tax taxes are made on buying and selling stuff.

Now, you could be UNKIND and call "buying stuff in the hope that it goes up in price so you can sell it for more than you paid" GAMBLING. But even if you are being generous, "buying things to sell them" is really just a SAVINGS PLAN for RICH PEOPLE.

If you put a thousand pounds in a savings account, a year later you still have your thousand pounds PLUS you have some INTEREST. You pay INCOME TAX on the INTEREST at the basic (20%) or higher (40%) or even top (50%) rate.

If you put a thousand pounds into SHARES and sell them a year later, you MAY have your thousand pounds back PLUS some PROFIT (if the price has gone UP; if it went down, then why did you sell the shares?) You pay CAPITAL GAINS TAX on the PROFIT at the capital gains tax rate of 18%.

Basically, both are INVESTMENTS where you put in some money and get a bit more back, and you pay tax on the "bit more" that you get back.

So why is the gain on the stock market investment taxed at a lower rate than the gain on the savings account?


Obviously, there IS a DIFFERENCE between these two kinds of INVESTMENT. And the difference is that the buying stuff plan has MORE RISK: that's why some people call it GAMBLING.

If you put money in the bank, you are pretty certain to get it back again with interest. So the interest rate will be quite LOW. Putting money into shares is more risky because (as the advert has it) the price CAN go down as well as up. But in the long term, so long as you can afford to keep your money parked in the investment, the stock market USUALLY goes up more, so you get a higher "return" than just a savings account.

And remember, boys and girls: RISKY investing is what led DIRECTLY to the credit crunch and worldwide recession. Are you 100% sure you want your government to be encouraging risky investing?

So why is the gain on the RISKY investment taxed at a lower rate than the gain on the SAFER one?



In FACT, Capital Gains have only been taxed at 18% for the last couple of years. Before that, quite sensibly, the CGT rate was similar to the income tax rate. The REASON that the rate was LOWERED was mainly because Mr Frown caused a MASSIVE RECESSION and STOCK MARKET CRASH and so wanted to encourage people to reinvest in the stock market.

I say "mainly" because it was also to do with Mr Frown's messing up the tax in the first place: a long time ago, you USED to get a allowance for INFLATION deducted from any gain that you made so you only paid tax on the money you made "in real terms". But Mr Frown thought he'd ABOLISHED inflation so he got rid of that allowance, and tried to bring in a "taper" relief instead, so that the tax got less the longer you owned the whatever-it-was. But that all got far too complicated and didn't work properly so he abolished that as well and just made the tax lower.

But this creates a massive LOOPHOLE so that if you are rich enough to get paid in ASSETS instead of CASH – like, say, city bankers – you can get your "salary" in shares and then sell them and so only get taxed at 18% instead of 40% of 50%. Which leads to the SHOCKING business of fat cats paying a lower rate of tax than the people who clean their big shiny offices.

So why is there a loophole open to the rich to get their earning taxed at a lower rate than the rate that the rest of us have to stump up?



So, to sum up, the answer is YES, Mr Jazzifull, I DO know where gains come from (possibly better than you); I DO know how they are taxed (probably better than you); and I know why it's FAIRER for the tax – thank you again Hard Labour debts – to fall on the better off, which is why I know we should switch from taxing income to taxing gains if we can (certainly better than you).

Is that what Master Gideon is going to do in his budget next week?

Well, no, I'm rather afraid that he won't. Because I'm afraid he's an idiot probably going to raise the wretched VAT rate.

The Liberal Democrat plan was to cut the deficit by cutting spending; to NOT increase or decrease the total tax taken (except for adding a Bank levy), just change the balance of taxes to try and be more fair.

But we have got to COMPROMISE now, in order to make the Coalition WORK. And the Conservatories plans include cutting the deficit by a MIX of spending cuts and tax rises. They have agreed to use the Liberal Democrat plans for a Capital Gains Tax rise, but I do not think that they will be raising the personal income tax allowance all the way to ten thousand pounds all at once as we had hoped (making this a tax RISE not tax NEUTRAL). And then there's the VAT.

A VAT rise is a MUCH WORSE idea because (a) it is REGRESSIVE, impacting more on people who have less (though the zero rate for food, and rent being exempt – and mortgages outside the scope – means that at least there is protection for the very worst off); and (b) whereas reversing an income tax rise is easy and has a direct benefit to the taxpayer, reversing VAT rises doesn't tend to get passed on to customers – as we saw last year when Hard Labour cut VAT back to 15% – and so you get stuck with a tax that only ever goes UP.

I am SURE that we will have argued AGAINST it, but it is an argument that we may have lost. And so, I'm afraid, we're going to have to LUMP it.

Arguments about Capital Gains Tax may exercise the more frothing members on the right wing. But VAT hits far more people, and so VAT – not Capital Gains – is going to be the REAL first test of the Coalition.

Hang on tight, fluffy chums, this could get NASTY!

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Day 3450: DOCTOR WHO: The Lodger

Saturday:


For starters: Big Fluffy Hugs and Thank Yous to Mr Chris and Mr Joe (and Auntie Jennie) for mentioning my diary on their Eleventh Hour Podcast show.

We've downloaded ALL your shows, now! The only question is: can Daddy listen to them all before the Pandorica Opens?

('Cos after that… ominous pause… SILENCE WILL FALL… Oooh!)

Before that though, there seems to be a lot of FOOTBALL* about.

Elephants, obviously, have NO INTEREST in football so we're watching Dr Woo…

What?

This?

Sigh.

OK… elephants, obviously, are BEST at football, but IN SPITE of that we're watching Dr Woo ANYWAY.

And even Daddy Richard admitted it was loads better than he expected, even though it had football in it too!

Another week when I'm proved wrong. Hurray!

It's all too easy to look at "The Lodger" and see the "cheap one at the end of the production run" set in a suburban street location in the present day and with one of the series' leads only minimally present and think: ah, this year's "Fear Her".

So I was already ready to look askance even before seeing who was writing it and what he was writing it from.

Which just shows you how little I know.

Reasons why I was expecting this to be worse #1: as I'm sure you already know, "The Lodger" was written by Gareth Roberts.

In the nineties Gareth wrote a triptych of near-perfect Season Seventeen pastiches for the Virgin "Missing Adventures" range ("The Romance of Crime", "The English Way of Death" and "The Well-Mannered War", do check them out if you can find them).

And I'll gladly concede that he has written rather well for the Sarah Jane Adventures, particularly the pilot, "Invasion of the Bane" (co-authored with Russell Davies); and he's been widely praised for the cleverness of his Trickster stories ("Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane", "The Temptation of Sarah Jane Smith" and "The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith").

Your opinion of "cleverness" may vary depending on what you think of recycling the plot of "Father's Day" but, even so, you must admit that the Trickster is a terrific recurring villain, and rather better than any that they have come up with for "proper" Doctor Who. Ditto Mrs Wormwood from the Bane stories, in fact.

But for Doctor Who on television Gareth's track record stands at a much less impressive: "The Shakespeare Code", "The Unicorn and the Wasp" and a half-share of the blame for "Planet of the Dead" (again with Russell). There's been a touch of self-indulgence, a hint of "I'm so clever" smugness, the slightest whiff of "I think these people are geniuses and look how I can write like these geniuses". Pastiche worked perfectly for his Season Seventeen stories, where "cleverness" in storytelling was the order of the day anyway, but not so much for his celebratory historicals and I think it's because Shakespeare and Christie actually were geniuses, and Gareth, er, isn't.

"The Shakespeare Code" really needed to finish with genuinely clever wordplay – not a string of random words with a "Harry Potter" joke on the end. There's nothing wrong with the "Harry Potter" joke, as such, but it needed to be at the end of something genuinely Shakespearean, not just one more odd-sounding word in a string of gibberish. Likewise, trying to cram in as many as possible of the titles of Agatha Christie's many books as dialogue was neither big nor clever, and in fact got old very, very quickly. Worse, it got predictable: not being naturalistic speech, you could see each "title" being set up as another forced bon mot. Or maybe that's just me.

None of which predisposed me to expect "The Lodger" to be witty, engaging and, believe it or not, actually rather charming. Being set in the present day seems to have helped enormously: focusing the efforts on the human (and non-human) interactions of the characters with no need to show off the research.

He is lucky in his cast. For all his shortcomings as a comic, for all that he's basically playing the same part over and over, James Corden is getting rather good at the slightly-shy everyday blokey bloke that he's been playing since "The History Boys". Daisy Haggard is almost built for "ditzy blonde" roles, but here keeps the comedy elements of her character turned down very low, presenting a sympathetic long-suffering girlfriend-in-waiting, but with some nice strength to her character, particularly when slapping the Doctor down for suggesting she deserves life in a call-centre and then smartly spotting his reverse psychology (if not the double twist of it). In fact, both Corden and Haggard treat it as entirely real, which is just the way to play comedy drama.

