strange_complex | New Who 5.10: Vincent and the Doctor

Yeah, so - for the fifth time this season, I spent the weekend doing things that stopped me seeing Doctor Who on Saturday night, and then most of the rest of the week writing about them. It's going to happen for the season finale, too, which is a bit sad.

I'm afraid I was quite disappointed by this episode. Maybe it's partly that I saw it late, and went in with my expectations set too high after reading multiple reviews describing it as a powerfully moving tear-jerker. But it really didn't strike me that way at all. In fact, given the potential of the material, Van Gogh's depression and forthcoming suicide in particular seemed to me to be skipped over pretty lightly. We got one minute of him lying on his bed behaving a bit grumpily, but the next moment he was fine again - and that was about as far as the story's engagement with the issue went. For most of the time he was simply a fun guy to be around - a larger-than-life rogue with the added bonus of supernatural powers of perception. Meanwhile, we never seemed to meet Van Gogh the real human being, beset by angst and misery and frustration and serious mental illness, at all. The offer of a helpline to call at the end of the episode if we had been 'affected' by the issues which it raised tells me that the BBC thought it was offering a serious treatment of serious issues - but personally, I didn't see much of that in the episode itself.

The history and geography were a mish-mash, too. The bedroom, the cafe and the sunflowers are all from Arles in 1888, but the church with the space-chicken in it is from Auvers near Paris in 1890 - the year when the story is supposed to be set. And Van Gogh really shouldn't still have been in possession of both his ear-lobes by the time of this story, either.

parrot_knight very cleverly suggests that this impressionistic approach is well-suited to the subject-matter of the episode, and I do very much like his thinking. But I find myself in the end feeling less charitable about it. It seems to me that if you are going to build a story around a historical character to the extent that he is referenced in the title, it is rather perverse to then go ahead and treat that character in a way which glosses over and distorts what is known of his real personality and historical context. What we got here was history as a fantastical theme-park, and while I recognise that this supports Moffat's thematic use of fairy tales this season, and indeed that many another Doctor Who story has done much the same thing (e.g. The Romans), somehow this time I just found it glib, cheap and annoying. Perhaps if this cherry-picking approach hadn't been combined with the claim to seriousness inherent in the trail for the helpline, or the Doctor's sad observation that all he and Amy can do for Vincent is give him some more good times amongst the bad, I might have been happy enough to accept it. But the two together didn't really work for me.

Also, gratifying though Van Gogh's own visit to the museum might be for 21st-century audiences who want to reach back in time and say "See? We would have understood you all along!", this sequence also throws up a classic problem with historical stories that deal with known characters and events. That is, since we know so much about Van Gogh's life, why isn't there any surviving trace of this event, which he says explicitly "changes everything", in what we know of his history? Indeed, I felt unconvinced that it had changed anything for him. The script had already both told us and shown us quite explicitly that he was in the middle of a highly prolific period before the Doctor and Amy ever appeared, so it doesn't really add up to claim that they spurred him on to greater achievements by showing him his own future. Meanwhile, the timing in relation to the known event of his suicide raises the unfortunate possibility that that was actually the final outcome of Van Gogh's journey into the future - perhaps in response to the subsequent experience of returning to a world where he did not yet enjoy such adulation. I'm sure that isn't what the script intended to suggest - but it would have been nice to see the issue thought through more carefully.

Still, all that said, there was some good material here too, which I believe I will present as bullet-points:

I liked the gradual emergence of information about the Krafayis - at first presented just as a straightforward monster, but later something which we develop compassion for as we come to understand it better.
Bill Nighy as the art critic was just great - absolutely perfectly cast doing exactly what he does best.
The structure of a story which begins with paintings in a Parisian art gallery and later requires a visit to the era when they were painted was a HUGE shout-out to City of Death, for which much win - though poor old Foury never did get to meet Leonardo da Vinci (or not in that story, anyway).
It's interesting to note that the Doctor puts particular stress on telling Van Gogh when he is depressed on the bed that the one thing there always is is hope - surely a fore-reference to how the opening of the Pandorica is going to be resolved at the end of the story?
On a similar note, interesting also that the casual references to unscreened adventures at the beginning of the story are to visits to 'Arcadia' and the 'Trojan Gardens'. I'm reading those as places in space which happen to have Classically-resonant names rather than actual Arcadia or a garden at the historical Troy - but they still fit nicely with the season's theme of myths and legends, and with the Pandorica, which is presumably another example of the same thing.
Bored!Doctor waiting outside the church for the space-chicken to appear was really funny.

In fact, there were some great Doctor moments throughout this episode, and indeed plenty of good individual moments and well-crafted lines for all the characters. I did enjoy watching it, for all I've said above. But I didn't feel that it entirely lived up to its own pretensions.

Click here to view this entry with minimal formatting.