Who Criticises Who

“You violated something more important than time: you bent the rules of life and death.”

Doctor Who S9 E4, ‘Before the Flood’ (2015)

Did you know that every single episode of Doctor Who produced since the 2005 relaunch is currently available on BBC iPlayer?¹ If not, well, look at that: now you have something better to do with the next little while than perusing my ramblings. You’re very welcome.

 

Look, ApocalypseCartoons at newgrounds.com has drawn an amazing picture of every single creature from the Moffat era! S/he has similar pictures for previous eras too; go and check them out: 

https://apocalypsecartoons.newgrounds.com/

I recently rewatched Toby Whithouse’s two-parter ‘Under the Lake’/‘Before the Flood’, easily the best story of Series Nine, and was struck afresh by the way it seems to be making some really, really scathing comments about the shortcomings of Moffat’s tenure as showrunner. Now, any of you who know me at all well will be familiar with my intense distaste for many of the trends exhibited by Doctor Who while Moffat has been at its helm. My sixth post on this blog, indeed, was devoted to criticism of three of those trends, which I characterised as Making Everything Ginormous, Writing the Female Companions Badly, and Messing Around with Death.² For this reason, I am completely willing to believe that my brain may simply be so well accustomed to criticising Moffat’s Who that it will see echoes of those same thought processes almost anywhere, and consequently that I may be reading all sorts of things into Toby Whithouse’s scripting that he didn’t intend to put there at all. On the other hand, he really does seem to be having a bit of a go. I’ll outline my case and you can see what you think.

‘Under the Lake’/‘Before the Flood’ is set in the twenty-second century, in an underwater base off the Scottish coast. Ever since the crew brought a mysterious (read: alien – this is Doctor Who after all) craft of some sort on board, the base has been haunted by what seem to be ghosts: insubstantial figures bearing the appearance of people known to be dead, which only come out when the base is in night mode, and make concerted efforts to add to their numbers when they do. Initially I gave a bit of a groan at the whole ghosts thing: I’d had enough of dead characters not really being dead after all, that being one of the key irritating hallmarks of the Moffat era. But the way the Doctor reacted to the ghosts – once he started entertaining the notion that they might genuinely be ghosts – caught me off guard in a most refreshing manner.

“So what have we got?” he begins to summarise. “Moran dies, and then those things appear. They can walk through walls, they only come out at night, and they’re sort of see-through.”

Clara interrupts: “Doctor, wait, you’re not saying –”

He interrupts her interruption: “They’re ghosts! Yeah, ghosts!”

“You said there was no such thing,” Clara reminds him. “You actually pooh-poohed the ghost theory.”

“Yes, well, well, there was no such thing as – as socks, or smartphones, and badgers, until there suddenly were,” rejoins the Doctor. “Besides, what else could they be? They’re not holograms, they’re not Flesh Avatars, they’re not Autons, they’re not digital copies bouncing around the Nethersphere. No, these people are literally, actually dead. Wow. This is – it’s amazing! I’ve never actually met a proper ghost.” A moment later he continues: “But don’t you see what this means? Death: it was the one thing that unified every single living creature in the universe, and now it’s gone. How can you just sit there? Don’t you want to go out there right now, wrestle them to the ground, and ask them questions until your throat falls out? What’s death like? Does it hurt? Do you still get hungry? Do you miss being alive? … OK, so they’ll try to kill you, blah, blah, blah. What does that matter? You come back. A bit murder-y, sure, but even so!”³

I remember feeling really quite disorientated by that little speech when I first saw the episode. Moffat’s Who had bombarded me with so many instances of people who were supposed to be dead turning out not to be properly dead after all that I’d become pretty much desensitised to it. Ghosts? Yeah, sure, whatever. Let’s all just shrug our shoulders and get on with the rest of the episode. What Whithouse does brings that whole assumption to a shuddering halt. Hang on a second, his scripting exclaims, this isn’t normal! Stop a moment; really look at what’s going on; think about it. Supposing you did find out that the dead came back to be among the living, wouldn’t the kind of awed fascination the Doctor describes – not an abstract curiosity, but a hunger to learn more, based on the understanding that this revelation matters intensely, possibly more than anything else does, for you personally – wouldn’t that be exactly the sort of reaction such a revelation would warrant? We’ve let ourselves get numb to this stuff under Moffat’s reign; Whithouse smacks us round the heads with the reminder that, in the normal run of things, there’s an absolute barrier between the living and the dead, which can only be crossed in one direction. Instead of using his not-actually-dead-after-all characters to make us forget that death is actually a big deal, he uses them to remind us of the fact.