Of course, the real star is Matt Smith, somehow finding incredibly believable ways to play "eccentric alien who doesn't understand our Earth ways" without looking stupid. In fact, in a damn fine performance, he convinces as wise old man trapped in young man's body, seeing both the big alien menace and the small human drama with equal clarity. He gives the Doctor's scripted eccentricities a sense of child-like innocence; his misunderstandings stemming from a failure to grasp such Earthly failings as lying, embarrassment and shyness, rather than from some innate "wackiness".

Even so, even the best of casts – well, unless you have Sir Ian McKellen who can frankly make anything worth watching – can be undone if the writer doesn't give them anything interesting to say.


Reasons why I was expecting this to be worse #2: as I'm sure you already know as well, "The Lodger" was written by Gareth Roberts based on a comic strip that he had written for Doctor Who Magazine (DWM #368, in fact; online here), written for the Tenth Doctor and hapless "tin dog" Mickey.

I confess, I remembered the story mainly because I didn't like it. The simple enough premise – the Doctor sharing a flat for three nights with Mickey because the TARDIS has misfired on landing and made off with Rose for a few days – has the makings of some odd-couple humour. But the problem is that the story is told very much from Mickey's point of view and Mickey just does not like the Doctor, and has some perfectly good and intractable reasons for not doing so: principally that the Doctor stole his girlfriend.

So the tale plays out with the Doctor shown up as an arrogant git. His actions, without so much as a by your leave, make Mickey very unhappy over the course of those days: from "hilariously" sonicing out his own teeth, through being shown up at everything that he enjoys, to having his latest girlfriend encouraged to leave to find her own life. Plus the Doctor saves the planet in his free time. Again.

The conclusion where the Doctor stays with the TARDIS to give Mickey some quality time alone with Rose ought to be about the Doctor having learned something, but doesn't half come across as him pimping out his companion to make Mickey feel better for the inconvenience.

And yet, by some extraordinary alchemy, the revisions needed to make the story work with new character Craig instead of Mickey and the established history between him and the Doctor actually improve the tale enormously.

Because the Doctor has to win Craig over, he starts off by impressing him with his weirdness and his cooking skills. And Craig is clearly taken with him. It means that what follows is much more the Doctor doing more of the same but taking it too far, ultimately alienating Craig because he's an alien and he doesn't know when to stop, rather than him rubbing Mickey's nose in his superiority over and over again.

With a couple of crucial exceptions, the beats of the story are remarkably similar but achieve a very different perspective on both story and Doctor.

The Sonic Screwdriver:

In the Comic: Mickey mistakes the sonic for his toothbrush and accidentally sonics out his teeth.

On Television: In a neat reversal, the Doctor grabs Craig's toothbrush instead of the sonic and rushes to try and save his landlord wielding only toothpaste and a strategically placed towel. The Doctor's near-naked hijinks cleverly distract us from the whopping great clue to Craig's importance in the story: his confrontation with the sinister figure behind the door upstairs and more significantly his entirely unexpected survival.

Boys' Night In:

In the Comic: Mickey and the Doctor play a shoot'em'up on the Playstation – the Doctor somehow wins without shooting. Mickey tries to watch some telly only to find that the Doctor has rewired the TV to watch broadcasts from 10 years in the future.

On Television: Partly because the Doctor is trying not to reveal his non-terrestrial nature, these humiliations are necessarily removed. However, the "I'm the Doctor and I don't use weapons" line is transplanted to the moments after the football match where he misinterprets the team's desire to "annihilate" their next opponents. It's a predictable gag to use, but Matt delivers it with great charisma, particularly when into the embarrassed apology afterwards. And since this is a character study, it doesn't hurt to have a Terrance Dicks-esque statement of fundamental principles for the Doctor.

Football:

In the Comic: one of Mickey's mates is sick, so the Saturday afternoon football is off until the Doctor declares himself never fitter. Mickey asks him not to introduce himself as "the Doctor" because it's "weird", but the Doctor does so anyway and no one bats an eyelid. On the pitch, the Doctor proves to be an ace player and the team win four nil. Much to Mickey's chagrin.

On Television: almost exactly the same (the "you can't call yourself the Doctor" bit is even exaggerated by the Doctor doing his "air kiss" greeting)

What is particularly interesting is that while the Doctor is clearly a very good footballer – do you think that being able to see all the alternative probable futures might help? – he's clearly no good at all at football: football is a team game and he's just not a team player, he's doing this all on his own, see especially the moment where he steals Craig's penalty.

It means that Craig's annoyance and frustration are legitimate in a way that Mickey being sulky about the Doctor showing him up is not. We retain our sympathy for Craig's character because he's kind of in the right. But we also retain our sympathy for the Doctor because, and this is at least in part thanks to Matt Smith's natural charm and love of playing the game he'd hoped to make his life, because we see that the Doctor isn't showing off; he's just having a whale of a time doing something he's only just discovered he's got a natural talent for (at least in this body). He isn't humiliating Craig in the way that a gazelle isn't humiliating a chinchilla.

A Night in with the Girlfriend:

Now this is where the TV version gets really clever, taking almost exactly the same scenario and yet totally inverting what the Doctor is doing and why he's doing it.

In the Comic: Gina from the flower shop is Mickey's new date, at least until the Doctor turns up with the wiring and Gina invites him to stay for a drink (name-brand cola only) and he ends up telling her that there's a much wider universe out there and convincing her that she can do better with her life.

On Television: Sophie is Craig's not-date-at-all just girl that likes to hang around his flat all the time and has two sets of keys for it… you get the picture. The Doctor certainly does. She and Craig are stopping in for booze'n'pizza, at least until the Doctor turns up with the wiring and Sophie invites him to stay for a drink (nice glass of wine, doesn't drink any) and he ends up telling her that there's a much wider universe out there and convincing her that she can do better with her life.

Except on television, the Doctor is every obviously trying to make a bigger point: he's showing Sophie that she clearly could do better but there is something making her stay. Specifically, a large Craig-shaped something. Far from splitting them up – in the comic he claims to be "rescuing" Mickey from something he'd never go through with – the Doctor is trying to throw Craig and Sophie together. It's not just a more positive aim; as Mickey himself points out: sometimes people don't want to be saved from their mistakes. Mickey and Gina may be wrong for each other but it's presumptuous of the Doctor to sink it before it can start – and you might also consider it's a bit questionable for the Doctor to be making sure Rose's ex stays single.

The complete reversal of the scene with the eleventh Doctor makes Matt Smith's version a kinder and wiser Time Lord, not acting from either arrogant or selfish motives, just trying to make things a little better but, being too subtle for Craig's perceptions, mucking it up.

A Trip to the Office:

In the Comic: this doesn't happen. We know that Mickey is a mechanic – we briefly see the garage where he works in "The Christmas Invasion", and it's why he's always got different cars – so the Doctor could have gone round to his work and shown him up further by sonicing all the cars he's supposed to be working on. But the story doesn't need it, and in fact is better with the Doctor almost confined to Mickey's flat (he only goes out to the football and that's with Mickey too, poor Mr Smith can't get away from him. Which is the point, obviously.)

On Television: The TV story has a slightly different agenda by this point.

The Doctor is trying to be helpful to Craig – his line "I'll recruit a spy" clearly means Craig, and he does do his landlord a nice breakfast before discovering him near dead from evil-residue poisoning. He thinks that covering Craig's work for him is doing him a further favour.

He's also, ever-so-slightly, procrastinating. Something about the upstairs flat – maybe the time loops, maybe the fact that it can interfere with his TARDIS – has got him nervous and he's, maybe subconsciously, trying to put off the point where he goes up there.

(He's actually right to be wary as if he'd gone up there alone, the planet would have been blown up – though he's slow to realise that Craig is the key: it's almost two days between Craig being turned away at the door and the resolution.)

It is, of course, hilarious to see the Doctor "in the workplace"; he's totally out of place there, and we'd all love to be able to treat annoying people on the phone the way that he does.

And I loved the metal slotted-spoon rotating on the desk in front of him with no given explanation at all. Magnificent.

Craig and Sophie, incidentally, clearly don't work in any normal kind of call centre, at least not from the appearance of the rather nice open plan office with swish desks and pot plants – see the grey cubicles of Adipose Industries in "Partners in Crime" for a more realistic view. Although we are probably safe to assume that it's only the Doctor's special charm that has the boss offering out biscuits.

But we all like to think that we are indispensible at work. We certainly don't want someone else turning up and effortlessly doing better at our job. That would feel like a threat to our well-being, particularly if maintaining our status quo is as important to us as it is to Craig. Remember, his job doesn't just pay for his house; it's also where he met and continues to meet Sophie. So having inadvertently undermined Craig's sense of his own football prowess, the Doctor's apparent attack on his security is what is needed to push Craig over the edge into open hostility.

