Mercy Me: An Overanalysis of "The Witch's Familiar"

Maybe if I stand in the most effeminate position possible, they won't see me...

I guess I have some apologies to make.  I've got some catching up to do, which is partially due to some slight ambivalence about this blog, but also partially due to being somewhat busy with a new relationship starting up.  And I've been trying to get her caught up on Doctor Who as well so we can watch it together but, ironically, she kept falling asleep during "Last Christmas."  I spend the whole of my weekends with her, so I won't really be able to watch the new episodes on the day they come out until she's caught up, which she will be soon.  Until then, I'm going to play a little catch-up.  So sorry that this blog is about a week late.  I'll work on that.  For now, on with the show:

The Daleks have always been a moral quandary for the Doctor.  The Doctor is the ultimate pacifist, at least in his philosophy if not always in his actions. His goal is always to prevent as many deaths as possible, including the deaths of his enemies.  The Daleks have shown up to throw a wrench in this philosophy more than once, because if your enemy serves absolutely no purpose in the Universe other than destruction, should your pacifism extend to them? He's been fighting the Daleks for almost 2,000 years now, and he has still failed to come up with a definitive answer to this moral dilemma.  Each regeneration seems to attack the problem again and each regeneration comes up with a slightly different answer.  That can be expected, as there isn't an easy solution to the quandary that the Doctor faces.  But when the option comes up in the shape of the opportunity to murder a young boy who hasn't done anything yet, the Doctor finds the question even more troubling than usual.

Could you kill baby Hitler!?  Look at him!  He's adorable!

My new go-to question whenever I have the honor of meeting one of the actors that has played the Doctor is to ask them what they think is consistent across all the very, very different incarnations.  I didn't think of this question until after meeting Colin Baker, so I never got to ask him, and when I asked Peter Davidson and Sylvester McCoy the question McCoy copped out and avoided the question with a "Well, that's the writers' job."  (You do Shakespeare, McCoy, I know you give more thought than that to your characters!)  However, Davidson gave a very interesting and insightful answer about the Doctor's recklessness.  If you ask me, the two traits that are consistent to all of the Doctors are curiosity and compassion.  That second one is big, even with regenerations like 6, 9, and now 12 who are notorious for how rude and pompous they can be to other people.  Their compassion may not be the first thing you notice about them, and they may not be the kind of person to stick around and put a blanket around you after they've saved you, but it's still very important to them to rescue all living creatures and ensure their survival.  Even when the Doctor's not particularly nice, he's still full of love and compassion, even for someone as terrible as Davros.

I've said before that I think the 12th Doctor is embarking on the redemptive arc that the writers originally planned for the 6th Doctor, the one that was never carried out due to Colin Baker's era nearly getting the show cancelled.  The low ratings, combined with the fact that the average fans were starting to agree with the conservative fanatics who thought Doctor Who was too dark and violent, led the production team to quickly cancel their plans and scramble to find solutions to save the show.  Their first solution was the bizarrely nonsensical "Trial of a Timelord" story arc, which only made things worse.  The abrupt firing of Colin Baker and hiring of Sylvester McCoy bought the show a few years of mercy from the BBC, but not much, and the show only lasted a few more years.  In the meantime, the long redemptive arc that was planned for the 6th Doctor never got carried out.  At the same time, though, I wonder if Jonathan Nathan-Turner and Eric Saward had the talent to carry off such a delicate arc.  Steven Moffat, on the other hand, does, and "The Witch's Familiar" is the episode that really makes it clear that we've set off on that path.  The Doctor is really trying to figure himself out, what his morals are now, if he is a good man, and if he's stronger than the darkness in his heart.  Never is that put to the test quite as much as it is in this 2-parter, and thankfully, the Doctor passes with flying colors.

