Review: DW: The Architects of History
Mar. 30th, 2010 10:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
charameiI'm starting to think that Big Finish's whole modus operandi at the moment is 'fixing the plots that RTD screwed up'.
Well, that and 'tying up the bloody timeline in ever more ingenious knots'.
This month, it seems to have been the turn of Journey's End, Waters of Mars and End of Time, all at once.
Spoilers follow.
Journey's End because we develop two more companions who never were: Waters of Mars and End of Time because this episode is all about the dangers of taking liberties with the timeline, with a side dish of 'the Doctor's dark side is the worst one of all'.
And yet, quite unlike those episodes, I did not spend the majority of it wanting to shove the Poetics and Ars Poetica down the writer's throat. And people say I'm impossible to please. I'm actually very easy to please: all you have to do is write well.
When last we left our intrepid (anti-)heroes, Klein had tricked the Doctor and buggered off in the TARDIS to rewrite history. Fast forward a couple of hundred years, rewind, fast forward, rewind, rinse, repeat ad nauseam and it's the 23rd century of the Galactic Reich - brought about largely by Klein fiddling with time every which when to make sure everything turns out successfully.
Oh, and the Doctor's been in a cell on the Moon for the past six months, scheming away. Unfortunately he only remembers the last three days of it, because that's when his original personality reasserted itself over the sea of changing timelines. Before he lost his memory, he'd picked up a companion, Rachel, played - ironically - by Lenora Crichlow (Annie from Being Human) and come up with a solid plan for escaping, which is about to be put into action. If only he knew what it was...
There are a couple of pitfalls that always have to be skirted with this type of plot: firstly, it is a non-episode. In fact, it's a non-trilogy, and negates Colditz as well for good measure (insert obligatory 'wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey' comment here). The whole point of this episode is to prevent this episode from ever happening. Of course, it's Doctor Who and that sort of plot happens twice a week, but this one was particularly well done: it doesn't jump timeline even once, but stays in one period, keeping true to its basic premise of 'what happens when someone just a little less moral than the Doctor gets this sort of power?'. It explores every major ramification of that central premise with elegance: from people being arrested for something they'll do in a decade or more, to Klein's own timeline being manipulated to keep her in check, to a companion the Doctor will never even know he had - up to hints of a much darker Doctor, who seems to have been about to take down the Reich at the head of an army of, er, sentient alien sharks.
Hm.
Anthropomorphic aquatics notwithstanding, this was a great episode in part because it was completely character-driven; a vital trick for getting around the small problem that none of it actually happened. Damn I cared about Rachel by the time it became apparent that not only would the Doctor never know she'd been his companion, but she never would be in the first place. Meanwhile, Klein's tying herself in knots trying to make history come out the way she wants it, and the Doctor spends most of the first half watching her mess up and, I suspect, laughing his arse off. (It's telling that he had the sonic screwdriver in the cell with him - evidently he spent six months chained up because he wanted to, not out of compulsion).
Klein turned out to be the perfect character to run this plot with: whereas the Tenth Doctor went/will go* utterly batshit power-crazy and then sort of collapse(d) a couple of minutes later, she's determined and ruthless enough to keep trying to fix her mistakes even as they mount up. The whole train-wreck also doesn't require any major shifts in personality for her, a definite advantage over Poor Confused Ten: and though she does get her comeuppance at the end, it's not without putting the Doctor in exactly the same situation as he was in for Waters of Mars - change the historical record (by wiping Klein from it) or let things carry on as they are, with humanity more or less extinct. That it's made explicitly clear what he chose without recourse to handwringing emoness - or even showing us the scene in question - is another definite advantage over the sister plot.
*Tenses. Always the first to suffer. Or is it the last?
I had only one question, and it's basically the same one as I had for Prisoner of the Daleks, but with even less justifications. Where are the Time Lords? Someone non-Gallifreyan has stolen a TARDIS and is rewriting history over and over and over again. If they're the ones who sent the Doctor, that's not made very clear: if they're not, what the hell were they doing about this?
In short: get this one, yes yes yes. It probably works better with Survival of the Fittest to give it context, but it was moving and well-plotted, thought-provoking and, at one point, utterly hilarious. It ends on a somewhat bittersweet note, and I think I'll miss Klein as a companion even though she was only in the role for three episodes. It's not melodramatic, it doesn't rely on deus ex machinae or bombastic, overblown emo speeches (although there are a couple: the Doctor's always up for some preaching, and then Crichlow does one later). It's just a good story, with wonderful characters, beautifully told.
Ooh. It's nearly April. That's... let's see...
Sixth Doctor reunites with Jamie
Eighth Doctor Adventures restarts
And... that other thing...
