New Who 5.4: The Time of Angels
Thursday, 29 April 2010 21:08![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
strange_complexIt's taken me a few days to get round to writing this up, but I did think it was a great episode - easily the best of season five so far, even though it was only one half of a two-parter. As in The Beast Below, it was absolutely bursting with fantastic ideas (albeit including a few recycled ones), and I still feel like I could do with seeing a transcript of the first part in particular before I can be completely certain that I've picked up on every nuance of the exchanges with River Song.
River herself I wasn't looking forward to encountering for a second time. Like a lot of people, I was badly put off her in Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead because I felt that the script kept telling me how great and special she was, but without giving me any reason to agree. I get that that's partly the effect of introducing a character who has a back-story with the Doctor which we haven't seen yet, and that that in itself is a clever and exciting thing for Steve Moffat to be doing at all. But I just didn't like the way she came across. This time, though, the script is telling me some much more exciting things about her - that she is tricksy and untrustworthy and has hidden agendas. That suddenly makes her fun and interesting to have around.
What exactly her hidden identity or agenda is is anyone's guess. I've seen people guessing various Time Lords of old - and River's ability to pilot the TARDIS and knowledge of Old High Gallifreyan certainly point towards a greater familiarity with Time Lord culture than most ordinary beings seem to possess now that the Time War has taken place. Since she's female, the most popular guesses have been the Rani (femme fatale with red nail varnish) or Romana (her formal, systematic training on the TARDIS vs. the Doctor's casual but extensive hands-on experience). But I just can't see either of those characters going around calling the Doctor 'sweetie' (which I still find annoying), even as part of an act. Besides, she is clearly not actually a Time Lord on either of the occasions the Doctor has met her so far, or he would sense it. So if she is (essentially) an old-school Time Lord, she must be fob-watched into human form, which a) I think would just come across as a cheap trick if it was done a second time in New Who, and b) doesn't really explain how come she still retains a knowledge of Old High Gallifreyan and piloting a TARDIS.
So I don't think she is an old-school Time Lord, but I don't really know who she is. One possibility is Jenny, who after all was saved from on-screen death by Steven Moffat. She could have been taught Time Lord history by the Doctor - but who would have taught her to pilot the TARDIS according to the book? Also, she'd have to be fob-watched too for the Doctor not to recognise her as Time Lord - and there is no obvious reason why she would need to be. Not to mention the fact that it casts a very icky light over the flirtatious aspect of The Doctor and River's relationship! Because of the 51st-century setting, it's also tempting to think that she is a Time Agent, like Jack Harkness (and John Hart in Torchwood). Her roguish demeanour certainly matches theirs very nicely, and again some basic knowledge of the Time Lords seems a likely component of Time Agency training. But Old High Gallifreyan and Advanced TARDIS Piloting seem a bit beyond that.
And that TARDIS piloting is especially problematic, because the nature of the knowledge she displays makes it pretty clear that she's telling the truth about someone other than the Doctor teaching her how to do that. OK, so once she's told him in this episode about leaving the brake on, he could teach that particular piece of information back to her later on in his future and her past (as happened with her teaching him that he could actually open the TARDIS doors by clicking his fingers at the end of Forest of the Dead). But it doesn't seem very in-character for him to do that, since he immediately says that he likes the wheezing noise. In my view, if he had taught her how to fly the TARDIS, it's unlikely he'd have taught her the sort of text-book approach she's displaying.
So who did teach her? The only Time Lord other than the Doctor who has been active in the wider Universe since the Time War is the Master - so has she at some point somehow been his wife? As for the other Time Lords - my understanding of the Time War is that once that happened, everything Time Lords had ever done anywhere within the universe ceased ever to have happened, so that all but the 'higher beings' had no idea they had ever existed. So if anyone other than the Doctor or the Master taught River Song TARDIS flight (or Old High Gallifreyan for that matter) amd she still remembers it, then that must mean that either a) she is some kind of 'higher being' or b) the Time Lords are less lost than we think.