Another thing he does here is make allusions to a selection of previous episodes. The Flesh Avatars featured in Series Six; the Autons showed up right back in the first episode of Series One; dead people hanging about in the Nethersphere constituted the background plotline of Series Eight, coming to the fore in the finale. One effect achieved by these allusions is a reinforcement of the events described as canonical. On one level, you might think I’d be none too happy with that, because that whole Nethersphere business was the absolute acme of Moffat messing around with death, and I disliked the whole premise of it very much indeed. Why legitimise that? However, the way that Whithouse uses all these allusions together actually sets itself squarely against Moffat’s way of doing things, because Moffat’s tendency has always been to dismiss previous canon. In his first series as head writer, he had the entire universe rebooted, making it explicitly clear that one effect of this was that certain events of former series never actually happened; Amy didn’t recognise the Daleks, for instance. He also overturned what could be considered the defining factor of relaunched Who as opposed to its predecessor, the destruction of Gallifrey and the Doctor’s uniqueness in the universe. (Granted, Russell T. Davies had made a couple of moves in that direction – most notably in ‘The End of Time’ – but to no lasting effect.) Whithouse, by contrast, puts all the events he describes on the same level: these things all happened, he indicates, not only the ones of them I like. It legitimises Moffat’s storylines, yes, but it delegitimises his approach to canonicity, which, of the two, presents the greater threat to the serial as a whole.

Furthermore, all the allusions made are held up as examples of not real living beyond death. The inhabitants of the Nethersphere, notably, are characterised as mere ‘digital copies’. Whithouse acknowledges the characters and possibilities Moffat has created as canon, but he doesn’t acknowledge them as having successfully torn down the barrier between the living and the dead.⁴

 

The ghosts no more demonstrate real life after death than this tasty-looking little guy.

Of course, at the time the Doctor made the above-quoted speech, he was mentioning these previous examples of flimsy, false life after death in contrast to the phenomenon he was currently encountering: at that stage he was entertaining, even advocating, the possibility that the ghosts on the underwater base really did achieve what none of the many and various undead entities of the Moffat era had. Later, however, that possibility is shot down. The Doctor figures out that what the ghosts are doing is beaming out a message – specifically, a set of coordinates – and that the reason they’re so murder-y is in order that there might be more ghosts doing the same, increasing the strength of the signal. “It could be [a distress call],” the Doctor says. “Or a warning. Might even be a call to arms. It could mean, come here, they’re vulnerable, help yourself. Wait a minute, though. Wait a minuet. Do you know what this means? It means that they’re not a natural phenomenon. It means that someone is deliberately getting people killed, hijacking their souls, and turning them into transmitters.” His disappointment and burgeoning anger here counterbalance his captivated excitement earlier. The ghosts are in the same category with the Flesh Avatars and the Autons and the digital copies bouncing around the Nethersphere: they fall short of real life after death. In the second instalment of the story, he refers to them as ‘electromagnetic projections’ a couple of times – a mundane and material term if there ever was one.

Thus Whithouse establishes firmly that the barrier between the living and the dead that we know from the real world is very much still in place in the Whoniverse too. Those Moffat storylines may have implied otherwise, but they fell short of achieving it. Death is still death.

That, perhaps, would be criticism enough of the way Moffat ran the show, but in actual fact, Whithouse goes even further. In ‘Before the Flood’, we are introduced to a character called Prentis, an undertaker from Tivoli, the most invaded planet in the galaxy. I would say that this in itself constitutes another nice bit of canon-acknowledging, since a different Tivolean showed up a couple of series ago in ‘The God Complex’, but Whithouse actually wrote that episode too, so maybe not. Still, if you want more acknowledgement of previous canon – and please do allow me to digress on this point for a moment – there’s more to be had: very early on in the episode, one of the crew of the underwater base, O’Donnell, mentions three of the Doctor’s previous companions: Rose, Martha, and Amy. She also remarks to him that, having travelled back to 1980, they are now “pre-Harold-Saxon, pre-the-Minister-of-War, pre-the-moon-exploding-and-a-big-bat-coming-out”. Once again, characters and events from the Davies and Moffat eras are treated as equally canonical – which perhaps, arguably, contradicts the resetting of the universe at the end of Series Five, but then again, it was never altogether clear which events that did and didn’t cover. I hated ‘Kill the Moon’, but the fact that its events are just part of the established past is somehow reassuring. If even the stupidest things in Who really happened, then everything really happened. The plotlines that occupy privileged positions in my heart and soul are safe from Moffat’s rampaging.

