Comic Liberation

Drawn by me, written by Melissa Beattie

The Fortune of War

Two weevils crept from the crumbs. ‘You see those weevils, Stephen?’ said Jack solemnly.
‘I do.’
‘Which would you choose?’
‘There is not a scrap of difference. Arcades ambo. They are the same species of curculio, and there is nothing to choose between them.’
‘But you suppose you had to choose?’
‘Then I should choose the right-hand weevil; it has a perceptible advantage in both length and breadth.’
‘There I have you,’ cried Jack. ‘You are bit—you are completely dished. Don’t you know that in the Navy you must always choose the lesser of two weevils? Oh ha, ha, ha, ha!’

If you’ve been reading for awhile you’re aware of my tradition to read one Master and Commander book every year (though I may have to step it up a notch as I realized I will be 38 by the time I finish, at this rate! ). Desolation Island was very good, and The Fortune of War continued the upward trend. I truly envy O’Brian’s ability to churn out novel after novel with the same characters and roughly the same setting and make each one fresh, funny, exciting, and full of heart.

This book begins with Captain Jack Aubrey and ship’s surgeon (and spy) Stephen Maturin arriving in the Spice Islands after the debacle at Desolation Island. When Jack tells the Admiral there what has brought them and the battered Leopard to such a state, he is in fact recapping the last book for anyone who had forgotten, which is a handy device. The Leopard isn’t really seaworthy anymore, so Jack, Stephen, and a few of Jack’s midshipmen are to take passage on La Flèche back to England and take a new command there. Stephen is upset that they’re leaving the Spice Islands so soon, not giving him a chance to gather more natural specimens, but Jack is looking forward to heading home and seeing his beloved wife Sophie again. Even seeing a letter the worried Sophie has written makes him homesick: The sight of that familiar hand struck Jack with astonishing force, and for a moment he could have sworn he heard her voice.

They have, however, had more than enough contact with natural specimens, living and pickled, that Stephen has picked up on Desolation Island and elsewhere: ‘Now, sir,’ cried the Captain . . . addressing the wombat, one of the numerous body of marsupials brought into the ship by her surgeon, a natural philosopher—‘give it up directly, d’ye hear me, there?’ (Jack then asks Stephen to take back the wombat who is eating his hat, and then it climbs on Stephen and looks up in his eyes “with affection.”) Stephen, whose ability to be good at nearly everything is as infuriating as it is attractive, makes a winning contribution toward a game of cricket that is very nearly like Matt Smith kicking butt in “The Lodger.” On board La Flèche, life is rather pleasant, with long and rambling officers’ dinners (which is where the “weevil” story comes from), aside from growing tensions with America. It is 1812, and it’s not long before war is declared. In the meantime, though, Captain Yorke and Captain Aubrey have time for discussions about novels:

‘Every novel I have ever looked into is all about love; and I have looked into a good many, because Sophie loves them, and I read aloud to her while she knits, in the evening. All about love.’
‘Of course they are,’ said Yorke. ‘What else raises your blood, your spirits, your whole being, to the highest pitch, so that life is triumphant, or tragic, as the case may be, and so that every day is worth a year of common life? When you sit trembling for a letter? When the whole of life is filled with meaning, double-shotted?’

And Stephen makes a friend in the Scottish surgeon aboard La Flèche, an ill-mannered, pipe-smoking, keen observer of nature, and they spend their hours dissecting Maturin’s specimens. These moments seemed a little too idyllic to me, and I knew that O’Brian, being the storyteller that he notoriously is, was going to have disaster strike.

It did, and you can’t say it came from an unexpected quarter: the surgeon’s pipe set the entire ship ablaze, and all those not killed in the fire or the boat’s inevitable sinking are stranded in a small boat surviving on nothing but biscuit for weeks. Stephen, of course, suffered similar deprivations a few books earlier when he was stranded on an island for days with blue-footed boobies. But the men, including Aubrey, are dangerously close to starvation and dehydration before a miraculous rain of flying squid in a tempest! O’Brian casually refers to things like cannibalism and pedestry, but then the story has picked back up again. It is, as usual, riveting stuff.

They are picked up by Java, but it isn’t long before the U.S.S. Constitution appears. I knew it was a formidable foe because in middle school I wrote a short story about the ship, which had among its sailors an impostor named Lucy Brewer who insisted on disguising herself as a boy to fight in the war. She doesn’t make an appearance here, alas, but in a surprising defeat for “Lucky” Jack Aubrey, the crew of the Java surrender, and Jack is taken to a hospital outside Boston where he is treated for a shattered arm and generally low spirits. Unusually, half of the book takes place on land, and it’s daringly set on the East coast of the United States.

Stephen is a liminal figure in almost every circumstance. He is Irish, Catholic, and a Republican, but is working as a spy for His Majesty’s government. This is because he despises Napoleon as a tyrant and also because his mother was Catalan. However, his equivocal attitude toward the War of 1812 is echoed not only by some other characters in the book, but, it seems, by Patrick O’Brian himself. The Admiral’s sentiments on Americans are some typical American-bashing: ‘Damned rascals—convicts themselves, for the most part, piebald mongrels for the rest . . . Disloyal—hang the whole lot of them, the whole shooting-match.’ However, after declaration of war, Bonden (coxswain) tells Stephen that the lower decks of Java are not altogether pleased—they consist of mostly hands taken from merchant ships or those pressed on shore. All had American shipmates. They could not see the sense in fighting Americans: there were half a dozen Americans aboard at this moment, and they were practically the same as Englishmen—no airs or graces about them—and you could not say fairer than that. Fighting the French was different . . .

