Steven's Last Night in Town: An Overanalysis of Twice Upon a Time

Senioritis:  A condition peculiar to high school seniors, hence the subword "senior" in senoritis. Symptons include a general apathy towards classes, homework, future i.e. college applications, restlessness and a "cannot do" attitude to surmountable school load. - Urban Dictionary

Despite all the hullabulloo about "Twice Upon a Time" being Peter Capaldi's last episode, we're forgetting another goodbye here.  It's also Steven Moffat's last episode writing for Doctor Who.  Moffat always kept an open invitation extended to Russell T. Davies to come back and write a one-off episode, but Davies never took him up on it.  All signs point to Chibnall holding out the same invitation to Moffat, but Moffat has indicated he doesn't intend to take advantage of the invitation either.  After six seasons as showrunner, 47 episodes, four minisodes, and one licensed parody, Steven Moffat is finally done (so he says) with the Doctor Who franchise.  (Of course, Rule 1.)  And for the conclusion off all that work, the greatest writer Doctor Who has ever known (fuck the haters) caps off his run on the show with possibly his biggest limp dick of an episode.

"Twice Upon a Time" can't really be called a "story" in the traditional sense.  The elements of a story are considered to be character, setting, plot, conflict, and resolution . "Twice Upon a Time" lacks conflict.  Hell, I'd argue it barely has a plot.  The episode even goes so far as to point out its own biggest flaw when the Doctor shouts out "It's not an evil plan!"  More or less, the Doctor happens upon a perfectly innocent science project, mistakes it for something evil, realizes it isn't, and moves along on his way.  That's distinctly not a story.

But the episode is an excuse to have some interesting conversations between the 12th Doctor, the 1st Doctor, Mark Gatiss for some reason, and Bill.  Here's the thing, I hate William Hartnell's 1st Doctor.  He played the character as a pompous ass, and Hartnell couldn't remember his lines to save his life, which was especially difficult when they couldn't afford to reshoot anything. Steven Moffat has talked about how, looking at David Bradley's version of the 1st Doctor is like looking through a time machine and seeing William Hartnell's Doctor in the flesh.

The fuck is he talking about?

Bradley's voice is distinctly deeper than Hartnell's, for starters.  His face looks nothing like Hartnell's, as the 12th Doctor comments on.  He doesn't act like the 1st Doctor at all.  While the 1st Doctor had a general air of superiority about him, that was always directed towards men and women equally.  He never showed himself to be the rampant misogynist that he appears to be in the "Twice Upon a Time."  Either Moffat hasn't watched the black and white episodes in a minute, or else he wanted to show everyone who accused him of sexism what sexism actually looks like.  Also, bragging about sexual exploits?  No Doctor does that.  The first Doctor had presumably one partner that we've never met, since he has a granddaughter, and he had a brief romance with an Aztec woman that probably amounted to nothing.  Either way, he's never been one to kiss and tell.  Remember that just because the 1st Doctor lived in the 1960s and his era aired in the 60's doesn't mean that he's a man from the 60's.  Any regeneration, and the Doctor is still an alien who has travelled all of time and space and is millennia ahead of simple human prejudices.

There are only a few things that "Twice Upon a Time" gets right about the 1st Doctor. One is that he always holds his damn lapels whatever he's doing.  The other is that the 1st Doctor is not truly a hero.  He's surprised by the notion of the 12th Doctor declaring the Earth to be "protected," because the 1st Doctor didn't see himself as a protector of the Earth.  He was just an explorer bumbling about, much like 12's speech at the end of "Death in Heaven."  I did love the 1st Doctor's explanation of what he was running to, though, that he was trying to realize why good so often triumphs when everything suggests that it shouldn't.  He went out in search of the source of that balance in the Universe, and accidentally became the balance he was looking for.

If I let go of my lapels, my neck will fall off.

I loved the line "To be fair, they cut out all the jokes" and it is my nw go-to response for everything now:

Why are the DCEU movies so boring?
Why wasn’t Two and a Half Men ever funny?
Why was Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s press conference so weird?
Why didn’t Kevin Spacey’s apology speech go over better?