That brings Craig to the point where Mickey sort of was in order for the row with the Doctor to happen. But even this row is different on television than in the magazine: where Mickey had an actual point about the Doctor's behaviour, Craig is just overwhelmed; and with Craig the Doctor argues back, insists on staying, because he isn't here just to kill time but because he's actually doing something plotwise.

Of course, dramatically, the argument on the telly is so that they are distracted enough not to notice Sophie's arrival and abduction by the upstairs neighbour.

Hence roll on the conclusion…

Meanwhile back in the TARDIS:

In the Comic: no time at all passes for Rose – the Doctor steps out of the TARDIS on Thursday but the materialisation glitch means that Rose emerges on Sunday with no intervening gap for her.

On Television: Amy actually has something to do, even if it's just play with the standing set while emoting to the Doctor's voice. The TARDIS continues trying to land for all the time the Doctor is alone on Earth, with the suggestion being that the same amount of real time passes for Amy as for the Doctor.

(The synchronisation of the time loops with the TARDIS going into shakes seems to indicate this, as does the way that the Doctor's earpiece lets them have conversations with Amy in real time – although he could have built in some kind of temporal compression filter as well. I'm sure someone can find a use for the word "Blinovitch" in any explanation they want to make up. Of course, the Doctor arrives at Craig's a day after the attempted landing and stays for at least more two days… does Amy really spend all that time stood at the TARDIS console? Does the girl need no sleep?)

Finally…

The biggest difference between the two versions, though, is of course that the TV episode has an actual plot rather than being just a study of two characters forced together despite causing friction whenever they meet.

A forty-five minute television episode needs a stronger backbone than a five-page comic strip.

Of course it was Alex, who is far brighter than I am, who spotted that this one is lifted from "Sapphire and Steel", actually a combination of two stories: the invisible apartment on the roof from Adventure Three crossed with the faceless man on the stairs from Adventure Four.

In the comic strip, the Doctor just happens to save the world in passing (inverting a time cone – how very Logopolis – to hide the Earth from intergalactic scavengers) and it's just the last in his long line of perceived slights at which point Mickey flies off the handle at the Doctor's persistent interfering.

On television, saving the world is the point. And saving the world and the Doctor being a lodger and the romantic subplot and the thing that causes the TARDIS to glitch in the first place all come together in the same point. Hmmm, do I detect the hand of Moff?

That point, that conclusion, that jaw-dropping moment of "oh… it's a TARDIS", which the series hasn't managed since 1965's "The Time Meddler", was an absolute stunner. Of course, all the clues were there if you were up to spotting them. I didn't.

Of course the peril is a little bit silly and slightly overstated. A threat to destroy just Colchester… the episode is set in Colchester, apparently; Alex used to live in Colchester, and he didn't remotely spot it. So, not what you'd call really hammered home, there… A threat to destroy just Colchester would have been equally adequate, and perhaps more appropriate given the stay-at-home themes of the episode. Again, someone who wants to use the word "artron" can probably think of an explanation of why plugging the Doctor into another Time Machine should explode the solar system. (Although this appeared not to happen when he was plugged into the time capsule in "The Two Doctors" – though it might have been a blessing if it had!)

I imagine everyone will mention the "Star Trek: Voyager" homage: Hologram plus Doctor plus "Please state the nature of the emergency".

I imagine everyone is going to say that the timeship looked Jagaroth -like, too, but I won't disappoint.

The gloriously dimensionally-transcendental interior looked like a TARDIS; in fact, looked like the TARDIS that the Master ought to have had: all gothic tomb done out in black metal and sharp edges.

But the exterior, the black sphere and spider-like legs, was straight out of "City of Death". And, with localised timeloops making everything go timey-wimey whenever the thing tries its starter motor, you do have to wonder if that wasn't deliberate.

Yes, localised timeloops equals someone is building a time machine. TARDIS can't land, must be getting blocking, must be another TARDIS. I said the clues were there for the spotting

A TARDIS disguised as part of a building is Douglas Adams-inspired as well: in the uncompleted "Shada", Professor Chronotis's college rooms are in fact his Type-38, usually materialising in the form of "a door".

It's still genius, though, to use a TARDIS as the "upper floor" of a one-storey building. Too rarely do the writers remember the full range and power of the Time Lords' Timeships.

Of course, this isn't a proper TARDIS – or correctly TT capsule – though. It's a homemade version knocked together by someone we never find out about. But what a great hook. I would really like to see the series develop this thread – someone is trying to rebuild the Time Lord technology? It's a bit of Lawrence Miles oeuvre that no one has mined yet. Come on Moffat, there's a story arc in there and you know it.

In many ways this is what makes this the most "Moffat-y" of the Moffat era so far: the use of ingenious plotting as a frame to hang human relations around makes this all but an episode of "Coupling" where an alien Time Machine is needed to bring the boy and the girl together.

Of course, a happy-ending rom-com is never going to be as moving as the intense emotion of the Van Gogh piece last week, so to an extent Gareth was on a hiding to nothing anyway. But in its own way this was a polished little gem, and certainly told me not to prejudge a book by the name on its comic-book cover.

Next Time… Take the money or open the box? Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen, Drahvins… Drahvins??? Is it for a bet? Is it because "Galaxy 4" is the next story after "The Time Meddler", the one where they discover another TARDIS? Is it a contest with Russell to see who can bring back the most obscure black-and-white alien? Or does Moffat just want an excuse to have more women in micro-skirts? And as a special reward for Gareth Roberts: Chelonians. And Romans. And Stonehenge. Who's locked inside the Pandorica, then? Is it the Doctor? Or someone exactly the same shape as someone played by Arthur Darvill? And is River Snog going to kill him? Expect everything to go timey-wimey 'cos it's Steven Moffat's first season finale. Anything could happen when "The Pandorica Opens".

*Football, as I understand it, is a game where you place one sphere, approximately twenty-two centimetres in diameter, on top of another sphere, approximately twelve thousand kilometres in diameter, and attempt to kick the smaller one and not the larger one.

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Day 3448: The Return of the Great Awkward Bustard

Thursday:


Isn't great that Britain's biggest booby is back!

What with their awkward flapping not to mention dangerously flamboyant mating habits making them all too tempting a target, it was once thought to be all over for Britain's answer to Big Bird. His habit of crashing and burning, a consequence of flying blind into electrical cables, didn't help either.

But now, thanks to a programme of careful conservation, the bustard has been given a SECOND CHANCE!

And for those of you NOT interested in BIRDS, Mr Simon Hugs has been chosen as the new Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats.



Everyone loves Mr Hugs. Even if everyone also has their "Oh Simon!" moments.

He could be described as one of those MARMITE politicians – if only MARMITE had a habit of changing its flavor every five minutes so that at one bite you love it and the next makes you want to spit.

Just recently, the speech that he gave at the Special Conference to endorse the Coalition deal was widely judged a CROWNING MOMENT OF AWESOME™ and was deservedly given the biggest standing ovation of the day.

But just a couple of days earlier he had appeared on radio show Any Questions with Jonathan Dimbledonkey and totally fumbled the defense of the Coalition's fixed term parliament proposal by not being properly up on the brief – not just leaving an open goal, but actually moving the goal closer to the opposition and then tipping the ball over the goal line himself by suggesting that the 55% rule was to help the GOVERNMENT.

(As any fule kno: the 55% rule is to protect PARLIAMENT from GOVERNMENT; NOT the other way around. Parliament can get rid of the Government on a vote of 50%+1; Government can only get rid of Parliament on a vote of 55%+1. That's why it's actually TOO LOW, not TOO HIGH; Scotland has a more reasonable 66% protection. And if no one can form a government, then you get an election after 28 days ANYWAY. But you know all this.)

DOUBLE but, the day before THAT Mr Hugs had appeared on TV's Questionable Time with David Dimbledonkey, and speaking to an audience that started off apparently largely hostile to the Coalition won them over by calmly and sensibly explaining that grown up politics was what they had voted for and was what they were getting.


I think that I can understand WHY the Liberal Democrats in Parliament chose him to be their new Deputy. I think he is the biggest woolliest security blanket in the whole of toytown, and with when you want to feel BETTER about yourselves for getting into bed with the big bad wolf, what could be better than hugs from Mr Hugs.

Of course what the Parliamentary Party NEEDS is not the same thing as what it WANTS. If you're getting into bed with the big bad wolf you need the BRAVE WOODSMAN and not GRANDMA!

Being deputy leader should not be a CONSOLATION PRIZE or a merit badge for LONG SPEECHES SERVICE. Yes, you CAN use is as a handy soap box for a non-Government Liberal voice, but the irony is that Mr Hugs is so popular and well-known already that he doesn't really NEED another soap box to stand on.