The battles Stephen and Jack have to fight in the second half of the novel are quite different than the ones they usually face. Jack is laid up in Dr. Choate’s progressive hospital among the mentally deranged, and I have no doubt that O’Brian research has led him to recreate the hospital from true reports. However, Stephen is much more the focus of this section. He meets again two characters central to the last book, Michael Herapath and mother of his child, would-be spy Louisa Wogan. Wogan eventually proves incidental but Herapath helps Stephen and Jack escape with their lives in a daring piece of espionage and danger that makes James Bond look like child’s play (strengthening rumors that O’Brian was himself a spy in World War II).

The continuing humorous and philosophical examinations of the differences between Americans and Brits give some levity to the cat-and-mouse (Americans can make neither coffee nor tea to the protagonists’ likings, and southern and northerners are compared). But at the crux of the conflict is Stephen coming in contact once again with Diana Villiers, the woman he has loved with desperation for about four books now. When he does finally meet her again, he begins to wonder if he still loves her after all. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have much time to wonder, as she is in as much danger as he and Jack are. SPOILERS My heart was keening for Stephen when he asked Diana to marry him, again, after his first rejection—I know no good can come of this. /SPOILERS

I was shocked when Stephen said “Ugh” to the Indian porter to the hospital, but O’Brian had this fascinating exchange up his sleeve:

‘You would not be astonished [that I hate all American government] if you were a native of this country, an aboriginal native. . . . Why did you say Ugh to me?’
‘I looked upon it as a usual greeting in the language of your nation—the Huron is represented as saying Ugh to the paleface in many authors, French and English. But if I am mistaken, sir, I ask your pardon: my intent was civil, though perhaps inept.’
‘Most of the Hurons I know have every reason to say Ugh to the paleface, French, English, or American: in the language that I speak—and I must tell you, sir, that there is an infinity of languages spoken by the original possessors of this continent Ugh is an expression of disgust, repulsion, dislike. I had thought of resenting it, but it appeared to me that you meant no offense; and then I have a certain fellow-feeling for you; we are, after all, both defeated, both victims of the Americans.’

There is one last daring battle at sea in the Shannon versus the Chesapeake, and O’Brian ends on a truly infuriating cliffhanger. I speculated in Desolation Island that Stephen and Diana’s story was at last going to reach a conclusion in this book, but I think that conclusion is still far off . . .

Your face is a room. I have lived there.
--Jane Draycott

skintastic

Today didn’t go as planned, but it did mean I got to visit the Wellcome Collection (which I saw once before during their exhibition Medicine Man) and the Petrie Museum (for the first time). I also tried to see stuffed Jeremy Bentham who I have tried to see for years, but could not find him on the UCL campus.

The new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection is Skin. I really like this museum/gallery as it is ultra-modern and thought-provoking with a wide range of objects (and it is free and always well-laid out). The Peruvian mummy who had been on display in the last exhibition was back, as well as some exquisite wax models, for example some way-too-lifelike ones of children with skin diseases. (What is with me and waxworks?) There was a sculpture/mask for someone recovering from cosmetic surgery, and in addition to that, I overheard a woman giving a tour talking about children growing up in orphanages with lack of touch. This all made me think of Phantom of the Opera (the poor Kay Phantom is never touched as an infant or child, even by his own mother. Surely this would validate what Christine says in the musical, “it’s in your soul / that the true distortion lies”).

As might be imagined, the preserved samples of skin with tattoos on them, collected from France between the 1880s and 1920s, were grimly fascinating (mostly of naked women but a curious one of a horse with a prize ribbon that said “1884”!). There were two books purported to be bound in human skin, one a treatise on virginity from the 17th century that was, according to the author’s foreword, bound in a virgin’s skin. And another supposedly bound in the skin of Crispus Attucks from the Boston Massacre, a token of respect, though the card said it most likely was not human skin.

I also liked the huge paintings from colonial South America supposedly demonstrating that the offspring of an Indian father and a European mother was okay, but that unions between Blacks and anyone else was bad. Really interesting that there was such an interest that this created a sub-genre of paintings. All bonkers, of course, as was the overtly racist 19th century soap ad showing a Black baby being washed and coming out white.

I don’t know why, but I quite liked the American film on skin and hygiene from 1926. Because the Wellcome Collection website is so good, you can watch it here.

I’d heard about the Petrie Museum from Simon Guerrier, and because I have visited lots of Egyptian collections around the world, I thought I might as well see it! Like the Egypt Centre in Swansea, it was quite small but absolutely full of objects. Unlike the Egypt Centre, which is rather modern in its design, the overwhelming amount of objects at the Petrie meant there were cases and cases full of early flints, bowls from all of the dynasties, and an enormous collection of jewellery from every period. I would have relished a bit more explanation, but as it is a working collection attached to a university, I understand it would have been a bit difficult. Nevertheless, I love ancient Egyptian objects and there were some noteworthy ones. Including probably the oldest surviving garment, a linen dress worn by a teenager and found in a pile of old rags in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Also a bead dress for a eight- or nine-year-old female dancer that was extremely provocative.

I always love seeing extant examples of Egyptian sandals (they’re so well-preserved!) and also found some razors (in different shapes for men and women). There was the skeleton of a girl buried in a giant bowl (the caption was rather more poetic and fanciful than explanatory). There was also, interestingly, a clump of “yellow hair” and pieces “of scalp,” I assume from the Ptolemaic period. And hidden all the way at the back, a Roman woman’s head with a mass of coiffed red hair. There were the usual shabtis, canopic jars, some nice Roman funerary portraits (though these were covered by a school project of giant pâpier-mâchéd shoes!).