Honestly, some of the banter between the two Doctors was amusing, but the fact that the 1st Doctor wasn't the 1st Doctor spoiled it for me.  Although I did like that 12 could steer 1's TARDIS which confirms something I've always suspected:  The 1st Doctor's TARDIS didn't have a broken navigation system, the 1st Doctor just never had any fucking clue how to steer the damned thing.

While Rusty the Good Dalek is a great name for a Saturday morning cartoon show (RIP), I don't understand why Rusty is so intent on killing the Doctor.  They seemed to part on good terms, they have similar goals, what do they have to hate each other over?  It seemed like Moffat didn't go back and watch his own episode before writing this one.

I did like the moment of the Christmas Armistice, which is a fascinating point in history, and I don't know how I didn't see that one coming.  That being said, it annoyed me that that was the only part of the episode that had anything to do with Christmas!  Moffat once said he hated Christmas specials that didn't actually have anything to do with Christmas.  Well, he's written two back to back (this and "Mysterio") that only feature one scene on Christmas.  I was sad to see his last one lacked any real Christmas to it.

Christmas bells, those Christmas bells, ringing through the land...

The Doctor's regeneration scene, however, was better than the rest of the episode combined.  The goodbyes from Bill and Nardole felt hollow since we knew they weren't really them.  Admittedly the same could be said of Clara's goodbye, but I think the main point of that moment was to give the Doctor back his memories of her, not for her to say a real goodbye to her.  The speech he gives his future self is some of Peter Capaldi's finest work, and a reminder of why he will always be one of the finest actors to ever play the role.

Speaking of actors, hello Jodie Whittaker, who I'm so excited to see taking on this role.  The Girl Who Was Hated.  I honestly expected they wold make a joke about her noticing she's not ginger before she realized she was a woman now.  The revived series has this annoying pattern where, every time the Doctor is about to regenerate, he punches in coordinates and starts the engines right when he is about to regenerate.  Think about it, it's happened every time:  War to 9, 9 to 10, 10 to 11, 11 to 12, and now in this episode we can not only say the same about 12 to 13, but also about 1 to 2.  Smartest man in the universe and he can't figure out that it's a bad idea to start up the most powerful vessel in the universe right before he's about to come down with massive amnesia and confusion.  "I'm about to go blind, now's a good time to go for a drive."  This time it ended more disastrously than ever before, as the 13th Doctor pressed one button, catapulted herself out the door, at which time the TARDIS dematerialized, leaving her both plummeting towards the ground and stranded without her TARDIS.  (The first person I hear make a joke about women drivers, I will detach something valuable from you.) . She'll probably survive the fall because she's technically still regenerating and therefore can heal her injuries, but I'm really excited to see Series 11 start off with a Doctor in a new gender, confused, lost, stranded, with no companions.  It's likely to be her most desperate situation upon starting a new regeneration, and I can't wait to see it.  Sadly, rumor has it we won't see the next series until September or so.  I can't wait.

While we're waiting, I might post in here once or twice.  I have been watching all of Jodie Whittaker's other roles and intend to make a post about that at some point.  Maybe I'll make another post or two in the meantime.  So, until then, fuck you, get pumped, the Doctor is a woman and this is gonna rock!

The Dead Doctor Scrolls: A Roundup of News About the Recent Found Episodes

On Sunday, the UK's Daily Mirror reported that 106 long-lost Doctor Who episodes had been found in Ethiopia at the Ethiopian Television and Radio Agency.  Fans immediately became skeptical, especially since similar rumors have been floating around for years and nothing has ever come from them.  Furthermore, the source that the Mirror quoted was someone who claimed to have heard the news from a friend.  Everything pointed toward some sort of hoax.  Then, it was confirmed that this news was at least partially true, and now the entire thing is steeped in confusion.  I'm going to try to provide everyone with a little background on this, as well as trying to work through some of the confusing and contradictory reports.

Now, for those of you who don't know, many early black and white episodes of Doctor Who have been lost for decades.  In the 1970's, the BBC showed a shocking lack of foresight when it taped over many old episodes of television shows in an attempt to save time and money. Apparently they didn't anticipate a future where people would pay good money to own such episodes for viewing in their own homes.  At the very least, you'd think they'd have the common sense to realize that these episodes would be useful to rebroadcast in the future.  Instead, many of the best BBC shows from before the 1970s are now lost, probably forever.  Doctor Who wasn't the only show to receive such shabby treatment, as BBC did this with many shows on hand at the time.  For example, many episodes of Til Death Us Do Part and Steptoe and Son--which were the basis for Norman Lear's brilliant American remakes All in the Family and Sanford and Son respectively--are now lost for the same reason.