Anyway, to return to Prentis, back in 1980 our heroes encounter him alive, but he’s actually recognisable as the first of the ghosts they saw in the twenty-second century. Another crew member, Bennett, wants to save him from his impending doom, but the Doctor stops him: “You can’t cheat time. I just tried. You can’t just go back and cut off tragedy at the root, because you find yourself talking to someone you just saw dead on a slab – because then you really do see ghosts. We don’t tell him – understand? Not a word. We don’t have that right.”

We don’t have that right. Cheating time, messing around with death, is here coloured as morally unacceptable. Still, that’s only a hint: the killer blow is yet to come. Towards the end of the episode, the Doctor confronts the Fisher King, the one responsible for creating the ghosts: “You know, you’ve got a lot in common with the Tivoleans. You’ll both do anything to survive: they’ll surrender to anyone; you will hijack other people’s souls and turn them into electromagnetic projections. That will to endure, that refusal to ever cease, it’s extraordinary – and it makes a fellow think, because you know what? If all I have to do to survive is tweak the future a bit, what’s stopping me? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, the ripple effect: maybe it will mean that the universe will be ruled by cats or something in the future – but the way I see it, even a ghastly future is better than no future at all. You robbed those people of their deaths, made them nothing more than a message in a bottle. You violated something more important than time: you bent the rules of life and death. So I am putting things straight. Here, now, this is where your story ends.”

Bits of this, I feel, could almost be addressed directly to Moffat. That refusal to ever let his characters cease is extraordinary. He robs them of their deaths, makes them nothing more than digital copies bouncing around the Nethersphere, or whatever the favoured variant happens to be in any particular episode. Doctor Who thrives off mucking about with time – violating time is within its remit – but Moffat violated something more important than that when he bent the rules of life and death, again, and again, and again. Somebody has to put that straight. Whithouse takes up the challenge.

There’s a lot of mucking around with time in ‘Before the Flood’ – the entire premise of the episode is something called the Bootstrap Paradox – which I’d say constitutes Whithouse exhibiting what the programme is allowed to do. Violate time, fine, that’s just how we roll in the Whoniverse, but life and death matter too much for that sort of highjinks. Leave them be. You don’t have that right.

As I say, maybe I’m reading too much into Whithouse’s scripting, but he really does seem to me to be concertedly challenging two of the things I dislike so much about Moffat’s head-writer-ship: Messing Around with Death, and unceremonious dismissal of canon (a subcategory of Making Everything Ginormous). At any rate, even if you can’t see the outright criticism I’m suggesting is there, ‘Under the Lake’/‘Before the Flood’ is still, in itself, an absolute gem of a two-parter, which is guilty of none of my trio of complaints. On the contrary, it’s got everything a good Who story should: an interesting setting, a compelling mystery, some quite scary bits and a good deal of funny ones, a diverse cast of secondary characters that we’re made to really care about, lots of the Doctor being clever and a little bit of him being stupid, some engagement with moral questions (but no self-righteous preaching of a particular narrow worldview), a satisfying conclusion – need I go on?

And of course, it’s on iPlayer right now, so you can go and rewatch it right away – and see whether the scathing commentary I think I can see in it is at all apparent to you. Regardless, I do hope we’ll be seeing more of Whithouse’s scripting in upcoming series. Only a few months to wait for Series Eleven now…

Footnotes

¹ See, here they all are: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b006q2x0?suggid=b006q2x0. All 146 of them. Have fun.

² Under ‘2015’, then ‘September’, in the box on the right.

³ As usual, thanks to Chrissie’s Transcripts Site, http://www.chakoteya.net/DoctorWho/index.html, and NowMyWingsFit.

⁴ Funnily enough, what Whithouse is most famous for is having created Being Human, a serial which concerns itself with ‘the flotsam and jetsam of death’: vampires, werewolves, and yes, ghosts, plus the occasional zombie or succubus. It’s really good, especially Series One and Four, but I should warn you that there’s a lot of adult content (more than I’d be willing to put up with these days without skipping certain scenes). It’s another one you can get every episode of on iPlayer at the moment: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b00hqlc4?suggid=b00hqlc4.