The Big Bang

26/6/10 “The Big Bang”
The Doctor: Your girlfriend isn’t more important than the entire universe.
Rory: SHE IS TO ME!

The finale to series 5 (or whatever you want to call it) had the distinction of feeling satisfying yet leaving lots of tantalizing questions unanswered; giving some genuine joyful moments; being small and self-contained and yet very large and complicated in scope. It was chronologically complex yet there was emotion within it, and I think it did review the heart of what makes the Doctor our hero. To do that, though, it had to penetrate our darkest fears. The Vast Toffee, as we have seen, is good at doing that.

After the cliffhanger, we were told to fast forward 1, 894 years to young Amelia Pond in her strange house, praying to Santa Claus at Easter. Instead of being interrupted by the Doctor’s appearance, though, she only noted a gust of wind. Her aunt Sharon criticizes her for drawing a nightscape with stars; only the moon and sun are left in this post-Pandorica timeline. “You know this is all just a story.” Aunt Sharon has the psychiatrist over (at first I wondered if Amy had two aunts, or what was going on, but after being informed who she was by the brother of the actress who played her, it nominally made sense!). “We don’t want her joining these star cults . . .” Very “Silence in the Library,” which is as much a recognition of a theme or a motif as it might be a criticism. A bit like Harry Potter and his first OWL, Amelia receives a flyer passed through the letter slot by a Doctor-ish figure that talks about the Pandorica at an exhibition. It has a Post It with the Doctor’s handwriting in red pen (eagle-eyed viewers will remember these details from “The Lodger”) saying, “Come along, Pond.”

Aunt Sharon takes Amelia to the National Museum (a nice way of acknowledging that it’s the National Museum of Wales that has shown up a lot in locations this series). Among the exhibits are stone Daleks (I think I would have been more shocked and confused had Doctor Who Magazine not spoiled it for me. Finally Amelia sees the Pandorica—someone swipes her drink from behind her—and on the stone is another Post It saying, “Stick around, Pond.” This is a very appealing proposition for kids, I think—secret, mysterious messages meant just for you, encouraging you to stay behind in the cool but slightly spooky atmosphere of a museum . . . I once wondered what Donna did for the hours she spent waiting in the loo during “Partners in Crime”—it resulted in fan fic, and it’s very tempting again to see this spirit replicated in Amelia’s wait. For two seconds I was reminded of “Ghost Light” as the museum seemed to come alive. Amelia tripped over some stuffed penguins and then had the rather astonishing surprise of seeing Amy in the Pandorica greeting her, “Okay, kid, this is where it gets complicated.” And all before the opening credits. That’s concise writing and editing!

Then we go back to where we left off, with Auton Rory cradling dead Amy on the Roman field in 102 AD. Rory’s sad little musings might help people to recall what’s going on, but he also said, “Now we’ve never been born. Twice, in my case. . . . You would have laughed at that. . . . I could do with a ridiculous miracle right now.” Little impish flashes of the Doctor, wearing a fez and carrying a mop, interrupt his musings. The Doctor hands him the sonic screwdriver and tells him to get him out of the Pandorica. “Just point and press.” “How do you do that?” The Doctor’s Puck-like behavior makes me recall the “goblin/trickster/warrior” speech from the previous episode, but that doesn’t wash with the part about being imprisoned by a good wizard. Rory dutifully goes to the Pandorica and lets the Doctor out. “You gave me this,” he says. The Doctor still has the screwdriver, though—yet when the two screwdrivers touch, they short themselves out. “Me from the future,” says the Doctor happily. “I’ve got a future, that’s nice.”

Looking around them, they find the Underhenge littered with ash-like statues. “History has collapsed. These are like after-images—fossils in time.” Not sure I buy this, but it’s very picturesque! As for why the Doctor and Rory haven’t been affected by the end of all things, “We’re just the last life to go out.” Rory shows the Doctor Amy’s corpse and wonders if she can be brought back. “You’re a Nestene duplicate.” “But I’m Rory now!” The Doctor seems quite disaffected. “Probably [I could bring her back], if I had the time.” It struck me, upon watching “The Lodger” for the second time, that when the Doctor used reverse psychology to belittle and then goad Sophie, the First Doctor (and perhaps the Seventh) would have just stopped with the cruelty. The Eleventh Doctor’s pattern of cruelty then kindness does seem age-appropriate. Anyway, he has done the same thing here, goading Rory into fury (and getting a punch in the process). “I had to be sure.” Amy’s latent memories of Rory brought back “not just your face but your heart and soul.” They put Amy into the Pandorica. “She’s MOSTLY dead.” A bit Princess Bride? :-D Not sure I buy that the Pandorica can bring Amy back to life any more than I buy that the TARDIS can bring Grace and Chang Lee back . . . any more than I buy the fact the Doctor can “leave her a message for when she wakes” by pressing her forehead! Rory wants to know whether Amy would be safer in the Pandorica if he was guarding her. The Doctor quibbles but eventually agrees that she would. “You’d be conscious every second.” “How could I leave her?”