Over time, lost episodes have turned up in the oddest of places.  Episodes from "The Dalek Masterplan," for example, turned up in a Mormon church in England which was on a property they bought from the BBC in the 1980s.  Imagine being the person cleaning up a freaking LDS church to find a copy of "The Dalek Masterplan"!  Private collectors seem to turn up a lot of them here and there.  Some episodes were sold overseas, meaning that the networks that aired the episodes in other countries have found old film reels of the episodes.  The first regeneration scene of the First Doctor into the Second Doctor only exists because a news program did a special interest story about the regeneration and they showed the footage on air.  While the episode in which the regeneration occurred was lost, someone miraculously saved the news report and got the footage from there.  You'd think that would be an episode someone would say "Hey, that's important enough to save!"

Only episodes from the black and white era--meaning only William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton episodes--remain lost.  While some Jon Pertwee episodes were wiped, black and white prints of the lost episodes remain, meaning that some episodes only exist in black and white, but all of them still exist.  Patrick Troughton got the short end of the stick on this one, as many more of his episodes were lost than Hartnell's.  It's a shame because, if we had to lose an entire Doctor's work, I'd rather it had been Hartnell's.  Troughton's performance as the Doctor was brilliant, and it's the main reason that the show has the longevity it now has.  Only 6 of Troughton's serials remain fully in tact.

Luckily for fans, every episode's audio still exists perfectly in tact.  This has led to a number of groups and individuals putting together what are known as "recons."  Recons are episodes that are reconstructed by combining the existing audio with still photos from the production, what little video remains, narration to explain gaps, and/or original footage to fill in for the lost footage.  These recons vary in quality a great deal.  The most well known company that does recons is Loose Cannon.  Loose Cannon's recons are a little overrated, though, and the fact that they refuse to sell any of their episodes in anything other than VHS quality means that the quality of the episodes suck.  The best recons come from this random dude named Richard who makes them with Windows Media Maker (which is a horrible program, but somehow he does a great job with them) and actually includes the assisting narration to the episodes that is fully available for free from the BBC!  Why nobody else ever thought to include this narration is a fucking mystery to me.

This is above average quality for a reconstruction.
Some of these are more painful to watch than that "Miracle of Life" video we all saw in high school

So what happened in Ethiopia?  Well, the Mirror's announcement that 106 episodes had been found seemed a little too good to be true, specifically because 106 is the exact number of episodes that remain lost.  The idea that every single episode could be available once again is a prospect that would make every Whovian orgasm simultaneously.  Therefore, we're all very weary of such promises.  The story on the Mirror's website was inundated with comments from fans who were all calling bullshit on this.  Some of them, understandably, had trouble with the fact that the article cited Doctor Who "expert" Stuart Kelly, whose first sentence of his quote began with "I was told by a friend..."  It's not something you normally hear in credible news reporting.  "An inside source at the White House today said that he heard from a friend who heard from a friend who heard from her cousin that Osama Bin Laden has been killed."

A commenter named Phil Cooper commented with great confidence:

"Ethiopia only got 77 episodes, and didn't GET any Troughton stories, and it only got half of the Hartnell ones. The most we could hope for from Ethiopia is 11 missing episodes and 66 that we've already got."

I saw this same comment repeated on Facebook and it dashed my hopes for a while.  But while Stuart Kelly's "friend" is a fairly weak source, so is someone who's commenting on The Mirror's website.  I decided to wait and see what the newspapers said the next day and see if anything is confirmed.

When Radio Times confirmed the news, that's when people started to sit up and listen.  Radio Times was founded by the BBC and, up until 2 years ago, was still a part of the BBC.  Even if there's no official connection between the magazine and the BBC anymore, the magazine isn't likely to publish bullshit rumors about its former owner.

Radio Times, however, didn't say the exact same things that the Mirror had said.  For starters, it made no claims about all 106 episodes being found.  It simply stated that the BBC would be making some long-lost episodes available for purchase this week.  It said that they were rumored to be from a "haul" found in Africa, but that details were "sketchy."  It seems to strongly imply that they know that there are more episodes that have been found than the few that are being released this week, but it didn't have a number:

Asked by RadioTimes.com if there were around 90 missing episodes from the 1960s a BBC statement said: “There are always rumours and speculation about Doctor Who missing episodes being discovered – however we cannot confirm any new finds.”