Of course, River could simply be someone or something we know nothing at all about yet. I very much doubt we are going to find out the answer in next week's episode, though I think we probably will find out at the end of the season. And I think that the issue of how she learnt what she knows about Time Lord culture is going to be pretty central to the revelation of her real identity.
Incidentally, if all members of the 'church' in this period have sacred names, that means that the names we know them by in this story (Octavian, Bob, Christian, Angelo, Marco) are not their 'real' (as in 'given-at-birth') names. That's a good example of Moffat's talent for detail, since a) the same certainly applies to the Doctor and probably also to River Song, so that it reinforces this theme, and b) I note that several of the names chosen have Christian resonances, also echoing the themes inherent in the idea of the church as a literal army and the idea of the Angels themselves.
As for the plot, obviously there's loads still to be resolved in the next episode. On this front, I found myself wondering about exactly what happened to the Aplans. This episode left us assuming that their civilisation had been wiped out by the Angels. But the normal way that Angels dispatch their victims is to send them back in time. If you tried to wipe out a civilisation that way, surely all of the vast numbers of people you sent back would warn everyone else, allowing them to prevent the Angels from ever getting a hold on their civilisation in the future? I'd really like to know exactly what happened to them, and whether any of them are likely to reappear or get a chance to tell their story. Also, three cheers for yet another hint that the Whoniverse and the H2G2 universe are one, since we can now speculate about whether Zaphod Beeblebrox was an Aplan. :-)
Meanwhile, I feel I'm getting the hang of Amy now. She's not my favourite companion ever - I liked Donna's self-confidence, assertiveness and explicit sense of the excitement of what she was doing better. Amy seems to me to be approaching her travels with the Doctor more casually. She's pleased to be there, and has some agendas of her own ('You promised me a planet!'). But when they arrive in a new setting, her basic approach seems to me to be to just tag along and have fun and see what happens. I guess that is a factor of their respective ages. Donna had lived long enough to know how boring normal adult life could be, and wanted to leave that behind for ever in favour of travelling with the Doctor. It was literally everything to her. But I think Amy is still young enough to accept travels through space and time as pretty cool, but fundamentally just something fun to do while putting off an adult life of her own which she does eventually want to return to.
In this episode, I felt that the scene between her and the Doctor when she thought her hand had turned to stone was absolutely brilliant for both of them. Amy suddenly demonstrated her absolute understanding of how serious the situation was and how much it mattered for the Doctor to sort everything out, which was a nice counter-balance to her teasing him and calling him 'Mr Grumpy-face' at the start of the episode. And the way he dealt with it also struck a fantastic balance between his very real fondness for her and acknowledgement of her bravery, and his light-hearted, matey relationship with her. This is a dynamic which is really working for me.
I find myself saying repeatedly in my Classic Who reviews that the way the programme uses on-screen images within the stories is almost always meta-referential - and that goes with bells on it for this story too. In-story televisual images of both River Song and one of the Angels are central to this episode - and to me the key thing about both of them is that they present us with images which are not just passive objects for us (or the characters) to gaze upon. They are active - they look right back at us, demand that we do things or even come out of the screen and attack us. This is brilliant. It not only reinforces the theme of the power and even the autonomy of images, which is explicitly addressed via the dialogue around the book which River found (and is clearly going to be pursued further in part 2). But it also plays around with the fantasy that this might somehow be true of the televisual image which we are sitting watching, at home in our living rooms. Is the Doctor suddenly going to turn round and start talking to us - as he also did in the DVD Easter Eggs in Blink, in fact? Even while our rational minds know perfectly well he won't, raising this possibility adds a lot to the excitement of watching the episode I think.
Finally, it may just be an easy way of creating an exotic-yet-familiar feel for the alien cultures featured in this story. But I really felt that there were a lot of resonances here with the ancient world. This is my list of the ones I noticed:
Click here to view this entry with minimal formatting.
River herself I wasn't looking forward to encountering for a second time. Like a lot of people, I was badly put off her in Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead because I felt that the script kept telling me how great and special she was, but without giving me any reason to agree. I get that that's partly the effect of introducing a character who has a back-story with the Doctor which we haven't seen yet, and that that in itself is a clever and exciting thing for Steve Moffat to be doing at all. But I just didn't like the way she came across. This time, though, the script is telling me some much more exciting things about her - that she is tricksy and untrustworthy and has hidden agendas. That suddenly makes her fun and interesting to have around.