The Doctor has River’s vortex manipulator so he’s off to make the jumps into the future that enable him to do what we saw in the first few minutes. Moffat has streaks of pure romanticism that surface from time to time; Rory’s “long wait” is one of them. In the Pandorica exhibit, the looped film says, “Throughout 200 years, the Centurion was there, guarding it.” Up until 1941 during the Blitz. The Pandorica survived but since that was the last time the Centurion was seen, “he perished in the fires that night.” The Doctor is sprinting around, leaving his messages for Amelia . . . then Amy and Amelia meeting. Again, really not sure I buy the fact that they can exist at the same time and be able to touch each other and not explode. Yet . . . whatever. “Come along, Ponds,” says the Doctor, taking both Amelias. They are stopped by a stone Dalek coming to life. Again, stretching credulity, but I suppose you needed a simple menace for this sequence, so the Dalek would do. Plus, it’s cool to see Auton vs Dalek when the night watchman shows up . . . and it’s Rory the Auton! “Two thousand years I waited for you!” Very sweet, very romantic reunion.

The Doctor doesn’t understand how Amelia knew to come to the exhibition, so he quickly grabs a flyer to drop off at her letter slot in the near-past, etc. He also swipes the drink from her and returns it to her in the future. “There you go, have a drink.” The Doctor picks up a fez and a mop, thus knowing when to go to the past to give Rory the screwdriver. The fez is ixnayed. Everyone is curious about the Doctor’s short time hops. “Vortex manipulator—very bad for you. I’m trying to give it up.” A future fez-less Doctor next rolls down the steps. “Me from the future . . . yes, yes, of course he’s dead.” This is ominous (and also hard to believe, again!) but the Doctor doesn’t pause and he, Amelia, Amy, and Rory continue their climb to the roof of the museum. I do a little dance because I remember scaffolding going up at the Guildhall in Swansea and having a vague feeling about it being Doctor Who-related but only now do I seem to be vindicated. Anyway, on the roof they see the “Sun” exploding. “It’s the TARDIS . . . that’s what’s been keeping the Earth warm.”

The Doctor thus remembers that River was in the TARDIS and that the TARDIS must have put her in a time loop to keep her alive, at the eye of the storm. “Hi honey, I’m home,” he says, as he rescues her from the time loop and drops her off on the roof with the others. “I dated a Nestene duplicate once,” she says, which sounds very Captain Jack to me. “I wear a fez now,” says the Doctor, though Amy and River take great pleasure in disintegrating the fez. But how will they save the universe? “In theory you could extrapolate the entire universe” based on Amy’s memories and do a “reboot.” “One spark is all we need for the Big Bang 2.” Unfortunately, that’s when the stone Dalek shoots him (dead?). There’s a sequence with River and a gun and the Dalek which is a bit too drawn out for me. “It died,” she tells them later.

In the confusion, the Doctor has managed to crawl back into the Pandorica. “Reality’s collapsing.” By flying the Pandorica into the TARDIS, they can broadcast all the memory cells to all time zones at the same moment. But in return, the Doctor will be forgotten and will never have existed. This, of course, was an ultimate danger hinted at in “Flesh and Stone,” but it’s a pathos-tinged corollary to the fact the Doctor so often goes around saving people who never even knew he was there. “We all wake up where we ought to be,” but he’ll be “trapped in the nether space.” For a moment, I wondered if this was going to be a reboot on the scale that we saw a couple of time in the EDAs. River tells Amy that the Doctor wants to see her before he goes. “He doesn’t know me yet—now he never will.” Very sad!

The Doctor confesses to Amy what he was going to tell her last episode, why he took her with him. “Amy Pond, all alone . . . nothing is ever forgotten.” In exchange for forgetting the Doctor, Amy can remember the parents that were sucked into the crack and forgotten, before “The Eleventh Hour” even started. “You brought Rory back, you can bring them back, too.” There’s a moment of terrific, poignant sadness as the Doctor says, “You won’t need your imaginary friend anymore.”

He flies off in the Pandorica into the TARDIS explosion—yet wakes up on the floor of the TARDIS. “I escaped, then. . . . I can buy a fez.” However, realizing he’s in the TARDIS at the same time as an unseen adventure of his and Amy’s in “Florida in Space,” he thinks he’s “rewinding my time stream.” He’s going to disappear after he goes back to the beginning, when he first met Amy. “Goodbye, Doctor.” I have to say bravo to the eagle-eyed viewers who can feel very proud of themselves for noticing the Doctor’s subtle change of outfit in “Flesh and Stone”—that second speech was more desperate in tone for a reason, as it was the post-Pandorica-into-the-TARDIS timeline. Finally the Doctor goes back to “Amelia’s house when she was seven.” He’s at her bedside. “When you wake up, you’ll have a mum and dad. . . . We’re all stories in the end.” This is very sad and reminds me of the Second Doctor’s speech to Victoria, about his family living in his memories. The Doctor is disappointed he didn’t get a chance to tell Amy about how he acquired his blue box. “It was the best. I borrowed it, I was always going to take it back.” All his adventures will still be there “in her dreams.” He retreats before she wakes, and walks into the crack before the very beginning . . . “I don’t belong here anymore.”

Granted, this is all kind of a reversal of Human Nature, but to me, it also has more worldly parallels. While Doctor Who was off the air and unpopular, in a way the Doctor only lived on in the minds of the fans who loved it so much, it stayed flesh and blood to them. It’s the same kind of idea about faith and the strength of stories that gave us Floaty Messiah Doctor in “The Last of the Time Lords,” but a bit more personal and subtle. It’s poignant and rather affecting. When Amy awakes in the newly-rewritten 2010 on her wedding day, she cries, “You’re my mum!” even though it quickly dawns on her that she’s had her mum since, well, the day she was born. “And you’re my tiny little dad!” Everyone is preparing for the wedding, of course; yet Amy feels there’s something important she’s forgotten. She asks if Rory feels the same way. “Are you just saying yes because you’re scared of me?”