A spokeswoman added: “We can’t confirm because it’s not true, as far as I’m aware."

Doctor Who Online said on their Twitter page that they could confirm that the episodes were found, but also stated that they have heard it is not as many as 100.

Less than 24 hours after their original story, The Mirror returned to the interwebs to defend their original report.  When they talk about the statements that have contradicted their original report, they claim that the BBC is very secretive about Doctor Who news, pointing to their report in 2012 that Matt Smith was leaving at the end of 2013, which turned out to be true.

So now their is a press conference on Tuesday with a screening, presumably of the lost episodes.  Journalists are supposed to learn which episodes exactly have been found.  However, there's one thing I'm very happy about:  Radio Times seems to be very certain that these are Troughton episodes that are being released this week, not Hartnells.  Bleeding Cool was told that they can expect the episodes to be from "Enemy of the World" and "The Web of Fear," both of which are episodes I'd absolutely love to watch in their entirety!

But how many more episodes have turned up?  The Mirror's blind optimism seems too good to be true, but I also have to remind myself that they're just applying my own Rule 1 (Moffat lies) to the entire BBC.  In other words, I can't make fun of them that much if they sound kind of like me.  I'd love to be pleasantly surprised to find that they were right.  While they make a good point about their report about Matt Smith leaving turned out to be true, it should be stated that it may have been a coincidence and that the decision for Matt Smith to leave could very well have been made after their report.

Either way, I'm going to be happy to see a few new Troughtons soon!  I'll try not to get my hopes up too much about what else is coming, because the truth is that the worst case scenario at this point is still very good news.  At the very least, we have a few more Patrick Troughton serials, most likely "The Web of Fear" and "Enemy of the World."  That's still means that, potentially, Patrick Troughton could come to be more appreciated by other Doctor Who fans.  No matter what is to come on Tuesday, that's still really good news!

"Chuck Norris ain't got shit on me!"

The Order of Rassilon #11: William Hartnell, The Crotchety Old Fool

Every Doctor Who blog should include a ranking of the Doctors. Who is best and Who is worst in Who? So, with the series now on hiatus, I thought it might be a little fun to count down the Doctors, from worst to first. I call it "The Order of Rassilon."

I look forward to hearing who agrees with me, and who vehemently disagrees with me. So we're going to start it out with the worst in the history of the franchise, the First Doctor, William Hartnell.

I wear a weird ugly hat now.  Weird ugly hats are cool.

Yes, he started the franchise.  Yes, the original show couldn't have survived without Hartnell's unbridled enthusiasm for the show, keeping everybody's spirits up during filming.  Good for him.  Punk wouldn't have gone anywhere without the Sex Pistols, but they still sounded like a special ed class playing guitars.  Honestly, I don't know what it is about Hartnell that made the show so popular that it could survive a replacement of every single cast member (several times over).

Famously, film was so expensive during the black and white era and they had to keep shooting even when things went horribly wrong.

If this was the stuff that was deemed suitable for air, I want to see what exactly a Hartnell blooper reel would look like.  What's the stuff that he fucked up so badly that they couldn't salvage it for television? I'm sure it has to exist.  He'd have to have, like, wet himself or something.

As old and feeble as he looked, would you believe that Hartnell actually played the role from ages 55 through 58?  My dad is 79 and he looks about 20 years younger than Hartnell did in his Doctor Who years.  He must have done some really hard living in his younger years.  I imagine him waking up every morning and drinking a big glass of paint thinner and smoking about a carton of cigarettes.  When they brought him back for the 10 year anniversary episode (keep in mind, 68 years old), he was so feeble that they had to write the script in such a way that Hartnell could perform the entire episode sitting down.

He could have shot this on the can and nobody would have been the wiser.

So yes, when it comes to Doctor Who, first is worst.  But then again, the whole point of the series is that it's supposed to be constantly renewing itself, and constantly getting better.  For all we know, Hartnell might have been very proud of the fact that every Doctor that followed him surpassed him.

Probably not, though.