With a lot of the best of Liberal talent is now IN government, we need to be developing our next generation. I think Mr Tim would have been an excellent and exciting choice, though my personal choice would have been Ms Jo Winsome, though she chose not to stand.

Because what the Deputy Leader should REALLY be doing is preparing the Party, in Parliament and out, for what happens AFTER the Coalition: they should be leading the independent policy development and developing the campaigns. That means it's a job for someone with drive and energy and organisation and new ideas. And Mr Hugs has lots of drive and energy.

So many congratulations to Mr Hugs and do try not to fly into any electric power lines!

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Day 3447: Five Go Mad for the Labour Leadership

Wednesday:

I say chaps and chaps-of-the-alternative-gender, it's time for fun and lashings of ginger beer – steady on! – as all the old gang get back together again: Ed, Ed, Anne(dy), tomboy George (short for Dave) and Token the Dog, off on a spiffing adventure to recover the lost election plans, find out where Uncle Quentin (Mr Frown) buried the secret of being popular, and unmask the nasty people-smugglers so no more of those icky immigrants can get in. Hurrah!

The ASTUTE READER may have noticed a small touch of SATIRE there, and I should like to apologise if anyone was OFFENDED by the suggestion that Ms Enid Blyton's much loved famous five characters were as frighteningly-right-wing as the nonimees for next Hard Labour Loser Leader.


The favourite to win is still creepy wearer of bum-fluff beards, Mr David Millipede, formerly Secretary of State for Denying that Britain had Anything to do with Torture, and Minister for Making Sure the Man in the Orange Jumpsuit was On that Unmarked Plane at Midnight. His campaign slogan: "Will you shut the badword up about badwordy Iraq already, bro!"

Mr Millipede has of course done his best to engineer the best possible contest for himself the Labour Party. He has learned from the mistakes made by Lord Blairimort – no, don't get excited, not THOSE mistakes, only the ones about crushing internal party dissent. Unlike Lord B, Mr Millipede wants to make sure that he doesn't just win the leadership, but also that he is seen to OBLITERATE all possible sources of opposition.

The main PURPOSE of this leadership election… yes, I know you think it's to pick the poor sap who will be getting slapped around by Mr Balloon at the despatch box for the next five years, but it's not really, but like ALL Hard Labour Elections it's about settling some scores internally and who gives a fluff about the outside world… so the main PURPOSE of this leadership election is to stage the "fight that never was" between Lord Blairimort (in the Millipede Corner) and Mr Frown (as represented on Earth by Mr Bully Balls).

Mr Balls, formerly Secretary of State for Signing off on Millions and Millions of Pounds worth of School Building Programmes that could Never have been Paid For just so that he could Point the Finger when the Coalition Cancel Them, is a total political animal. Close friends speak of him as a kind and generous young man… who then met Mr Frown in the nineteen-nineties and turned to the DARK SIDE. Or at least they WOULD speak of him thus if he HAD any close friends. And if anyone could find their bodies. He was badly damaged by the close squeak of nearly losing his safe seat in the election, but he still remains a strong candidate because of his Sith Powers Union backing. Actually that IS like Sith Powers.

What Mr Millipede knows is that the great secret of Mr Frown's powers in the Labour Government was that Lord Blairimort made a DEAL with him rather than standing against him and proving who had the real support of the Party. Which is why he sees this leadership election as the one and only chance for the Blairite and Brownite factions finally to bury the hatchet. Preferably right between Mr Bully Balls' SHOULDERBLADES EYES.

But it is ALSO why he went to so much trouble to make sure Ms Diane Abbott-and-Portillo was bumped over the starting line by people who are never going to vote for her. Namely himself. Never mind all this touchy-feely now Hard Labour can tell itself that it's the real Party of Diversity™ guff. THAT'S just a BONUS. His real aim is to make sure that the left of the Party have a candidate in the fight so that when he wins they can't sit on the backbenches griping about a stitch-up. I mean they WILL gripe about it, but he can slap them down, and the membership will have to buy it.

Unless, of course, she wins. Which would be hilarious. And it's not actually impossible. As a TV personality and loud-mouthed opponent of some of the NASTIER aspects of Labour policy, not to mention the only one not TAINTED as a former Government minister, she could attract a lot of support from the ordinary members who feel betrayed by thirteen years of THATCHERITE Government that they're pretty sure they never voted for. But they only count for a third of the vote. Obviously she'll never win the MPs. So it does depend on how many of the unions ballot their members.

On the down side, she doesn't really stand FOR anything. Not that that ever did Mr Balloon any harm! Her voting record is a bit of a mixed bag: for and against climate change laws, for and against I.D.iot cards, for and against transparency in Parliament, for and against powers for ministers to intervene in inquests… she seems to have voted strongly against the Iraq war, but then against an INQUIRY into the war too. It makes her look like a bit of a POPULIST, even an OPPORTUNIST. Still, supporting an elected House of Lords Club, gay rights and Europe and opposition to terrorist laws, student fees and anti-asylum seeker legislation all make her much more appealing to a Liberal voter than the boys with their draconian Government records.


I am in two minds as to whether all the gerrymandering will HELP or HINDER Mr Andy Crash-and-Burnham. On the one fluffy foot, the presence of Ms Diane seriously undermines his Unique Selling Point of being ever-so-slightly not-exactly-the-same-as the other three posh white boys; on the other fluffy foot, perhaps it gives him the chance to "come thought the middle" by playing the "I'm different but I'm not THAT different" card.

Which just leaves us with the "compromise candidate": Mr Ed Millipede, product of a TRANSPORTER ACCIDENT between Mr Ed Bully Balls and Mr Dave Millipede. Because his Cabinet experience extended only to being Secretary of State for Fluffity Bunnykins people are saying that he has the EXPERIENCE to lead without any of the getting-your-hands-dirty RESPONSIBILITY that goes with the sort of jobs like the one his brother had.

Ironically, I think he would actually be the WORST leader for Hard Labour, for precisely the reason that he would always be seeking to establish his credentials, to define himself as something OTHER than "the one who's neither Ed nor Millipede".

You can see it happening already with his nakedly "I'm to the left of big brother" promise to keep the 50% tax rate forever. He's trying to appeal to a constituency within the Hard Labour, regardless of the longer-term consequences – in a way it's like Mr Balloon courting the RIGHT of the Conservatories with his silly promise to pull out of the SENSIBLE Centre-Right Group in Europe… and look how THAT promise came back to bite him on the bum! Remember how Lord Blairimort and Mr Frown RULED OUT income tax rises – not because they expected people on higher incomes to vote for them, but because they wanted the (many more) people who ASPIRED to higher incomes to vote for them.

Ultimately, Hard Labour's problem is that all the leading candidates are basically the SAME: a bunch of Mini-Me's of either Lord Blairimort or Mr Frown or both, all equally responsible for the ghastly state that their Party left the economy and the country in.

Ms Abbott-and-Portillo may be a vacuous, opinionated, populist, tribalist, self-publicist and narcissist… but at least she's proved to be an EVIL vacuous, opinionated, populist, tribalist, self-publicist and narcissist.

And if the Coalition's Cuts make Liberals and Tories as popular as a Greek Prime Minister promising to sell the rest of the Elgin Marbles to the British Museum, she might even get to be Prime Monster!

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Day 3445: Inlaws and Outlaws

Monday:


There's an excellent opinion-piece by Mr Ed Fordham, on Liberal Democrat Voice, about the Chief of Stonewall and the case of Mr David Laws.

Back in 1997, when former Prime Monster Lord Blairimort received a million pounds from Mr Bernie Ecclestone – in return using his influence to get Formula One racing exempted from the ban on advertising tobacco in sport – he got away it, appearing on television with the excuse:

"I'm a pretty straight kind of a guy"

Clearly, that's not an excuse that Mr David was going to be allowed to use.

Okay, that's a terrible, terrible gag.

But there's also a big, big point there: a one million quid bribe that clearly was for the benefit of Hard Labour with obvious corrupt benefit to the man giving the bung – no repercussions; forty thousand quid questionable claim for an expense that all other MPs are allowed to claim – job gone and career over.

Oh yes, times have changed.


People responding to the David Laws case seem to fall into two quite distinct categories:

Category A: he "fiddled" his expenses and "ripped off" the taxpayer to the tune of forty thousand quid – burn the witch!

Category B: he was entitled to claim for a second home but (deliberately) misdeclared the allowance claim (which was both wrong and stupid) because he wanted to conceal his private life – come back David, all is forgiven!

Let me be quite clear: I am firmly and PROUDLY in Category B.