At the wedding, Amy receives a blank TARDIS book from River and starts crying. “Someone left it for you . . . it’s blank.” Why is she crying? “Because you’re happy, probably.” “No, I’m sad! Why am I sad?” Rory’s a little at a loss to answer this! Then Amy remembers and shouts, “I remember you!” Then the Doctor arrives in his “brand new ancient blue box.” “How did we forget the Doctor?” asks Rory. The Doctor pops out of the TARDIS dressed in very smart top hat and tails. “I’m Amy’s imaginary friend.” He says hello to the “brand new Mr. Pond.” “I only came for the dancing.” Again, I think of Cornell and his Christmas short stories, “The Hopes and Fears of All the Years” and “Deep and Dreamless Sleep,” for the way the Doctor is triumphant and joyously part of the proceedings, yet someone just a bit removed. “The boy who waited,” he says of Rory.

Outside on the way to the TARDIS, he hands River her diary. “You always dance at weddings,” she says. “I didn’t peek,” he replies. “Are you married?” he asks her. “Are you asking?” “Yes.” “Yes.” “Was that a yes or yes?” “You’re going to find out very soon now.” (Well, we hope so.) Rory and Amy run out and want to join them in the TARDIS. Strangely, despite Rory’s devotion, Amy still seems to want to get into the Doctor’s pants. “It’s my wedding.” “OUR wedding!” “Space and time isn’t safe . . . the silence is still out there.” And first, “an Egyptian goddess is on the loose in the Orient Express . . . in space.” “I think it’s goodbye.” And it’s goodbye to Leadworth as they all leave in the TARDIS until Christmas. It’ll be a very interesting mix of companions now.

More discerning viewers than I will have a more exhaustive list, but there are a lot of unanswered questions. Who was controlling the TARDIS and caused it to explode and is presumably the voice saying “Silence will fall”? Is it the same person who tried to create their own time machine in “The Lodger”? What will become of the Silurians in 3010? Is the Doctor now in his first incarnation again or still on eleven? I’m sure all these questions will be eventually answered, years down the road.

The Pandorica Opens

19/6/10 “The Pandorica Opens”
“Impossible things just happen.” –The Doctor

I feel a bit of pity for anyone who decided now was the time to start watching Doctor Who, as they might have been alienated by the first few minutes. Nevertheless, for those who have been following it week by week, it was a nice salute to the entire season and a reminder that up there, the Vast Toffee has it all planned out. Going in chronological order, it starts off with Vincent van Gogh in 1890 having a fit and his Doctor and landlady (?) examining his latest ghastly work. “He’s very ill.” “It’s even worse than his usual rubbish.” The master of suspense, the Vast Toffee keeps us guessing about the painting for the next ten minutes or so. Churchill sees it in 1941—“You’re not supposed to understand it.” He phones up the Time Vortex (interesting, that!) and gets River Song, in prison, in the Stormcage Facility 5145. He’s expecting the Doctor. “You’re phoning the Time Vortex—it doesn’t always work.” In any case, she learns about the painting and uses her Poison Ivy-esque lipstick to escape. She ends up in the Royal Collection, where Queen Elizabeth from “The Beast Below” wonders why she’s there to steal a painting. Four stories have been alluded to in very quick succession, and it’s neatly done.

Maldovarium 5145 (which looks a bit like the Firefly universe, down to River’s exquisite gown) is where she blackmails—well, it looks like the Duke of Manhattan—for a Vortex Manipulator (from the hand of a “handsome Time Agent,” but presumably not Jack unless he gets his arm chopped off in the next series of Torchwood). Presumably she next goes to Planet 1 and graffitis the “oldest cliff face in the universe” with “Hello Sweetie” and some coordinates, as that’s where Amy and the Doctor next go and see the inscription. (The TARDIS being able to translate anything is not strictly true. It didn’t work in “The Impossible Planet.”) The Doctor and Amy follow the coordinates to Earth 102 AD. They see a Roman camp, and Amy announces it was her “favorite topic at school.” A soldier then hails the Doctor as Caesar and brings him to Cleopatra (as one of the soldiers later points out, Cleopatra VII—if that’s the one they mean—should have been long, long dead at this point. I suppose it’s a cute way of referencing things like the Doctor’s conversation in Ghosts of India where Donna wonders how he knows about the interior of Cleopatra’s bed chamber).

Cleopatra is, indeed, River Song, and after showing the Doctor and Amy Vincent’s painting, they ride off to Stonehenge (presumably). (The painting shows the TARDIS exploding in different directions—“it might not be that literal” says River.) It seems that the events of “Time of the Angels” are in River’s future, though that’s quite confusing—hopefully it will be explained a bit more in the finale. In any case, having recently seen “The War Games,” the horseback riding and Roman legions seem like a nice homage (like was said at the Mythological Dimensions of Doctor Who launch, Romans are much more the trendy civilization to be seen in Doctor Who; the Greeks haven’t been glimpsed since “The Horns of Nimon”). At the base of Stonehenge is the Pandorica, “a box—a cage—a prison,” a myth and legend and “not real” according to the Doctor. Descending into a tomb-like atmosphere provided Indiana Jones shorthand for suspense (and I did think the Cybermen clips were linked to this tomb bit, for obvious reasons). Like the whole season, we’re left wondering if this is “more than just a fairy tale.”