Missy is having a big ball of fun in this episode, and we finally get to see how she managed to survive the end of "Death in Heaven."  Considering her quick return, I can only assume that Steven Moffat has been planning this for quite a long time.  The only real complaint that anybody (anybody with taste, anyway) had about Missy in "Dark Water"/"Death in Heaven" is that there wasn't nearly enough of her, especially considering that we got a chance to get to know John Simm's Saxon Master over a 3-part episode.  Granted, he only showed up at the very end of the first part of that episode, but it still means we got much more of him, as the reveal that Missy was the Master didn't even come until the end of the first part of her two-part introduction.  Finally, "The Magician's Apprentice"/"The Witch's Familiar" gives us some time to get to know Missy.

Doesn't she just look so inviting?  Don't you want to get to know her better?

As delightfully warped as Michelle Gomez's performance of Missy is, she also proves herself to be incredibly intelligent.  She has a very different moral compass from the Doctor, but that's about the only difference between them, as Missy demonstrates that she has as much intelligence and ingenuity as the Doctor.  Clara, in this episode, serves more as a companion to Missy than the Doctor, hence the title of the episode, making it the first time since the 1996 movie that the Master has truly had his own companion.  Missy's explanations of the Dalek homeworld and how it functions sound quite like the Doctor's explanations, but with the added danger of being willing to murder anyone without a moment's hesitation.

Michelle Gomez brings out a very interesting aspect of the Master that we've never really seen before.  We've known since back in the 3rd Doctor serial, "The Sea Devils," that the Doctor and the Master had been friends once at school, and we've seen glimmers of that friendship before.  There's been a begrudging respect between them, and a few temporary truces so that the two former friends can put their heads together to defeat a common foe, but Missy is the first version of the Master to make it absolutely clear how much the Doctor means to her, and is adamant that her multiple attempts to murder him over the years do not change how she feels about him.  Perhaps it's that her last regeneration (presumably) met his end trying to protect the Doctor (a long lost 3rd Doctor era plotline that Davies finally brought to fulfillment), but Missy genuinely cares about the Doctor.  In "The Magician's Apprentice" she expresses her friendship with the Doctor and explains why it isn't a contradiction to two people as ancient as herself and the Doctor, but it's only in "The Witch's Familiar" that she puts her money where her mouth is and mounts a rescue mission to save the Doctor.  In a way, she almost becomes a second companion in this episode, which is extremely refreshing.

Now, some people may have had a moment of hesitation that the Doctor is surprised at Clara's ability to get the Dalek tank to say the word "mercy."  Most notably because of this famous scene, which was also written by Steven Moffat:

This made me do a double take as well, because clearly, River gets the Dalek to say the word "mercy" a long time ago.  However, it occurred to me, the Doctor wasn't present for this scene, as he was busy wiring his vortex manipulator into the Pandorica.  (That might be the nerdiest sentence I've ever written.)  River is a brilliant woman, who knows a lot about the Universe, and certainly more than the average companion, but in many ways she is still a companion.  It makes sense that she wouldn't know as much about Daleks as the Doctor does, and that she would not notice that it was strange for a Dalek to know this word.  There's a good chance that she never got around to telling the Doctor about the time she made a Dalek beg for mercy, as whether or not he approves of this will largely depend on what mood he's in.  Even if she did tell him, it seems likely that he wouldn't have believed her.

The bigger discrepancy is this, which is also Steven Moffat's writing:

We don't actually see a shot of the Dalek from the outside saying the name "Oswin Oswald," but we do get it saying "I am not a Dalek" and a few other things which it seems, from Missy's demonstration, would be impossible.  Similarly, "Into the Dalek" features a Dalek saying a lot of things that "The Witch's Familiar" implies would be impossible for a Dalek casing to be able to interpret.  It's worth noting that Moffat is also credited as a co-writer on "Into the Dalek," although I do believe that's largely because Moffat gave himself partial credit for every episode in Series 8 where he threw in a little bit of story for the overall plot arc.