Yes, I'm biased: this is a great big WIN for the forces of EVIL who want to damage the coalition, regardless of how good or bad it is for the country, because they are scared of the new politics and what it might mean for their vested interests, and I hate that.

But I'm really getting quite BORED not to mention CROSS with people in Category A who think that "he fiddled forty thousand quid" trumps all arguments. Your moral fervour to crucify a man who told a foolish lie puts you on the side of seriously bad people who want to totally scr– bad-word you over, and that's just INCREDIBLY STUPID!


To you people in Category A, I have to ask: do you think that an MP should have to foot the bill for two homes at once, one in London and one in their constituency? If YOUR job required that you work away from home for long periods, would you mind if they expected you to buy another house?

You might think that MPs should not get an allowance AT ALL for having to run two homes. But that would be saying that only RICH people who can afford to be MPs can be elected; that would DISENFRANCHISE a whole lot of the population. It would not be good for democracy and it would not be fair. Ah ha! people then say, but Mr David Laws IS rich already, he COULD afford to be an MP – that's not the point; the point is that the allowance is to make a LEVEL PLAYING FIELD so that people who are rich OR poor can stand for Parliament equally easily.

So, if you don't accept that, you're not really a democrat and our conversation has to be over.

Perhaps you think that POOR people should get the allowances but not rich people, that there should be some sort of Parliamentary MEANS TESTING. Which would be novel. And certainly not something I've ever heard anyone saying BEFORE this case came up. Though of course you woldn't be trying to fit an argument to the case after you've already made your mind up. And for that matter, where are the protests that Mr Balloon and Mr Oboe get these allowances? Or Hard Labour's Shaun Woodwood or Ms Barbara Folly? They're all millionaires, too. And for that matter, why stop at allowances: why not say MPs who are already wealthy shouldn't get PAID any more.

I think it's fairly IMPORTANT that equal pay for equal work is the proper way to treat people, no matter what they are doing, and that creating different classes of MP depending on your level of contempt and envy is probably a quite BAD IDEA.

So if you DO accept that it is fair enough for MPs to get an allowance for another home, and for all MPs to get the same treatment of their allowance, then you really have to say what your problem IS.

Why might it be WRONG to pay your rent to your PARTNER? Well, I can answer that one: you might be using the payment of rent to disguise the fact that there isn't really a cost at all. If your partner OWNS the property outright, you could be fixing it up for them to make some money for nothing by pretending to rent.

But that ISN'T what was happening here: there was a GENUINE cost of mortgage and bills to pay and Mr David was contributing his SHARE. In fact, as has been pointed out a LOT, if he'd only owned up to being one of a COUPLE Mr David could have claimed for the WHOLE LOT and got a lot MORE money, quite legitimately.

So how can it be a "rip off" to pay forty thousand pounds (over a number of years, remember) for a GENUINE cost that we agree that it's fair enough the taxpayer should pay for?

Essentially, it MUST have been legitimate to make the claim, but the WAY that he made it was wrong.

Now, I know that Ms Diane Abbott-and-Portillo is one among several who have said: "well if a benefit claimant made a false claim – even if they really deserved the money – then THEY'D have to pay it back and might end up in PRISON".

To which I have to say: well that's because the BENEFIT SYSTEM is really, really BAD-WORD-Y. And that is just plain WRONG too.

People should get what they are OWED, not "as little as we can get away with paying them because they filled in box 137b on form Q wrong"!

And if people are going to start flinging accusations of HYPOCRISY about, "one rule for MPs and one rule for benefit claimants", can I just say that as a member of the Party that has been IN GOVERNMENT for the last thirteen years, Ms Abbott-and-Portillo bears rather more responsibility for the benefit system being really, really BAD-WORD-Y than Mr David does!


So, if you're going to put yourself in Category A then either you must think that it would be better for the system to exclude the less well off from standing; or you think that rich people should get different treatment based on envy; or you think that using technicalities to make a profit is legitimate if it's the taxpayer on the receiving end.

Because the only OTHER possibility is that you think it's something to do with SEXUALITY.


Personally, I think it's pretty darn OBVIOUS that it's something to do with sexuality, that this was a case of QUEER-BASHING by a National Newspaper.

And frankly I'm pretty OUTRAGED that some people are now saying that mentioning Mr David's sexuality at all is some kind of EXCUSE.

Without sexuality, this just isn't a story. If Mr David had fallen in love with a women, he'd have declared it with no problems and no one would have batted an eyelid.

Maybe if he hadn't been brought up in a strongly Catholic family; if he hadn't started out life in the screamingly homophobic Eighties (when Mr Michael Cashman got regular bricks though his window for being "the gay" on EastEnders); if he hadn't worked in the ultra-macho environment of the City; if that hadn't been the decade when the viciously hateful Murdock-led press were out to "out" any vicar or teacher or MP they could… maybe, MAYBE then he wouldn't have been so wound up by this as to have gotten himself into this situation in the first place.

But you know what: it would STILL have been a GROSS INTRUSION into an intensely PERSONAL and PRIVATE matter to blab Mr David's sexuality all over the front pages.

NOBODY should be FORCED to stand up and talk about their SEX LIVES. I hate to have to mention it, but that's what the NAZIS did with those PINK TRIANGLES.

If you don't want to "come out" then you shouldn't have to. It's a simple case of FREEDOM FROM CONFORMITY. What you tell and who you tell is YOUR CHOICE and NOBODY ELSE'S.

That is why someone like Mr Bean Bradshaw is so VERY, VERY WRONG in what he tweeted on twitter:

clegg statement re laws nonsense. why should anyone in Britain today feel ashamed to acknowledge they're gay

Why should anyone HAVE to "acknowledge they're gay"? Typical New Labour assumption that the State has a "right" to know anything it wants and that people have a "duty" to be fine with that because OBVIOUSLY new Labour have made all prejudice and hate crimes vanish. Sigh.

We have a HUMAN RIGHT TO PRIVACY, don't we; why can't that actually mean that our privacy is kept PRIVATE?


But what is much, much worse is when someone like Mr Ben Summerschool, chief executive of gay rights* organisation Stonewall, plays along with the QUEER BASHERS.

(*terms and conditions apply, may not include bi-, trans-, poly- or any other rights)

Just a day after Mr David's outing, in a piece for the Independent on Sunday, Mr Summerschool wrote:

Mr Laws seems to have been using his sexual orientation as a bit of a smokescreen to explain away a controversial expenses claim

But that begs the question why was the claim "controversial"? Oh yes, because he didn't declare that the rent was paid to his partner. And why didn't he declare who his partner was? Oh yes, it was to do with sexual orientation.

In other words, what Mr Summerschool writes is: Mr Laws seems to have been using his sexual orientation as a bit of a smokescreen to explain away an expenses claim to do with his sexual orientation.

When you put it like that, when you can see that this makes NO SENSE in logic or language, you realise that it can only be POLITICALLY-MOTIVATED ATTACK.

But this is the clincher:

If he had made no claim, then none of this would be in the public domain now

In other words, a gay man who does not want to come out has to accept worse treatment than other people doing the same work. That is discrimination, pure and simple.

And that is why Mr Ben Summerschool is NOT FIT to be chief executive of Stonewall, an organisation that is SUPPOSED to campaign for the PROTECTION of gay daddies and NOT the discriminatory treatment of them.

Daddy Richard was – we have to admit – in a state of some FURY already about this whole business, but when he read Mr Summerschool's diatribe in the Sunday Independent he totally blew an upper head gasket, terminating his monthly donation to Stonewall with, as they say, extreme prejudice, and dashing off the following e-mail to the organisation:

Dear Sirs,

Your Chief Executive, Mr Ben Summerskill writes about the Outing of Liberal Democrat minister, Mr David Laws in today's Independent.

Mr Summerskill asserts that David Laws' resignation was about money and not about the hounding of a gay man from office.

Mr Laws could clearly have claimed the same money (in fact possibly even more money) if he had been a married heterosexual man or if his landlord had been a woman, so this is clearly not about the money. But because the other person was a man Mr Laws would have been required to be treated differently. If you do not see that that is about unequal treatment, then I no longer know what your organisation is for.

Mr Summerskill also makes a number of snide remarks and innuendoes about Mr Laws and the Liberal Democrats in general that one would not expect outside the writing of some of the so-called right-wing commentators. If that is his view, then I do not see how Mr Summerskill can be considered to be a campaigner for equal treatment for gay and lesbian men and women, and frankly I find that he is, and therefore you are, supporting a homophobic attack by the Telegraph. I will have nothing further to do with any organisation that employs him.

I am therefore cancelling my direct debit to Stonewall immediately.

Yours in extreme anger with you and your whole team

Richard Flowers.

We have not yet received any reply.

But that was all a bit OVER THE TOP, so let me finish by once again endorsing the rather more TEMPERATE response from the MUCH CALMER Mr Ed.