According to the stories, a “goblin/trickster/warrior—the most feared being in all the cosmos” was trapped “by a good wizard.” Anyone with the McCoy era burned into their brain will think the good wizard was the Doctor (and River even makes the connection), but the Doctor has been known by all the above, so it’s very ambiguous. Is he the villain, the victim, the destroyer, the creator? Amy speculates on the name “Pandorica,” saying it sounds an awful lot like the story of Pandora, which was one of her favorites as a child (details about who Pandora was and hope being left in the box, etc, are not mentioned). Is Amy Pandora? She didn’t open the TARDIS in “The Eleventh Hour,” if memory serves correctly; the Doctor climbed out. The Doctor notices the coincidence, but says, “unless you’re busy, then you ignore coincidence” (similar to what he said in “Boom Town” about Bad Wolf). With Stonehenge as big transmitters telling people to go away, the Doctor wonders who has converged on them. There are Daleks, and Cybermen, and a long list of old enemies—I noted Zygons and Draconians among them. The Doctor wonders how they are going to defeat so many Daleks, bets on the element of surprise, but then talks sense—“that would be a fairly short surprise!” “You have to run,” says River. “Run where?” “Fight, how?!”

The Doctor, rather bafflingly, puts his faith in the contingent of Roman soldiers. He gets “a volunteer” after River goes up to talk to them. I didn’t predict anything else correctly, but I knew the volunteer must be Rory. Amy has decided to ask the Doctor about the diamond ring she found in his pocket earlier. “If something can be remembered,” he says, “it can come back.” This is a nice but elusive statement. There’s a fun bit of Cybermen nonsense—a broken-off arm shooting at the Doctor and Amy and finally electrocuting the Doctor; Amy grappling with a scary Cyberman head that ejects its human skull at her and then tries to eat her with its neck wires/spinal cord and then spits a dart at her to “assimilate her.” The Cybermen has seen a version of Sleepy Hollow and puts its head back on its body. Amy is only saved by Rory the Roman and his gladius (that’s sword-thing to you).

Amy faints before Rory can say anything, but the Doctor, in a Doctor-ish manner, ignores Rory’s reappearance for a bit. “How do you do?” he finally manages. Of all things for Rory to come back as, a Roman soldier is quite satisfying, IMHO. He seems a lot more assured in this guise, and I like him tons more. “How can you be here?” the Doctor asks. “I don’t know.” The Pandorica itself sort of resembles Aztec calendars. Meanwhile, overhead all alien baddies ever are converging in their pretty space ships to confound (yet the Romans don’t seem too confounded). The Doctor makes a Doctor-ish speech to them on top of a stone, shouting at the darkness. It seems a victory for the Doctor and his lack of weapons, his ability to talk people down (the bad-ass-ness of it witnessed in “The Eleventh Hour”). “Something else I don’t have . . . anything to lose!” (This isn’t strictly true! River, Amy, Rory, the TARDIS!!) “Do the smart thing—let somebody else try first.”

Having seemingly successfully driven off the hordes, the Doctor, Amy, and Rory mill around, the Doctor sends River to retrieve the TARDIS. Amy doesn’t remember Rory. “How can she not remember me?” The Doctor explains what happened in “Cold Blood,” how Rory was erased from time, and quite sensibly wants to know what happened from Rory’s perspective. He remembers dying and then woke up, “head full of Roman stuff.” (The fan fic possibilities are endless.) “I thought you’d come back for me,” Rory says with pathos, a bit reminiscent of Captain Jack. “Why am I here?” asks Rory. The Doctor, looking on the bright side, declares it a miracle (with a little hint of “Everybody lives!”).

River is having trouble with the TARDIS and can’t seem to move anywhere other than 26/6/2010. (I love that the TARDIS uses the European dating system!!) She discovers a Roman book where everything is just as it appears in 102 AD (or wherever they really are), discovers Amy’s Legend of Pandora book (alongside the Raggedy Doctor and Amy dolls), and things start to look like Sally Sparrow and her 17 DVDs. Great fodder for my Unsilent Library essay—“they’re all in a book.” She phones up the Doctor at the Pandorica, relaying this information—“Something’s using memories.” Realizing the Romans aren’t garden-variety Romans, she says, “They actually believe their own cover story.” With “The War Games” still in mind, I was thrown off the scent (perhaps intentionally) and wondered if they were like the brainwashed soldiers in the different zones in the War Games. “They used Amy to get close to you.” Massive conspiracies within conspiracies as the Roman start acting very machine-like and I write in my notebook, “Autons?”

They are Autons, which Rory realizes. Unfortunately, he’s got Amy in his arms, who’s crying, because she’s remembered who he is, because she’s remembered the ring (or so she says—I think it’s something else). “Amy, you’ve got to run!” Rory snaps, reverting to Auton-consciousness. That was a great twist, I thought, one I didn’t see coming. Rory the Auton! Surely that means the real Rory is actually gone? Where could the baddies get the memories of Rory if he’d never existed? What is going on? The Doctor would like to know, too, as, like Cyrano de Bergerac (if a little more literally), he’s surrounded by “all his old enemies” (and strangely, the Judoon). River can’t get out of the TARDIS and can’t get out of the time zone. Rory the Auton accidentally shoots Amy (“there are crocodiles”) but I’m afraid it doesn’t have a whole lot of emotional impact because with Rory in and out of the story, it’s easy to believe Amy will be back, or at least explained as something other than what she is. Perhaps, as has been suggested, it’s all still a dream from “Amy’s Choice”? Or maybe the whole series has been a dream of some sort? In any case, I’m no good at making predictions so I have none to make.