What exactly her hidden identity or agenda is is anyone's guess. I've seen people guessing various Time Lords of old - and River's ability to pilot the TARDIS and knowledge of Old High Gallifreyan certainly point towards a greater familiarity with Time Lord culture than most ordinary beings seem to possess now that the Time War has taken place. Since she's female, the most popular guesses have been the Rani (femme fatale with red nail varnish) or Romana (her formal, systematic training on the TARDIS vs. the Doctor's casual but extensive hands-on experience). But I just can't see either of those characters going around calling the Doctor 'sweetie' (which I still find annoying), even as part of an act. Besides, she is clearly not actually a Time Lord on either of the occasions the Doctor has met her so far, or he would sense it. So if she is (essentially) an old-school Time Lord, she must be fob-watched into human form, which a) I think would just come across as a cheap trick if it was done a second time in New Who, and b) doesn't really explain how come she still retains a knowledge of Old High Gallifreyan and piloting a TARDIS.
So I don't think she is an old-school Time Lord, but I don't really know who she is. One possibility is Jenny, who after all was saved from on-screen death by Steven Moffat. She could have been taught Time Lord history by the Doctor - but who would have taught her to pilot the TARDIS according to the book? Also, she'd have to be fob-watched too for the Doctor not to recognise her as Time Lord - and there is no obvious reason why she would need to be. Not to mention the fact that it casts a very icky light over the flirtatious aspect of The Doctor and River's relationship! Because of the 51st-century setting, it's also tempting to think that she is a Time Agent, like Jack Harkness (and John Hart in Torchwood). Her roguish demeanour certainly matches theirs very nicely, and again some basic knowledge of the Time Lords seems a likely component of Time Agency training. But Old High Gallifreyan and Advanced TARDIS Piloting seem a bit beyond that.
And that TARDIS piloting is especially problematic, because the nature of the knowledge she displays makes it pretty clear that she's telling the truth about someone other than the Doctor teaching her how to do that. OK, so once she's told him in this episode about leaving the brake on, he could teach that particular piece of information back to her later on in his future and her past (as happened with her teaching him that he could actually open the TARDIS doors by clicking his fingers at the end of Forest of the Dead). But it doesn't seem very in-character for him to do that, since he immediately says that he likes the wheezing noise. In my view, if he had taught her how to fly the TARDIS, it's unlikely he'd have taught her the sort of text-book approach she's displaying.
So who did teach her? The only Time Lord other than the Doctor who has been active in the wider Universe since the Time War is the Master - so has she at some point somehow been his wife? As for the other Time Lords - my understanding of the Time War is that once that happened, everything Time Lords had ever done anywhere within the universe ceased ever to have happened, so that all but the 'higher beings' had no idea they had ever existed. So if anyone other than the Doctor or the Master taught River Song TARDIS flight (or Old High Gallifreyan for that matter) amd she still remembers it, then that must mean that either a) she is some kind of 'higher being' or b) the Time Lords are less lost than we think.
Of course, River could simply be someone or something we know nothing at all about yet. I very much doubt we are going to find out the answer in next week's episode, though I think we probably will find out at the end of the season. And I think that the issue of how she learnt what she knows about Time Lord culture is going to be pretty central to the revelation of her real identity.
Incidentally, if all members of the 'church' in this period have sacred names, that means that the names we know them by in this story (Octavian, Bob, Christian, Angelo, Marco) are not their 'real' (as in 'given-at-birth') names. That's a good example of Moffat's talent for detail, since a) the same certainly applies to the Doctor and probably also to River Song, so that it reinforces this theme, and b) I note that several of the names chosen have Christian resonances, also echoing the themes inherent in the idea of the church as a literal army and the idea of the Angels themselves.