An excellent piece, well written, sir!



Declaration of Interest: Daddy Alex knows Mr David slightly; Daddy Richard knows Mr Jamie slightly. No of us knew there was anything between them. And you know what, it was none of our business then and it's none of our business now.
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Day 3443: DOCTOR WHO: Vincent and the Doctor

Saturday:


Normally, when you put the words AWESOME and DOCTOR and VINCENT together, a Liberal Democrat will jump to a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT conclusion than that you're talking about the week's Dr Woo.

Last week Daddy Richard was a bit DOWN on visiting HISTORY; does he still think that?

Well, that'll teach me to be cynical about the "celebrity historical" as an overused sub-genre of Doctor Who. This was a wonderful, emotional exploration of a very creative yet very troubled life, not afraid to show us glimpses of that life's dark side while keeping it appropriate to a Saturday teatime audience.

You've got to give Moffat credit for bringing talent to the table, because surprisingly it's the "celebrity guest" authors – Nye and now Curtis – who've turned in the better stories this year, more interesting, thoughtful, original, yet making good use of the format; while the more "traditional" Who-writers – Gatiss and Chibnall – who, while we can't hold them entirely responsible for poor choices by the design department, have given us the stories that, er, underperformed. I can't say that bodes well for next week's episode by TV's Gareth Roberts.

…not sure where Toby Whitehouse fits in: being famous as creator of "Being Human" could make him a "celeb" author, but as writer of season two's "School Reunion" he could be seen as "trad", too. "Vampires of Venice" was pretty good, though…

Two possibly-not-contradictory possible reasons for this come to mind: first, Moffat may have just left the "trad" writers to get on with it, after all, that's how he worked for Russell, while he focussed his efforts on supporting and tweaking-to-fit-the-format the work of the writers less familiar with Doctor Who's current incarnation; second, there the case for a "fresh eye" from writers only peripherally aware of Doctor Who's tropes and clichés coming up with something a bit more outside the (blue) box. A third possibility is that they bring a dose of the "emotional intelligence" that was key to the Russell Davies era to add to Moffat's genius for plots and ideas.

Interestingly, possibly coincidentally, Nye and Curtis's episodes are the only stories to have no "cracks in time" at all so far, although both do move along the emotional story arc, with "Amy's Choice" resolving Amy's feelings towards Rory and now "Vincent and the Doctor" having, as it happens, Vincent and the Doctor able to see the gap where Amy's emotional trauma ought to be.

As an aside, Jonathan Blum is quite right when he points out that although this is very much what the Russell Davies model would expect of new Who (or more crudely what Lawrence Miles would call Moffatt doing his "Fire in the Girly Place" writing), this is quite wrong from a story point of view. It's very touching that the Doctor has been consoling Amy for Rory's death – and weirding her out because it's for something she cannot remember – with trips to Arcadia (presumably pre-Dalek Time War fall), and today the Museé D'Orsay, but in terms of the series story arc, why is he not now urgently investigating the cracks in time that look like they will destroy his TARDIS? Or, alternatively, explicitly avoiding those cracks in time because they will destroy his TARDIS.

Previously in this arc, we've seen the Doctor first believe he's dealt with the crack in Amy's bedroom wall, then return for Amy possibly because he suspects that all is not quite right with her (if his significant glance at the TARDIS scanner at the end of "The Eleventh Hour" is to mean anything); then we see – but importantly, he does not – that there are cracks following his and Amy's progress to Starship UK and the Cabinet War Rooms; and then the Doctor encounters the crack aboard the Starship Byzantium and again thinks that he's dealt with it by dropping an army of angels into it. The crack that he hears about in "The Vampires of Venice" is past tense; his response to the silence at the end is puzzled, not alarmed; and, as I've said, there doesn't appear to be one in "Amy's Choice". So up to that point it's not illegitimate for him to not to be thinking about these as an urgent or pressing threat. He may even feel that he is trying to deal with it by "sorting Amy out".

However, in the aftermath of "The Hungry Earth" that's gone impressively horribly wrong; it is, to coin a well-turned phrase, really extremely very not good. It's possible that he's even caused the cracks in time by making Amy's wedding day not only the most crucial day of her life but also one that isn't supposed to happen at all: the kind of universe-shattering paradox that might happen if she only ran away with the Doctor because it was the eve of her wedding, that the things that the Doctor has put right because she was with him, only happened at all because of something he's now prevented from happening – explaining how the crack appear to be following them: it's trying to swallow up the paradoxical events of Amy's post Wedding-that-never-was timeline.

Storywise, Moffat-wise, he ought to be doing something about this.

However, in the context of this story, the arc is only used as an "in" on the slightly other-worldliness of Vincent Van Gogh – something that he shares with the Doctor, since they both sort of see Rory's place in the timeline – and anything more would have been intrusive and unnecessary.

And, frankly, I'd rather have this story than any number of episodes about the cracks.

Even before we get to the story, it's a beautiful episode to look at. Full marks for getting the most out of the location work this year, with Croatia brilliantly doubling for first Venice in, unsurprisingly, "The Vampires of Venice" and now doing a passable impression of France for a visit to Van Gogh. Or at any rate not-Wales, anyway, at least until the scenes outside the Church at "Auvers" which look crushingly Welsh chapel again. The ingenuity of the producers is to use different aspects of the same location several episodes apart, so you don't notice it. Unlike – Alex points out - using Lanzarote to double for alien planet Sarn are, er, Lanzarote during the same story, which is less likely to get away with it, as you can discover for yourself if you get the DVD due out next week.

Jonny Campbell, directing, is here even better than in the Vampire story: fluid and funny in the "chase with mirror" sequence and again in the fight in Vincent's back yard; and yet moodily thoughtful when dwelling on the sunflowers as a motif for a troubled life and death; and of course – and let's not shirk the kudos for the art department too – beautifully recreating scenes from Van Gogh's art "as life", in the café, the bedroom (who cares if that's anachronistic) and the sublime "Starry Night" sequence which really is what the episode is about.

It's tremendously good acting too from a very small cast (with a few supporting players). Bill Nighy almost comes as a buy-one-get-one-free with Richard Curtis these days, but here he gives a beautiful understated performance playing, essentially, "John Cleese in the Art Gallery", but with warmth and emotion in a role that could easily have been arch and comedic. The banter about bow-ties could have been played so much for laughs but instead he comes across as genuinely touched, so it's all the more forceful and credible when he eulogises Van Gogh at the climax.

Tony Curran as the man himself, and a startling visual double, shows us a person who – although also leavened by light humour: "sorry about the beard" – can be rude, uncontrolled, off-putting, even frightening and distressing, and yet at all times retains our sympathy for the so-obvious pain that his Van Gogh's genius has to suffer, and will continue to suffer.

So, what we get from these wonderful people is a story about a man and something terrible that happens to him, and a story about a monster and something terrible that happens to it, and how those two stories briefly intersect.

It's easy to say how clever it is to make this a story about a man who sees things differently from other people, sees more than other people and link that to a monster that is invisible to other people. And then to reveal that the monster itself is blind. (The member of the tribe left to die because blinded being strangely reminiscent of Leela and the ways of the Sevateem.)

And it is clever, certainly cleverer than having Shakespeare encounter witches who are really aliens whose power comes from language, and who he defeats with clever wordplay (to a certain value of "clever"). Or for that matter, running into "ghosts" with arch-spiritualist-debunker Charles Dickens. (And never mind how archly metatextual we got by having a story with Agatha Christie that was so like an Agatha Christie story that the characters actually started commenting on how like an Agatha Christie story it was…)

It's also clever that it ties in with a developing theme of eyes and sight throughout this series: perception filters that you only see from the corner of your eye; Atraxi who are all eye; Vampires that fool the eye; the importance of eyes – open, shut and not-looking-them-in-the – to the Weeping Angel story; turning a "blind eye" to what's going on in "The Beast Below"; and so on.

(Alex wonders if the Silurian's missing third eye is a symbol that Mr Chibnell missed that memo.)

But what's really clever here is that Van Gogh doesn't see the monster as an avatar of himself or his condition – this isn't "depression made external": he sees it as like the villagers, blind and lashing out. And yet Vincent retains his compassion for the monster and, by extension, the villagers who abuse him. He has a gift of sight that he wants to share, indeed does share with Amy and the Doctor and the Doctor admits it is more wonderful than anything he's seen.

In that sense the beast, the Krafayis, is Vincent's shadow, his antithesis, a dark reflection – re-emphasised by it appearing only in reflection, its features framed in the Doctor's mirror-gizmo "reflecting" the framing of Van Gogh in the self-portraits of that we see repeatedly through the story.

