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New Who 6.1: The Impossible Astronaut
Saturday, 23 April 2011 21:33So Moffat certainly does love his historicals. I noted at the end of last season that he was delivering a hit-rate of historical stories almost equivalent to Doctor Who in the mid-'60s. And it's not just that the bulk of this episode was set in 1969. It was the tropes he was playing around with at the beginning that really struck me - because they came straight out of the mid-'60s episodes.
See, I've got a little file of all the times 'history books' were directly referred to in Doctor Who in the mid-'60s - usually so that they could stand for the established, 'objective' view of history, as known to humanity, which the Doctor's adventures would then subvert and dance between the lines of. And that's exactly what we got at the start of this episode, too, when Rory asked Amy, "Do you really think he's back there trying to wave to us out of the history books?"
And I've flagged up case after case of in-story use of television screens as a parallel for the real-life viewers' experience of following the Doctor's adventures on their own televisions. That one's not unique to the '60s - it's been deployed over and over again throughout Doctor Who's history, including as recently as Moffat's A Christmas Carol. But this week's specific device of placing the Doctor within a Laurel and Hardy film reminded me very strongly of some of the '60s examples of it, and particularly the First Doctor's visit to a silent film set in The Daleks' Master Plan.
So, in short, it's not just that Moffat is setting stories in the past a lot. It's that he seems to me to be doing it with a very strong awareness of how Doctor Who has done that same thing within its own past. Indeed, as I've also said before when commenting on Whovian historicals, there does seem to be a particular tendency for Doctor Who stories which are set in the (real) past to become commentaries on the show's own past as well. And I could definitely see that going on here.
But of course that is by no means all, because the new thing which Moffat has really contributed to Doctor Who's treatment of history is his trademark tangling of time-lines - which was once again absolutely central to this story. That makes it hard to assess this episode it is own right at the moment. We've seen terrible and amazing things, but we've also been reminded that time can be rewritten. So who knows how it will all pan out next week. I've just got three squees and a question, which are going safely behind ( a spoiler cut )
Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.
See, I've got a little file of all the times 'history books' were directly referred to in Doctor Who in the mid-'60s - usually so that they could stand for the established, 'objective' view of history, as known to humanity, which the Doctor's adventures would then subvert and dance between the lines of. And that's exactly what we got at the start of this episode, too, when Rory asked Amy, "Do you really think he's back there trying to wave to us out of the history books?"
And I've flagged up case after case of in-story use of television screens as a parallel for the real-life viewers' experience of following the Doctor's adventures on their own televisions. That one's not unique to the '60s - it's been deployed over and over again throughout Doctor Who's history, including as recently as Moffat's A Christmas Carol. But this week's specific device of placing the Doctor within a Laurel and Hardy film reminded me very strongly of some of the '60s examples of it, and particularly the First Doctor's visit to a silent film set in The Daleks' Master Plan.
So, in short, it's not just that Moffat is setting stories in the past a lot. It's that he seems to me to be doing it with a very strong awareness of how Doctor Who has done that same thing within its own past. Indeed, as I've also said before when commenting on Whovian historicals, there does seem to be a particular tendency for Doctor Who stories which are set in the (real) past to become commentaries on the show's own past as well. And I could definitely see that going on here.
But of course that is by no means all, because the new thing which Moffat has really contributed to Doctor Who's treatment of history is his trademark tangling of time-lines - which was once again absolutely central to this story. That makes it hard to assess this episode it is own right at the moment. We've seen terrible and amazing things, but we've also been reminded that time can be rewritten. So who knows how it will all pan out next week. I've just got three squees and a question, which are going safely behind ( a spoiler cut )
Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.