Oh, yes...
ELEVEN.
April is going to be a good month for Who geeks, one way or the other.
Well, that and 'tying up the bloody timeline in ever more ingenious knots'.
This month, it seems to have been the turn of Journey's End, Waters of Mars and End of Time, all at once.
Spoilers follow.
Journey's End because we develop two more companions who never were: Waters of Mars and End of Time because this episode is all about the dangers of taking liberties with the timeline, with a side dish of 'the Doctor's dark side is the worst one of all'.
And yet, quite unlike those episodes, I did not spend the majority of it wanting to shove the Poetics and Ars Poetica down the writer's throat. And people say I'm impossible to please. I'm actually very easy to please: all you have to do is write well.
When last we left our intrepid (anti-)heroes, Klein had tricked the Doctor and buggered off in the TARDIS to rewrite history. Fast forward a couple of hundred years, rewind, fast forward, rewind, rinse, repeat ad nauseam and it's the 23rd century of the Galactic Reich - brought about largely by Klein fiddling with time every which when to make sure everything turns out successfully.
Oh, and the Doctor's been in a cell on the Moon for the past six months, scheming away. Unfortunately he only remembers the last three days of it, because that's when his original personality reasserted itself over the sea of changing timelines. Before he lost his memory, he'd picked up a companion, Rachel, played - ironically - by Lenora Crichlow (Annie from Being Human) and come up with a solid plan for escaping, which is about to be put into action. If only he knew what it was...
There are a couple of pitfalls that always have to be skirted with this type of plot: firstly, it is a non-episode. In fact, it's a non-trilogy, and negates Colditz as well for good measure (insert obligatory 'wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey' comment here). The whole point of this episode is to prevent this episode from ever happening. Of course, it's Doctor Who and that sort of plot happens twice a week, but this one was particularly well done: it doesn't jump timeline even once, but stays in one period, keeping true to its basic premise of 'what happens when someone just a little less moral than the Doctor gets this sort of power?'. It explores every major ramification of that central premise with elegance: from people being arrested for something they'll do in a decade or more, to Klein's own timeline being manipulated to keep her in check, to a companion the Doctor will never even know he had - up to hints of a much darker Doctor, who seems to have been about to take down the Reich at the head of an army of, er, sentient alien sharks.
Hm.
Anthropomorphic aquatics notwithstanding, this was a great episode in part because it was completely character-driven; a vital trick for getting around the small problem that none of it actually happened. Damn I cared about Rachel by the time it became apparent that not only would the Doctor never know she'd been his companion, but she never would be in the first place. Meanwhile, Klein's tying herself in knots trying to make history come out the way she wants it, and the Doctor spends most of the first half watching her mess up and, I suspect, laughing his arse off. (It's telling that he had the sonic screwdriver in the cell with him - evidently he spent six months chained up because he wanted to, not out of compulsion).
Klein turned out to be the perfect character to run this plot with: whereas the Tenth Doctor went/will go* utterly batshit power-crazy and then sort of collapse(d) a couple of minutes later, she's determined and ruthless enough to keep trying to fix her mistakes even as they mount up. The whole train-wreck also doesn't require any major shifts in personality for her, a definite advantage over Poor Confused Ten: and though she does get her comeuppance at the end, it's not without putting the Doctor in exactly the same situation as he was in for Waters of Mars - change the historical record (by wiping Klein from it) or let things carry on as they are, with humanity more or less extinct. That it's made explicitly clear what he chose without recourse to handwringing emoness - or even showing us the scene in question - is another definite advantage over the sister plot.
*Tenses. Always the first to suffer. Or is it the last?
I had only one question, and it's basically the same one as I had for Prisoner of the Daleks, but with even less justifications. Where are the Time Lords? Someone non-Gallifreyan has stolen a TARDIS and is rewriting history over and over and over again. If they're the ones who sent the Doctor, that's not made very clear: if they're not, what the hell were they doing about this?
In short: get this one, yes yes yes. It probably works better with Survival of the Fittest to give it context, but it was moving and well-plotted, thought-provoking and, at one point, utterly hilarious. It ends on a somewhat bittersweet note, and I think I'll miss Klein as a companion even though she was only in the role for three episodes. It's not melodramatic, it doesn't rely on deus ex machinae or bombastic, overblown emo speeches (although there are a couple: the Doctor's always up for some preaching, and then Crichlow does one later). It's just a good story, with wonderful characters, beautifully told.
Ooh. It's nearly April. That's... let's see...
Sixth Doctor reunites with Jamie
Eighth Doctor Adventures restarts
And... that other thing...
Oh, yes...
ELEVEN.
April is going to be a good month for Who geeks, one way or the other.