So yes, Moffat has created a bit of a plot hole here.  There are ways to rationalize this away.  We could say that this is a trait particular to the newly revived Daleks from after "Victory of the Daleks," but more likely than not it's just because Moffat decided that it was convenient to the plot, so fuck all those scripts he wrote in the past.  Personally, I think Moffat and Davies together have patched up almost every major plot hole leftover from the classic series, including the bizarre prophecy that the Valeyard would appear between the Doctor's "12th and final incarnations," and because of that I think Moffat can be forgiven for leaving a few very small holes of his own.

I got the distinct feeling that this episode was setting up the season-long plot arc for Series 9.  It would be very unlike Moffat to leave the series without a larger, overarching plot, and the stuff about the prophecy of the "Hybrid" sounded far too foreboding and interesting to leave it where it stands right now, especially considering that Missy continued to reference the prophecy after the Doctor had already defeated Davros.  At first, I thought the prophecy sounded too mystical for as scientific a race as the Time Lords, much like their "Visionary" from "The End of Time," but I decided that a time travelling race could have many non-magical or mystical ways to predict the future and see a "prophecy."  The fact that Missy said that she had just come up with a very clever idea once she was cornered by the Daleks seemed like it was also pretty clearly Moffat setting up a larger plot arc, with a return for a Dalek attack led by Missy later this season.  Remember, the Master has teamed up with the Daleks before, and last time the plotline was cut short due to the untimely death of the actor, Roger Delgado, so we never really got to see what comes of a Master/Dalek team-up.  Perhaps this is another lost plotline that Moffat intends to finally bring to fruition.

I've decided to do a little thing that's fun for me.  This series, I'm naming every Overanalysis after a punk song I like (that I think is appropriate) then putting the song at the end.  So, enjoy!

Daleks are Sexy: A Report from the Denver Comic Con and How I Met My First Doctor

The glare fucked up my sign.  It's supposed to say "The Horror of Fan Blog loves Colin Baker (Whether you like it or not)."

It's been a busy week.  I know it doesn't seem that way since I posted a blog on almost every single day for the past 2 weeks, but most of those were written in advance and put on a timer to post when I was at work.  My job has become wicked busy, and I'm working 50-60 hour weeks.  But it's good money, lots of overtime, good tips, and I spend most of the time riding around in a dump truck.  So it took me a week to finish my write up of my experience at the Denver Comic Con last week.  I wanted to go into some detail of the non-Doctor Who related things I did there, too, but I feel like this post is long enough as it is.

I went to the Denver Comic Con primarily to see Colin Baker.  What I didn't expect was the plethora of incredibly hot girls in nerd costumes, including several sexy Daleks.  I have a new bucket list goal to sleep with a girl in a sexy Dalek costume.

This is not from Denver Comic Con, but rather a picture I found on a Google Image search.  However, this isn't far off from the really sexy Dalek outfits I saw.

By the end of the day, I felt nerded out, like I felt like I couldn't do a single thing nerdy for about a week.  I love being a nerd and I loved being around my fellow nerds.  I thought I was going to hyperventilate from joy.  But after a few hours, you hit a point where you see the obese guy with long hair and the black jean shorts, sneakers, and some sort of black Star Wars shirt (because black on black looks so good together) with some sort of slogan on it that he thinks is funny like "May I Force One In You" (Yes, I've actually seen that) and he's with his girlfriend who is also obese and is wearing too much make-up and a leather corset and she probably does Renaissance Fairs and you think to yourself "Please tell me I don't look like them to other people."  But, I've got just enough nerd in me to write about what happened.

I was one of the more half-assed cosplayers there, and only one of about a million 11th Doctors.  Doctor Who cosplayers were all 4th, 10th, and 11th Doctors, with one solitary 5th Doctor.  That's 7 Doctors being completely unrepresented, including the one who was there.  Although, admittedly, Colin Baker said, flat out, he didn't blame people for not wearing his costume because it's hideous and hard to do.  He said he envies Christopher Eccleston, because Eccleston got the costume that Baker had asked to be able to wear.  Even though he's one of my least favorites, I think next year I'm going to go as the 9th Doctor.  I'll put a sign around my neck that says "I know you can't tell, but I'm supposed to be the 9th Doctor."