Obviously it's an enormous coincidence that a monster that can only be seen by someone like Vincent Van Gogh happens to be in the exact time and place to be seen by Vincent Van Gogh – and how long is this berserk creature supposed to have been in France, anyway? And what about all the other berserk beasties that left it behind, when exactly were they supposed to have been here?

But that's really not the point, and you should realise that from the way the Krafayis is offed ten minutes before the show is over.

This story is about the importance of different perspectives: we think one thing about the Krafayis when the Doctor tells us it's evil; we think another when we learn that it is crippled, alone, abandoned.

Vincent shows the Doctor a different way of looking at the stars, literally a different perspective lying back on the ground (which came first, this episode or the season trailer seen in cinemas?); it's commented on comically as the Doctor gains a new perspective of time, living it moment by moment waiting while Vincent paints the church and the Doctor cannot shut up with the spoilers. I particularly enjoyed the moment of him by the fireplace, listening to Van Gogh's synaesthetic rant about listening to the colours, swinging his head about as though trying to do just that, simultaneously baffled by the artists and trying to see from his perspective.

(And I just have to say isn't Matt Smith also rather wonderful. Funny and unafraid of looking daft and yet at times achingly alien. Just brilliant as the Doctor.)

In return, the Doctor shows Vincent another perspective by taking him into the future, showing him the long view of history of the Time Lord. And Amy gains new perspective when she realises that one good day isn't enough to save him.

Is it sentimental, to bring Vincent Van Gogh to the present day to show him a future that loves him? "Sentimental" is a cheap kick at Richard Curtis, after "Four Weddings…" and "Love, Actually", but is it fair? We've known since Dickens that the Doctor is not above bending the laws of time, or dropping a few "spoilers", to let the people he admires know that they are admired, so it's not out of keeping with the series. Is it tritely playing with our emotions? No, I think that the emotional response is earned.

And the episode is as nothing if the Doctor does not repay Vincent with the one kindness that he can give, even knowing that it won't change his fate – even knowing that perhaps it might (and I've seen a cogent argument that seeing the future, knowing he'll never be appreciated until after he's dead may have contributed to Van Gogh's suicide rather than prevent it).

The Doctor's point is about seeing life not as win/lose but as a pile of good things and a pile of bad things, and he's trying to add to the pile of good things. Think about that and remember where he's been taking Amy recently.

Mind you, as the indie rock of Athlete comes crashing in on the soundtrack over the top of the montage of images, you do have to wonder whether Richard Curtis didn't brief himself on new Doctor Who by watching an episode of Doctor Who Confidential by mistake.

Most of all, this episode is a different perspective on what it is to be "mad", to be "mental", to be "depressed", to be a bit different. And we should treasure it for that.


Next Time… If you can't get enough of the World Cup, then I'm sure the Doctor playing footy with Smiffy out of Gavin and Stacy is just what you need to fill a gap. If you don't want to know the scores, look away now. Safety deposit and a month's rent up front, please, for "The Lodger".

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Day 3438: A Totally Unwarranted Comparison

Monday:


How can ANYONE think of comparing the State of Israel to the People's Democratic Republic of North Korea?!

I mean, Israel would have to have:

• nuclear weapons;
• sealed borders;
• denials about people starving in their country;
• unresolved war issues with their neighbours;
• defied UN resolutions;
• an attitude that they can do what they like 'cos they've got a Superpower ally;
• and to go around attacking ships from other countries…

…oh.

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Day 3435: DOCTOR WHO: Cold Turkey

Saturday:


Saturday was a bit of a WRECK, what with one thing and another, but at least we had Dr Woo to cheer us up, eh?

Well, except it was a bit SAD. And a bit SLOW. Though with a sort of PONDEROUS GRACE.

A bit like a HIPPOPOTAMUS ballet-dancing the SWAN LAKE in SLOW MOTION!

And if it was STUPID, at least Mr Chibbers was finding entirely NEW and ORIGINAL ways to be stupid!

A story using the Reptile People, and using so much of the Pertwee back-catalogue that goes with them, really ought to be cleverer than this.

The Doctor should not have been kind to Ambrose at the end. "It was murder" was his line to the Brigadier; it should have been his line to Ambrose too, and not to realise that misses the point of "…and the Silurians" by so far as to be truly shocking. Notice, "evil" murdering Silurian Restac ends up poisoned because she won't heed the warnings; equally murdering Ambrose gets let off with a stern lecture to "teach your boy to be better", a disparity of treatment by the writer that is probably racist or something.

If the Daleks are Doctor Who's metaphor for the Nazis – and stories with them are about the undiluted evil of treating the unlike as the enemy – then the Silurians and their stories are the flip-side of that: racism remains the point, but they are representative of a conflict where each side ends up acting like the Daleks by failing to recognise the "humanity" of the other.

That requires a parity of treatment by the writer so that the viewer can see this.

In "…and the Silurians", diplomatic Okdel, warlike Morka and scientist T'ko are an imperfect mirror of the Doctor, the Brigadier and Dr Lawrence (imperfect only in the sense that characteristics do not match one for one: Lawrence not the Brigadier is the overt xenophobe on the human side, say; and that there are more human characters). In "The Sea Devils", even though the Reptile People have rather less characterisation, it is still clear that there is a kind of equivalence between the chief Sea Devil and Captain Hart: they are both warrior leaders; they are both thoughtful of the cost of war, and so on. Even in "Warriors of the Deep", clearly the least of the classic series trilogy, you can spot reflections between the "noble leaders" Commander Vorshak and Silurian Icthar and their more belligerent subordinates.

"The Hungry Earth"/"Cold Blood" ends up crushed in the mismatch between the entire Silurian civilisation and one human family. The sense of scale in "Cold Blood" was at least widened – cities full of Reptile People, the fate of the world, a thousand years of history (although, was that opening monologue anything more a crushingly banal rip-off of Timothy Dalton's narration in "The End of Time"? )– but it was at the expense of drawing in sundry other stupidities.

Most egregious is the point where Nasreen protests: "we can't negotiate on behalf of humanity," and the Doctor dismisses this with a casual, "sure you can." No, Doctor, they really, really can't, any more than I could commission the next series of Doctor Who on behalf of the BBC just because I'm a viewer.

If they hadn't failed to establish the "big" project in "The Hungry Earth", Nasreen could have had the government connections to maybe make it credible that she could at least open talks.

What we should have here is a situation where the Silurians don't even believe that humans are sentient; what the Doctor should be doing is having Amy and Nasreen change their minds through talking to them. Convince lead Silurian Eldane (played with weariness by Stephen Moore, best known as Marvin the Paranoid Android) and then he can end the threat of war.

It could have been genuinely interesting if Eldane had not believed humans to be intelligent until he actually met some; contrasting with the warrior cast Alaya and Restac who know perfectly well that humans are intelligent, but are ignoring it because they are so clearly into racial supremacy in a big way.

As a side-order of stupidity, we might point out that all the women are murderous bitches. Well, okay, Amy is just a Rio-obsessed bitch, and Nasreen is lovely, but apart from that…

We might hazard a guess that female actors were hired to play the warrior Silurians and male actors to play the scientists in order to establish some kind of species dimorphism – if only someone had said something along those lines. As it is, it doesn't half seem like the scary scaly ladies need the level-headed lizard gentlemen to set them straight about a few things. Sigh.

Nor was the story sufficiently clever to be drawing some kind of nurturing/vengeful mother parallel between Alaya and Ambrose.

Do I have to mention again that the Reptile People's city really is supposed to have implausibly survived down there for tens of millions of years. It does at least get implied that generations of Reptile People have been staying awake doing all the dusting. But that's stupid too. Even if you avoid mentioning that that's a fairly impressive span to live though without evolving into anything new, has no one thought to ask them why they didn't just wake up the rest of their species as soon as it became clear that the moon was not going to draw off the atmosphere or smash the planet or whatever else they feared? I mean it does just slightly negate the stories whole premise.

Along the lines of Reptile People being awake when they shouldn't, there seem to have been some kind of story points with Silurian Scientist Malohkeh that got dropped. The business about never harming the children, and that he's been at this for three-hundred years – probably tying in with the blue grass fairy rings last episode – and the implication that he's been up to something all fizzle out and go nowhere.

Also, at what point did the guy who conducts vivisection on live – and conscious – victims become the "nice" Silurian? Saying he doesn't harm children is surely begging a big big question, one which the stitching up Mo's tummy seems to answer. I'm reminded of what the Doctor said to Margaret Siltheen: "just because you let a few go, doesn't mean you aren't a monster".

On the flip side, Malohkeh then gets murdered by Restac, a development which looks sure to have repercussions for her… Only they never happen either. And no one in the Doctor's party seems to notice that Malohkeh seems to have gone missing either, even when they're planning on turning on the poison gas. Was there a whole scene excised where they found the body? It would certainly have helped develop Eldane's sudden desire to help them in any way that he can.

