What
the world needs now is, as I'm sure you've realised, yet another blog post about the new Doctor Who but I
promise, at least I’m not one of those Whovians, fans of the show, who seemingly only watch the
programme in order to criticise it. Well, not only for that reason…
I first started
watching Doctor Who in the mid to
late eighties. I have a hazy memory of Peter Davison dashing around the TARDIS
console but Sylvester McCoy was my Doctor; I even liked the controversial
question-marked tank top and umbrella. The Seventh Doctor's Scottish brogue was also a departure for the character, previously played by posho Englishmen.
Peter Capaldi is the
first 'openly' Scottish Doctor since McCoy and the first since the
show’s 2005 reboot. I know David Tennant is a Scot, too but he played the Tenth Doctor with an English accent, albeit with more of an Estuary one than his more middle-class predecessors, excluding Ecclestone's Northern Ninth Doctor, naturally. Ten briefly broke into a Scottish brogue in his Highlands-set second episode, Tooth & Claw but that's the exception. Much is made of Capaldi’s accent in Deep Breath, his first full episode as the Twelfth Doctor, following his introduction at the end of The Time Of The Doctor, Matt Smith's final episode as the Eleventh Doctor.
Many of Deep Breath's Scottish comments come from The Doctor himself and his assertion
that he can now 'really complain about things' possibly gives hope to fans that the Doctor may
display the angry tendencies of Capaldi's The Thick Of It character, Malcolm Tucker, although probably not his profane choice of words, at least not yet.
After casting fellow Jock Karen Gillan as companion Amy Pond, having Madame Vastra, played by Neve McIntosh, briefly use her natural Scottish brogue, as well as setting Deep Breath certain scenes in Glasgow, Head Writer, Showrunner and presumably proud Scot, Steven Moffat, has been accused by some Whovians of having a Tartan agenda. Now the Doctor himself
is Scottish, or at least picked up the accent, somewhere, this will be grist to the mill for such fans' accusation.
Previous showrunner Russell T Davies was said to have
had a gay agenda and Moffat apparently has a Scottish one. Neither agendas, if they even really exist, have really overtaken the show. Still, Moffat focuses so much on Capaldi’s
Scottishness in Deep Breath that it
may as well become a feature of the whole series. Why not deck the Doctor out
in tartan, have him borrow a kilt from Second Doctor companion Jamie McCrimmon, or Clara’s tartan skirt, redo the theme tune with bagpipes and have the Time Lord bring about
Scottish Independence by having William Wallace win the Battle of Falkirk, then fight a Haggis monster. Maybe the fact that I come up with ideas like that is why I'll probably never write Doctor Who?
A bagpipe version of the theme tune would be an improvement over the latest version, however. Murray Gold’s new rendition is not his best work, which was probably the version heard over 50th anniversary episode The Day Of The Doctor's end credits. The latest is uncomfortably reminiscent of the synthesized Colin Baker one from 1986. It can’t be easy remixing a fifty-year-old tune, though. Not that it needs it, Delia Derbyshire's original still holds up as a haunting piece of electronica.
If the new title
sequence looks like a fanmade Youtube video, that’s because it is, sort of. Professional designer Billy Hanshaw
uploaded his own version of the titles to showcase his abilities and ended up getting hired to do it for the show proper. Are Who producers so desperate for ideas, they’re now looking to Youtube for
inspiration? Maybe that’s unfair, when Hanshaw’s original video is better than new show titles. Well, at least it’s an upgrade from the mad,
psychedelic mess of a title sequence from Matt Smith’s last series. Here, we get lots of spinning cogs and clocks instead of timey-wimey stuff but still, the TARDIS hops from one time-tunnel to another, there's also a quick glimpse of Capaldi's prominent brows, which made their first appearance in The Day Of The Doctor.
The Doctor seems to
have to comment on almost every aspect of himself, now, eyebrows included, which I don't remember being the case in McCoy’s
time. Companion Clara, played by Jenna Coleman, struggles to get used to a different, older Doctor.
However, she makes it clear to that she has never been interested in ‘pretty young boys’, as the Eleventh Doctor apparently was, even if the Doctor himself chose to look younger in order to gain acceptance,
as Vastra surmises. This is a reassuring example of Clara being fleshed out
beyond her ‘Impossible Girl’ status that seemed to define her as an Eleventh Doctor companion. It's odd that Clara is so fazed by her friend's new voice and form, after having seen all the previous ones in The Name Of The Doctor, so is not new to the concept of regeneration. Maybe she's struggling to accept this new Time Lord because she's not seen him before and it's the first time she's seen him change first hand.