Some teenage girls actually stopped me to ask me to take pictures with them, because they were happy that I thought to wear the cowboy hat with my 11th Doctor outfit instead of a fez.  I gave them my email to send me the pictures, but they never seem to have arrived.  Perhaps they thought I was creepy being a 29 year old man giving my email to teenage girls, but I swear I just wanted the pictures.

My favorite Doctor Who related costumes (other than Doctors) were:
-Complete Amy Pond kiss-a-gram outfit, that was impeccably made
-Two different Weeping Angels.  Not the most well done outfits (how could you do a realistic Weeping Angel and still see?), but a creative choice
-The sexy Daleks, obviously.
-Multiple girls in sexy TARDIS dresses, one with "Bad Wolf" written on her ass in chalk.
-A girl dressed as The Empty Child who, as I walked by, put her gas mask back on and said "Are you my mummy?"

The most hilariously irrelevant costumes at the Comic Con:

-Mr. T from The A-Team
-Ronald McDonald
-Oscar the Grouch
-The Mask (from the Jim Carrey movie The Mask)
-Belle from Beauty and the Beast
-The Mad Hatter (specifically from the stupid Tim Burton version of Alice in Wonderland)
-Natalie Portman in Black Swan
-Gumby
-A narwhal

Colin Baker was an interesting man to talk to.  I asked him a question, and avoided the obvious ones that I knew someone was going to ask because I knew I only got one question.  I knew plenty of people would ask him his opinion about the new series, as there were like 50 girls in the room who were just Tennant fangirls who came because they heard this guy was a Doctor back before they were born.  He was complementary about most of the new series and, even though he was very complementary about David Tennant, he spent a lot of time making fun of David Tennant for being so good looking and young.  He was especially complementary about Matt Smith, saying that, at first, he was afraid because they had "cast another child," but found that, although his body is young, Matt Smith had the mind of a 900 year old man.  His criticisms of the new series included the fact that they are only casting young Doctors (not that he was anything but nice about the actors themselves, just the fact that none of them are older), the revoking of Jonathan Nathan-Turner's old "No Hanky-Panky in the TARDIS" rule (he said he didn't think the Doctor and his companion should even notice that they are of different genders), John Simm's Master, and the fact that the Doctor never suggested keeping the Weeping Angels away by winking with alternating eyes.  Despite the quotations, the following is a paraphrase:  "If he had been a proper Doctor, he would have known how to keep the Angels away.  (Audience laughs)  That's not an insult.  Did I regenerate?  No!  I wasn't there.  So I never regenerated.  That means the 6th Doctor is still the Doctor and any others after him are just impostors."

A lot of people wanted to ask him about his opinion regarding the introduction of the John Hurt Doctor.  Even after he said that he had not seen the most recent season, some people, who either didn't hear him or walked in late, still tried to ask him about the John Hurt Doctor.  I got people to start yelling "Spoilers!" when this happened.  But I think he may have figured out what's happened, and that's a shame.  But he's a Doctor, and the introduction of a new Doctor is an unbelievably important change to his character, and he was pretty much the only person in the room and didn't know about it.

I showed up late to take a picture with him, but he was kind enough to set up a late picture with me.  Unfortunately, this meant that I had to wait near his booth until he was available, and caused me to miss out on William Shatner.  He was a little cold.  When I asked him if he would take a picture with my sign, he said "It's your photograph."  I was thrilled, so I tried to show him the sign, and he simply repeated "It's your photograph."  I could tell I had annoyed him a bit, but it might be because I fucked up and missed the photo taking times.  I was also stammering like a mad idiot because I was so happy about meeting a Doctor.