Just as unresolved was whatever was supposed to be going on with the all-new Silurian sting, green and poisonous and spreading over Tony Mack's neck and chest. One minute he's dying; next he's not but it's caused a mutation; finally, never mind all that, we'll just all go into hibernation together because the episode is over in five minutes.

Frustratingly, Tony's tale has got all the plot devices of a story, but none of the actual plot.

Did Alaya's sting not kill him because humans have evolved? Or because the venom interacted with paracetamol in an unexpected way? Or because of something Malohkeh might have been doing – was Tony, perhaps, one of those kidnapped by the Silurian as children and "altered" already?

It almost looks as though someone, somewhere along the line thought about doing a story where humans were being hybridised with Silurians (with possible implications for Alaya and Restac's racial purity) and then abandoned it.


The Doctor himself is being particularly dense today. Admittedly he's always had a serious blind spot about the Earth Reptiles – while, funnily enough he's always seeing the worst in those Martian reptiles, the Ice Warriors – but he's talked to Alaya. She's a full on name-rank-serial number soldier. Not to mention an fanatic. Any idiot should be able to see she's no more use as a hostage than a paratrooper dropped behind enemy lines as a spy or a terrorist. And although terrorists have been known to take hostages in order to secure the release of one of their own, it must be a bit unusual to respond to hostage-taking by seizing one of the terrorists. She's not an innocent here; she's a criminal. Once again there is no equivalence between taking her prisoner and the kidnap of Mo, Amy or Elliot.

And anyway, he knows that she wants to provoke a war by getting herself killed. Leaving her exactly where she wants to be, particularly when you've seen how Ambrose's first instinct is to reach for weapons, is surely just asking for trouble. What he ought to be doing is dragging her back to the Reptile People city and, in front of any council of elders he can find, demanding an explanation for exactly why she's trying to do that.

Also, it's a bit stupid, and not actually accurate, when he says that the Silurians who he encountered before were "attacked by the humans". Under the circumstances – trying to prevent a Silurian invasion of the surface – wouldn't the truth have been a better idea? Those Silurians chose to attack the humans, underestimated their resourcefulness and got wiped out by them in retaliation.

Isn't it a key point that, while the Reptile People are immensely technologically advanced – though not so much further than they think – humanity has numbers on its side. Any war would do vast damage to both.

When trying to persuade the Reptile People of this, isn't "your cousins all got killed because they wouldn't just listen to what I'm trying to tell you" a cogent argument?


On the other hand, you can maybe forgive the Doctor being stupid about Alaya's deviously dippy plot, when it appears to be so obviously unnecessary. Alaya's own sister, Restac, is in charge of the whole Reptile military down in the underground city, and not only seems to be as entirely gung-ho about invading the surface as her sister, but also appears to have the keys to the freezing facility and can unlock her army any time she likes.

So why is there any need for a pretence? Just fire up the Tyrannosaurs and make like you're America liberating Iraq.

For the story to make any sense on its own terms, either Restac should have been opposed to the subjugation of humans and therefore needed to be converted to the war party by Alaya's "murder"; or she is in on the scam but not in a position to revive her army without a "pretext" i.e. she needs something with which to convince Eldane.

And, incidentally, the head of the military is the baddy is such a grisly cliché. Racist megalomaniacs tend not to get promoted to senior military positions for the very good reason that they cause a lot of wars and get a lot of people killed, which is not actually that good a military strategy.

(Far be it for me to point out how, in recent years, the politicians George Bush, Dick Cheney and Tony Blair were much more hawkish that their military, or even ex-military like Colin Powell.)

Alex being fair though, points out that there wasn't another race for her to be racist about when she went into the deep freeze, so nobody could have spotted that she's a megalomaniac since she doesn't go round, say, just shooting other Reptile People… Oh.

I know I said it about the last episode but it really is just all too Minbari. Has Chris Chibnall watched any television other than early-Seventies "Doctor Who" and "Babylon 5"? (I dread to think that he's only following the career of Guy Siner, as that means he'll be taking his characterisation from "Allo Allo"!) And there's just not the time to develop the different Earth Reptile factions properly, leaving the plot points to be taken from just the crude sketch of the Minbari Warrior/Religious Caste divide.

And we return to the series story arc. And let's be quite clear that this year it really is a story arc, just like they do in "Buffy" or "Heroes" or, oh all right, "Babylon 5". It's not a Russell Davies "light touch" allusion to an ongoing story through a series of impenetrable hints; it is a proper story that depends on you seeing each of the bits to understand the developments. That's an important change, because it's something Russell did not feel would work in Doctor Who, or at least not in his Doctor Who.

So, we return to "Doctor Who and the Cracks in Time".

There appear to be two distinct kinds of crack – or the producer hasn't properly made his mind up (surely not): in "The Eleventh Hour" and "The Vampires of Venice" we have cracks that "something can come through" (be it Prisoner Zero or the eponymous Vampires aka Saturnynians); alternatively, in "Flesh and Stone" and again here in "Cold Blood" we see a crack that is spilling out "time energy", which does the "erasing you from history" thing. What's the difference? And what is the mysterious "silence" that we witnessed falling at the end of the Venice story?

In passing, how does the Doctor avoid getting his hand erased from history when he's pulling shrapnel out of the "wound"? We can probably put that one down to "Time Lord Powers(TM)"; he does appear to be a bit agonised by the process, so possibly he is sticking his hand into non-existence.

So he stuck in his thumb and pulled out a… plot coupon: a fragment of TARDIS casing.

Where Moffat borrows from Lawrence Miles, here Chibnall writing for Moffat borrows from "Unnatural History" by Kate Orman and John Blum – which sees the TARDIS stuffed into a crack in time to stop the Universe shattering – and "The Shadows of Avalon" (again) by Paul Cornell – where the old girl explodes on colliding with a similar anomaly.

Jennie is quite rightly shocked by the Internet's casual disregard for this: it ought to be a truly shocking development, the death of the "most faithful companion" that we were promised in "Journey's End". Except of course, it's because of "Journey's End" – and all the other "prophesies" that came to nothing – that we just don't believe that any more. They've cried "Bad Wolf" too often!

So, in fairness, of the two it is Rory who is far more likely to remain dead. The series has killed off companions before, but destroying the TARDIS is pretty much the end of the show. Even if they hadn't just spent a fortune on a shiny new (and very beautiful) TARDIS set. The last time that the TARDIS was destroyed utterly and forever (in the aforementioned "Shadows of Avalon") she was back six books later. There's really just no keeping a good Type 40 down.

Killing off Rory – unless he's subsequently resurrected too, and I'm putting nothing past them at this point – will certainly add a certain amount of "memorability" to this story, generating an (undeserved?) amount of sentiment at the end.

But the question of "what does erased from time mean?" raises its ugly head again. It is difficult to work out how differently this adventure would have played out without Rory, thanks to his presence turning out to be pretty ineffective at each juncture. For example, I realise that she's a reptile and so it probably wouldn't work, but it's still odd that Rory the nurse doesn't even attempt CPR on the electrocuted Alaya.

What would have been more interesting was to do this as a three-parter: make Rory more integral to this week's plot and then re-run it next week without him to show the (presumably disastrous) differences.

It is inevitable, given that the format of the show presents the producers with a requirement to keep returning to a near-present Earth that is at least vaguely recognisable as our own, that a peace treaty between humans and Reptile People is going to fail. Doctor Who isn't a series like Stargate where the dedicated fanbase follow as the internal continuity drives the world gradually further away from the one we know; Doctor Who appeals to a broad audience as well as we, er, more enthusiastic followers, and you can't expect people tuning in at random to know why there are alien-looking people wandering about. There probably is a really interesting sci-fi series about Reptile People trying to integrate into human society – as it happens, it's Alien Nation – but it needs to be an ongoing series, not something you dip into once or twice a year. Besides, it would be bogglingly expensive to achieve. But that's no reason not to play with people's expectations first.

Consider this possible scenario: Restac has been shooting her mouth off about murderous apes; Ambrose, full of remorse, presents herself and confesses to killing Alaya; Restac gains the authorisation for defrosting her troops that she's been after… and then Rory arrives with a revived and shame-faced Alaya. War is averted, the Silurians sign a treaty with the humans and a new age is ushered in, flash-forward to the next thousand years of peace and cultural progress… Except then the vengeful Restac tries to kill the Doctor, gets Rory, and then Rory is erased from history, leading to a completely different version of the story next week.

So forgive me for saying that "Cold Blood" opened up a number of opportunities for being really interesting… and missed every single one.

Next Time…History: it's that place that famous people live. Not satisfied with one celebrity cameo this season? Let me paint you a picture, it's Vincent a-Go-Go in "Vincent and the Doctor".

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