I was wracking my brains trying to figure out what was the Pandorica and the only answer I could think of was the Doctor! So it’s appropriate that “an alliance” of his enemies (rather like a Roger Langridge comic) seal him in some kind of torture chamber (though they all say it’s just to prevent him from using the TARDIS to create the crack and destroy the universe). It feels a bit like poor Eight destroying Gallifrey in The Gallifrey Chronicles . . . and there’s no trailer for next time, so let’s see them get out of that one!

The Lodger (SPOILER)

12/6/10 “The Lodger”
They call me the Doctor. I don’t know why. I call me the Doctor, too. –The Doctor

I was familiar with the Gareth Roberts comic of the same name from Doctor Who Magazine because I read it, but I have to admit the title (because of its Ripper association in my mind) had a sinister ring. I seem to be the only one who didn’t like “Vincent and the Doctor,” so while in general I am a Gareth Roberts fan, I was prepared to go either way on this. I don’t know how it would stand up to repeated viewings, but in the first instance it was charming, funny, very natural, and showed (I think) the spark that the producers saw in Matt Smith when they cast him and the rest of us, feeling loyal, trusted their judgment but ultimately weren’t quite sure. Production-wise, it must have been a popular episode because the settings are few (the TARDIS, the residential building, the park, the call centre), the cast list quite small (in general, this season has focused on fewer characters with intensity), and the wheeze so tremendously simple. Yet, I find it all works well.

Very little has carried over, story-wise, from the comic, other than the general premise (the Doctor sharing a flat with an ordinary bloke, trying to be ordinary but just being terrific and weird and causing the normal bloke much angst). The sci fi element is highly creepy but in the end, rather easily defeatable (and I don’t mind that). In the comic, poor, underused Mickey was the ordinary bloke, who had emotional baggage of his own; in the episode, he was intensely likeable Craig. The setting is nominally Colchester (though a street in Cardiff serves the purpose just as well). There’s a very short introduction in which Star Wars¬-like music plays, the Doctor gets dumped onto the turf, and “One day later,” the quiet block of residential houses where the Doctor landed conceals a sinister secret. A passing nerd hears from the intercom, “I need your help, there’s been an accident.” I think it’s both optimistic and depressing that people are shown to stop to help. It means the inevitable: there are still good people willing to stop and help strangers, but their concern being rewarded by death (and a mildew stain on the ceiling) is quite depressing. (Still, I suppose, dozens of people could have walked away from the plea for help, we just don’t see them onscreen because the pacing in this story is impeccable.)

Psycho music and flickering lights (all rather similar in mood to “The Eleventh Hour”) see the nerd to his doom as he goes up the flight of stairs at number 79. As he disappears, Sophie, Craig’s “friend who’s a girl,” uses her set of keys to come into his flat and greets him. “Who lives there again?” They’re in for a night of “pizza, booze, and telly” (admittedly, if you hadn’t been watching the promo material, you wouldn’t up to this point know who Sophie is). “That’s your mission in life: find me a man,” Sophie says, dispelling all confusion on that point (and letting us know that Craig is looking for a flatmate). I wonder if there’s any significance to the things on Craig’s fridge (since later the crack appears behind the fridge): there’s a flyer for a Van Gogh exhibition, a post box magnet, a donut (I think) and the old skool magnetic letters in rainbow shades. (Words, words, words.) When Sophie is reluctantly called away, the buzzer rings and Craig, seeing it as his chance to tell her how he feels about her, charges toward the door. “I love you!” he cries, to the amused Doctor who is on his doorstep. “That’s good, because I’m your new lodger.”

The Doctor, in his imitable style, barges in on Craig. He isn’t a “young professional,” he’s an “ancient amateur.” This is the first of a long string of amusing one-liners in rapid-fire fashion. He hands Craig a brown carrier bag of money (“have some rent. Don’t spend it all on sweets—unless you like sweets. I like sweets”). The Doctor gives Craig a hilariously effete pair of kisses—“that’s how we greet these days?” Craig, while not entirely agreeing, allows the Doctor to the flat including “his” room. In order to credentials, he shows his NHS and NI numbers and references (including one from the Archbishop of Canterbury). Somewhat reluctantly, Craig agrees. He starts telling the Doctor about his life working at a call centre, how he has a management plan for it but because he just mans the phones he’s not allowed any input. “Why am I telling you all this?” he sputters. “I have one of those faces,” the Doctor says. Ha! “Has anyone ever told you you’re a bit weird?” In response, the Doctor is faintly critical of Craig’s lifestyle—he doesn’t want to go on holiday, move anywhere, do much out of the ordinary. “You’re starting to look like it [the sofa].” After the Doctor has whipped up Craig an unlikely but delicious meal, the Doctor starts questioning him about the flat.

Then Craig tells him, “We have an arrangement.” The Doctor doesn’t get this (it’s wonderful to have the Doctor so delightfully obtuse in such matters, it tallies with his refusal of Amy earlier). “You know, if you want to bring a girlfriend or . . . boyfriend around . . .” The Doctor finally thinks of a way to make this plain, by shouting, “I WAS NOT EXPECTING THIS!” LOL. He retreats to his room while Craig phones up Sophie. “What if he’s a dealer?” Sophie wonders, putting the Doctor’s strange lack of name together with the sack of disposable income. Meanwhile, the Doctor is talking to Amy on an earpiece. It’s very strange, but we usually get a “Doctor-lite” story round about here in the lineup, and this is actually the “companion-lite” story—Craig has become the companion, in a sense, and Amy isn’t really missed, I find (then again, I’m not lusting over her so perhaps it is worth grounding the story and giving some urgency to it by cutting back and forth with her in the TARDIS). The thing’s falling down around her, and the Doctor has gone down to Earth to try to fix whatever’s interfering with the TARDIS and causing such a bad reaction. It’s “locked in a materialization loop.” Craig, however, can’t hear any of this conversation—“anyone listening would hear absolute gibberish”—and because Craig already thinks the Doctor’s weird, he doesn’t mind. The Doctor asks Amy for advice on passing as a human being. “You’re just going to be snide,” he snaps when Amy just makes fun of him. Then there’s a “localized time loop” after the Doctor has tried to defend the bow tie. So, there are problems.