The other Doctor Who "celebrity" there was Daphne Ashbrook, who played the one and only televised companion to the 8th Doctor, Grace Holloway.  This woman pissed me off to no end.  Now, understand, she was on screen in this series for only 90 minutes in the 1996 Doctor Who made-for-TV movie.  So, really, she's not much of a get for this convention.  I could understand if this woman was only involved in one movie, but later fell in love with the series and wanted to talk with the fans about how proud she was of her one small achievement in this franchise.  Sadly, that was not the case.  This was a woman who was in the franchise for 90 minutes almost 20 years ago and does not care about Doctor Who.  She talked about recently starting to watch the Classic Series episodes.  This seems like basic character research work for someone before they start playing a companion.  She didn't know the franchise very well.  And this is the moment where she really lost me:  She said that she only realized, the day before, at that very same convention, sitting in on another panel, that The Master was from the same planet as The Doctor.



I.  Was.  Stunned.

Hey, Daphne, there was exactly one villain in your Doctor Who movie.  How did you miss a key plot point in your own movie?  Why would you have acted in a movie that you didn't fully understand the plot of?  Why wouldn't you ask as many questions as possible to figure out what you're getting yourself into.

And, while we're at it, why did you come to a convention for a franchise you clearly care so little about?  Oh, wait, I think I know what it is.  You're a 2-bit hack actress who couldn't act her way out of a shoebox to get into a shoe commercial.  But it turns out that science-fiction conventions are rife with fans so fucking in love with this wonderful franchise that, in their love of that franchise--crossed with a number of cases of unfortunately strong OCD--they would pay for an autograph from anyone who has ever touched anything Doctor Who, right down to the key grip on the 7th episode of K-9.  So you went to a convention, pretended you liked this one movie that you did that you clearly cared very little about, avoid the questions you don't know the answers to by somehow parlaying it into a barely related anecdote about your movie, and charged people $30 a pop to get your autograph and--maybe if they're really off of their rockers--a photograph with you.  Oh, and you put up a picture of yourself from your one episode of Deep Space Nine that you did just in case you reel in some of the equally enthusiastic Star Trek fan.

The fans are good people with a deep passion, not walking ATMs, Daphne.

I refused to be sucked in, and it made me think a little bit about my own fandomness.  There are some things I'm going to be interested in paying money to do just because of the way it's linked to the franchise I love.  I need to remember that, sometimes, these things are not an important part of being a fan.  If I'm ever paying money to buy a perfect replica of the 6th Doctor's blue variant costume from the expanded universe stories simply because I have to have an exact replica of every costume the Doctor ever wore, I want you to smack me in the head with my sonic screwdriver for the love of Christ!  I'm going to buy a lot of Doctor Who merchandise in my lifetime.  Perhaps more than some people would deem normal.  They're going to have to accept that about me.  But I need to realize that there are some limits, and that I don't have to have everything just to have everything.  From now on, when I'm looking into a Doctor Who item I want to purchase, I'm going to ask myself a very important question:  Is this really something I want, or is this Daphne Ashbrook's autograph.

The Order of Rassilon #4: Colin Baker, The Wrongfully Accused

Haters gonna hate

As I write this right now, it's about one week before I go to the Denver Comic Con to meet Colin Baker himself.  I tried 4 times to ask the Denver Comic Con when Colin Baker would be appearing.  They only responded to me the third time, and that was because I was fucking furious with them.  Finally, I emailed Colin Baker's personal website, and got a response from Baker's webmaster within  hours (which he at least claimed he got from Colin himself) and told me to introduce myself as the guy who emailed him to ask when he would be there.  This exchange confirmed something I already knew deep down:  Colin Baker had to be moved up on my list.  Where Tom Baker was the most popular Doctor of the classic series and now avoids audio productions and conventions like they're the plague, Colin Baker, who has more reason than anyone to feel completely screwed over by the franchise, is more loyal to the show and his fans than almost any Doctor in the history of the show.