At one point, Clara is faced with The Doctor apparently
leaving the Impossible Girl to her possible death, not his previous usual style, at the hands of clockwork 'droids. Thankfully, Clara realises she can avoid being detection by holding in a 'deep breath'. Never mind the fact that these robots are so slow-moving that briskly strolling away from them would be enough to avoid their attack, even when surrounded by the blighters. These villains are hardly on a par with Moffat's best Who monsters. The Weeping Angels could beat the 'droids easily. I get the point, though, that these robots are of the like that Moffat introduced in The Girl In The Fireplace, only, in Deep Breath, after hundreds of years of changing to survive, they are barely managing. At one point, The Doctor surmises that his old enemies have altered themselves so often, they're not what they were in the first place and perhaps the same could be said of him, even if regeneration is more humane than murdering other lifeforms in order to survive.
Clara flashes back to struggling in her role as a teacher, where she threatens to have all of her class expelled. ‘Go on, do it then,’ one unruly student dares her. Later, Clara repeats this line to the chief 'droid threatening her life in the present moment. Of course, the Doctor turns up to save her in the nick of time. He may not be able to in the future, if Capaldi’s recent comment on The One Show is to be believed, regarding whether Clara will survive this whole series. Clara's not been my favourite companion, before now, partly because there didn't seem to be a lot to her character, other than being 'The Impossible Girl' but, on the strength of this episode, there's more to her, yet.
As is
usually the case with any first full episode for a new Doctor, it took me a while to fully get into this one, to take a full Deep Breath as it were. It had a
strong opening, with possibly the most original entrance for the TARDIS
I’ve yet seen. Then, Twelve appears, all over the place, prancing about in a Victorian nighty, with a delivery as as manic his two most recent predecessors but animated face and accent all his own. The Doctor interpreting the sullen moans of a lost, lonely dinosaur was a nice touch, if a bit Eleven. Said T-Rex's fiery death was a horrible, though, even if only seen from a distance. All for the sake of some eye cartilage. At least The Half-Faced Man, played by Peter Ferdinando, leader of the clockwork 'droids, admits that his reptilian victim was 'an ancient, beautiful creature.' That could be applied to The Doctor too, perhaps.
Deep Breath is one of two episodes in this series to be directed by British filmmaker, Ben Wheatley, responsible for Sightseers and A Field In England. It's rare for Who to attract a film director, although since Moffat became showrunner in 2010, he's brought in bigger talents than usual to work on the show, such as Richard Curtis and Neil Gaiman. Capaldi's first episode displays some unusual visual artistry, with one particularly effective moment being when we see Clara's attempted escape from the clockwork 'droids from her perspective. Whilst holding her breath almost for longer than she can bear to, red flares appear at the edges of her vision, as if she's about to pass out.
As promised in various
interviews, Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor is more alien than we’re used to, or is that just less human? It is nice to get a darker and grumpier Doctor, although Ten and Eleven had their cross moments but often came across as emo and sulky. Twelve looks like he’ll do away with some of that, as well as the more
child-friendly stuff, like silly hats, 3D glasses and bloody catchphrases.
He shows promising hints of a more curmudgeonly Time Lord, like Hartnell, Hurt and
Ecclestone, before him.
Madame Vastra, Strax, played by Dan Starkey and Jenny, assayed by Katrin Stewart - the so-called ‘Paternoster Gang’-
usually annoy me but didn’t so much, here, probably because of their
dynamic with a new Doctor and their efforts to assist Clara in getting used to
him. Another familiar, albeit prettier, face surprisingly appears toward the end to give her
further encouragement. Whenever this gang appear, we know we’re in Victorian
London, a now overused Who location,
having featured in almost every season of the revamped series since 2005. If it carries on like this, it'll become as tiresomely frequent as the Daleks.
A marriage between two
people of the same gender is somewhat passé on TV, now but two separate species, a human and a lizard, here, is another issue entirely.
During a close up of Vastra and Jenny’s snog, I was reminded of Plato’s Stepchildren, a 1968 Star Trek episode, in which William Shatner's Kirk, a white guy, and
Nichelle Nichols' Uhura, a black woman, shared TV’s first interracial kiss. Is Moffat trying to one up
Trek with TV’s first interspecies snog, even if the reason given is an exchange
of air? Surely Trek has given the world an interspecies kiss before now?
Deep Breath had more promotion than even Who's fiftieth anniversary episode. A live show announcing Capaldi’s casting last year, as well as
cinema screenings and a world tour just for this one episode, where armies of
fans heaped adoration on their new Doctor before even having seen his first
proper adventure, was overkill. Good job it was a pretty good start but we’ve
got another twelve episodes to go. Deep breath, then…
Picture: BBC
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