As for the plot, obviously there's loads still to be resolved in the next episode. On this front, I found myself wondering about exactly what happened to the Aplans. This episode left us assuming that their civilisation had been wiped out by the Angels. But the normal way that Angels dispatch their victims is to send them back in time. If you tried to wipe out a civilisation that way, surely all of the vast numbers of people you sent back would warn everyone else, allowing them to prevent the Angels from ever getting a hold on their civilisation in the future? I'd really like to know exactly what happened to them, and whether any of them are likely to reappear or get a chance to tell their story. Also, three cheers for yet another hint that the Whoniverse and the H2G2 universe are one, since we can now speculate about whether Zaphod Beeblebrox was an Aplan. :-)
Meanwhile, I feel I'm getting the hang of Amy now. She's not my favourite companion ever - I liked Donna's self-confidence, assertiveness and explicit sense of the excitement of what she was doing better. Amy seems to me to be approaching her travels with the Doctor more casually. She's pleased to be there, and has some agendas of her own ('You promised me a planet!'). But when they arrive in a new setting, her basic approach seems to me to be to just tag along and have fun and see what happens. I guess that is a factor of their respective ages. Donna had lived long enough to know how boring normal adult life could be, and wanted to leave that behind for ever in favour of travelling with the Doctor. It was literally everything to her. But I think Amy is still young enough to accept travels through space and time as pretty cool, but fundamentally just something fun to do while putting off an adult life of her own which she does eventually want to return to.
In this episode, I felt that the scene between her and the Doctor when she thought her hand had turned to stone was absolutely brilliant for both of them. Amy suddenly demonstrated her absolute understanding of how serious the situation was and how much it mattered for the Doctor to sort everything out, which was a nice counter-balance to her teasing him and calling him 'Mr Grumpy-face' at the start of the episode. And the way he dealt with it also struck a fantastic balance between his very real fondness for her and acknowledgement of her bravery, and his light-hearted, matey relationship with her. This is a dynamic which is really working for me.
I find myself saying repeatedly in my Classic Who reviews that the way the programme uses on-screen images within the stories is almost always meta-referential - and that goes with bells on it for this story too. In-story televisual images of both River Song and one of the Angels are central to this episode - and to me the key thing about both of them is that they present us with images which are not just passive objects for us (or the characters) to gaze upon. They are active - they look right back at us, demand that we do things or even come out of the screen and attack us. This is brilliant. It not only reinforces the theme of the power and even the autonomy of images, which is explicitly addressed via the dialogue around the book which River found (and is clearly going to be pursued further in part 2). But it also plays around with the fantasy that this might somehow be true of the televisual image which we are sitting watching, at home in our living rooms. Is the Doctor suddenly going to turn round and start talking to us - as he also did in the DVD Easter Eggs in Blink, in fact? Even while our rational minds know perfectly well he won't, raising this possibility adds a lot to the excitement of watching the episode I think.
Finally, it may just be an easy way of creating an exotic-yet-familiar feel for the alien cultures featured in this story. But I really felt that there were a lot of resonances here with the ancient world. This is my list of the ones I noticed:
- Old High Gallifreyan script looks a lot like it belongs to the same family as the Etruscan alphabet.
- The Aplans are an extinct civilisation with expertise in architecture and a habit of burying their dead in catacombs.
- The statues in the 'maze of the dead' turn out not actually to be Aplan - but they do look quasi-Classical, and some of the ones we see towards the end of the episode resemble the Pompeian casts both in their poses (with arms reaching forward) and in the sense that there is a real skull lying beneath the mis-shapen faces. I would draw your attention in particular to this cast, which has its hands over its face.
- The name of Bishop Octavian recalls the civil war era of 40s and 30s BC, when Octavian was one of several major players intent on wiping out their rivals for power. I'd say that if River Song maps onto any figure from that era, it has to be Cleopatra!
- The crashed space-ship is called the Byzantium (now Istanbul - not Constantinople).
- The use of what we consider to be ecclesiastical terms for ranks within the army reminded me of the change in meaning which the Roman terms vicarius and dioecesis underwent. In the third century they referred to a high-ranking administrative official and his sphere of command, but they were of course later adopted by the church to describe its own ministers and territories.
Click here to view this entry with minimal formatting.