You can consult my book report on The Valeyard or the Topless Robot article I cited as one of my main sources to see how much I think Colin Baker got completely fucked over by the BBC.  Colin Baker did an excellent job of portraying the Doctor.  It just happened to be a Doctor that was the exact opposite of what the fans wanted to see.  The writing can't even be blamed, as many of Colin Baker's supporters have tried to claim.  The writing was actually excellent.  Colin Baker's acting was excellent.  What was wrong was the way in which the writers and producers read their own audience.  They went darker with the stories, and made the Doctor meaner, and both turned out to be choices that the audience sternly objected to.  They weren't bad plot choices, but they were a stark contrast from the Davison era.  Virtually no Doctor in the history of the show had to steer such a drastic change in tone, and, had the public been ready for it, he would have been praised for his masterful handling of that change.

Kill it!  Kill it with fire!

Some of the criticism can also be blamed on Baker's hideous outfit.  However, as has been pointed out repeatedly, Colin Baker himself objected to it.  The Doctor's outfits had become sillier and sillier, starting with Troughton's fur coat, and then getting weirder with Pertwee's dandy outfit (which he put on as a joke that the producers did not get), Tom Baker's ludicrous scarf (an accident on the behalf of the costuming department), and Davison's decorative celery.  For some reason, Jonathan Nathan-Turner (who I honestly think was trying to commit television suicide by sabotaging the show) thought the Doctor's outfit should be wild and crazy to highlight the Doctor's alien nature, and demonstrate how he failed to understand fashion.  Even if you buy that as a logical explanation, you have to wonder why every single person who met the 6th Doctor didn't shout "What the fuck are you wearing?  And why the fuck do you have a cat pin on your lapel?"  Baker wanted to wear black to highlight the fact that he was playing a darker Doctor, but, personally, I can't imagine Colin Baker in any black outfit that wouldn't make him look like the guy on the Quaker Oats box.  In some of the expanded universe media, mercifully, a different outfit was introduced for him called the "Blue Variant."  While it's much better looking, it doesn't change the fact that the Sixth Doctor, in his timeline, must have gone back to his hideous clown suit after the blue variant, because he died in it.  But at least someone said "Hey, the Sixth Doctor deserves better than this quilt from hell" and they gave him this:

Despite its unpopularity, though, the Sixth Doctor's obnoxious costume, probably because of its uniqueness, is one of the most common Doctor costumes at conventions.  It's hard to dress up as the Ninth Doctor because his costume isn't distinctive.  Nobody can say the same of the Sixth Doctor.

Personally, I love it when Doctor Who gets really dark.  The fun of the deep, dark, terrifying moments of the show is the moment when the Doctor stands up and says "No.  Not here.  Not this time.  Not while I'm here."  The darker it gets, the better it is when the Doctor brings the light.

Had Colin Baker been allowed to continue the role as he should have, he would have been playing an arc that would see the Doctor go from a brash and pompous regeneration to a much calmer and kindly version of the Doctor after the death of his companion, Peri.  It would have been a difficult arc to carry off, and a marvelous feat if done correctly, but I think Baker probably could have handled it.  Frankly, once the show was put on 18 month hiatus after the first Colin Baker season, they would probably have been better off just going back to what they were working on with this arc.  Instead, they did "The Trial of a Timelord," which is fascinating as a metaphor for what was happening to the show, but which made very little sense in the end.  The Colin Baker era might have lasted longer had they stuck to their guns.

As it is, we saw a very complex Doctor in the Sixth incarnation.  Even though, during his regeneration crisis in his first serial he attempted to strangle his companion and also cravenly tried to give her up to save his own life, this soon proved to be a temporary problem caused by a very difficult regeneration.  Once he got adjusted again, Colin Baker portrayed a character whose pompousness and brashness didn't completely conceal the Doctor's love for all living creatures and his generous nature and spirit.  Those who see the Sixth Doctor as nothing more than a blowhard are missing the point.  He was a blowhard on the outside, but Colin Baker made sure that, underneath the surface, the Sixth Doctor was still, without a doubt, a Doctor.

Hopefully, by the time this is published, I'll have met the man and be able to tell you about that experience.  Until then, know that The Horror of Fan Blog loves Colin Baker, whether you like it or not.