The next morning, the Doctor is merrily in the shower, recalling Pertwee in “Spearhead from Space” for all intents and purposes. “How long are you going to be in there?” asks a perturbed Craig. In his wonderment, Craig starts up the stairs to the sinister flat above. The Doctor catches him after falling down in the bathroom and grabbing the curtain, throwing a towel around himself, and clutching Craig’s electric toothbrush instead of the sonic screwdriver, but Craig is all right and more than a little embarrassed by the Doctor’s behavior. It’s compounded when a confused Sophie shows up. This is a very funny sequence (for me it would have been distracting had it been Tennant, but it’s just slapstick and silly and yay!). “You didn’t tell me he was gorgeous,” Sophie mutters.

Craig is inviting the Doctor to come along with him and Sophie to a “pub league,” ie where pub friends play football. It suddenly dawned on me why this episode was in the running at the time it was: it’s the World Cup, stupid. But as an idea, it works wonderfully. I was just thinking, in the midst of British World Cup mania, you wouldn’t catch Hartnell playing football. Yet with Matt Smith, who as we all know used to play football, the Doctor completely solidifies his place as a football-obsessed child’s hero, and loses no credibility for the Rest of Us, because it’s perfectly in keeping with the story (from what I recall of the comic, the Doctor played football in that as well). The idea, of course, is that poor Craig gets shown up because the lackadaisical Doctor is brilliant at “footie,” has captured the accolades of Craig’s friends and sympathy of Sophie, and Craig now feels bits of his life being stolen away by the Doctor who, despite himself, he likes. Rough.

There’s a wonderful moment as one of Craig’s friends wants the Doctor to “annihilate” the other team next time, which the Doctor misinterprets and refuses with towering anti-violent zeal! As the Doctor works with Amy to secure the TARDIS, Craig asks for some alone time with Sophie. They are too British and too polite to insist the Doctor leaves them be. So the Doctor makes conversation with Sophie and finds out her secret dream is to work with animals at an orangutan sanctuary. “You’re going to stay secure and a little bit miserable for the rest of your life?” The Doctor may be sincere in this, but they interpret it as reverse psychology. “Are you going to live with monkeys now?” Sophie has renewed direction, qualifications or not, but Craig is sad about losing his friend (and love of his life). He makes the mistake of touching the mildew stain from upstairs and gets very sick. The Doctor brings him breakfast—“that’s . . . normal”—and saves his life the next morning, with a combination of tea and compost! “Got to excite the tannin molecules . . .!” (Tannin does have astringent properties, just one of the many reasons tea is good for you!) There’s a nice tender moment as the Doctor cares for Craig—“you’re important . . .”

Later Craig realizes he’s been in bed ‘til midday, he has an important meeting at work, so he struggles in to the call centre, where the Doctor is doing his job! This is very funny because I read a great Short Trips short story where the Fifth Doctor had an inspired conversation with a call centre telemarketer, and now he’s on the other end of it! He makes a client hold so he can eat a biscuit. “I’ve never worked in a place like this . . . well, I’ve never worked anywhere!” Craig is very upset and takes a peek into the Doctor’s room, which of course is not a room but a homemade . . . well, something like a wibbly wobbly timey wimey detector. Craig tells the Doctor to pack his bags. “What have I done?” “Everybody loves you!” But they’re both missing the point; Sophie, following the sinister plea for help, has gone upstairs and vanished. The Doctor cracks his head on Craig’s, initiating some kind of mind meld (Tennant had a much less comic and more sensual way of doing this!), which gets Craig up to speed but also gives us yet another peek of the previous ten actors to play the part! Where is all this going? The Doctor has gotten “psychic help from a cat” to spy on above stairs. “There is no upstairs,” he tells Craig, who’s been blinded by a perception filter all these months. “The time engine is the flat!”

They race up to save Sophie, see the rather awe-inspiring set for this time/space ship (again, where is this going?), and meet the “emergency crash program,” drawing in human pilots until it finds the right one. It’s the kind of appalling behavior without malice that reminds one of the Clockwork Robots of “The Girl in the Fireplace.” The Doctor quickly sums up for Sophie’s benefit—“I have questions”—and then asks Craig to overcome his fears and try to become the ship’s next candidate. “Concentrate on why you want to stay!” Craig shouts out his love for Sophie, who immediately responds, “I love you, too, you idiot!” “For God’s sake, kiss the girl!” shouts the Doctor, who is echoed by Amy. It works, the ship goes away, they run downstairs, there is no upstairs flat, Craig is amazed that the perception filter caused passersby not to see.

It’s interesting that this story makes being a homebody an acceptable and rightful life-path, while caricatured in people like Mickey and Rory, it’s always seemed the less impressive option (well, because the Doctor ran away from home, for better or worse). Sophie and Craig have well and truly “spoiled their friendship.” There is bittersweetness to the Doctor’s departure after Craig tells him to keep his set of keys, rather like Paul Cornell’s “The Hopes and Fears of All the Years.” And speaking of bittersweet, with the last flourish of time travel, Amy finds in the Doctor’s pocket Rory’s ring, without knowing what it is. I sense we’re on a collision course!