That Gum You Like Is Going To Come Back In Style
“Diane, 11:30 AM, February 24th. Entering the town of Twin Peaks.”
Doctor Who and The Church on Ruby Road
When the first trailer for “The Church on Ruby Road” aired, opening as it did with a shot of the new Doctor dancing in a nightclub, I saw someone online react something along the lines of “why would a thousand year old Time Lord go dancing?”
To this, I had a very strong two-part reaction, namely:
- I think you mean “billion”, not “thousand”
- My nightclub days are long, long behind me, but if I woke up looking like Ncuti Gatwa, you couldn’t drag me out of them
But this grouchy internet person made an interesting point, albeit accidentally: there’s a solid sub-genre of Doctor Who where the story opens with the Doctor already in the middle of something, and I can’t remember there ever being one where that “something” was “having fun”.
Taken entirely on its own, “The Church on Ruby Road” is an absolute delight. Just fun from beginning to end. The stakes are never that high, and the plot is a slender thing, but that’s the point; we’re here to launch the two new leads and set up the show going forward. And be as Christmasy as possible while doing it.
From the moment he pops onto screen, here in his first real episode, Ncuti Gatwa makes it clear why he got the part; playing a character that’s unquestioningly the Doctor, but a different model than we’ve ever seen before.
The script does a lot of heavy lifting for him, giving him a series of, if you will, “median value” Doctor Who moments, and letting him show off his spin on them. He gets two scenes—where tells the police officer that his girlfriend is going to say yes, and then later when he compares “real time travellers” to whatever the goblins are doing—that are practically Doctor Who audition pieces (and I’d be surprised if at least one of them wasn’t literally one). You can close your eyes and hear how any of his predecessors would have done either of those scenes. Gatwa manages to land a take on both that’s both utterly unlike how any of the other actors would have done it, but also unmistakably the Doctor.
And, mind you, this is after being introduced in a scene doing something no other Doctor would do—that seems custom designed to stroke out anyone left watching who’s been complaining about “woke doctor who”—and then immediately snaps into frame and Doctors the hell out of his first scene with Millie Gibson.
Mille Gibson’s Ruby Sunday, on the other hand, is a little harder to get a read on, mostly landing on “high energy” and being unflappable. Frankly, introducing the character by having her recite her life story in a literal TV interview feels a little—not lazy, exactly, but impatient? Mostly, she’s there to have stuff happen to, which is a little unfortunate. Her big moment comes at the end of the big song set-piece—the Goblin Song was heavily promoted ahead of time, but of course that turned out to be a headfake to cover the fact that we’ve got a Doctor that can sing now too, and then that turned into the reveal that we’ve also got a companion that can.
“Can ad-lib lyrics to a goblin song while trapped in a sky ship” isn’t the strongest character premise, but it’s a pretty solid start.
The goblins themselves, meanwhile, feel like exactly the kind of move you do when you have a new potential audience and you want to make sure they know “hey, this isn’t star wars.” Doctor Who has always worked better when it knows it’s science fantasy instead of science fiction, and musical steampunk goblins feels like a real statement of purpose. Plus, a solid use of that extra Disney+ money.
The ending is a little clunky? The brief riff on It’s a Wonderful Life and closing the time travel loop both feel a beat too short and easy, and the look on Gatwa’s face as he watches the figure that dropped off the baby walk away is “I could find out now, but I guess I’ll save it for the season finale.”
And then, Ruby runs down stairs and boards the Tardis because… the episode is over? Even the bigger-on-the-inside scene is swallowed so that the Mysterious Neighbor can break the fourth wall.
It’s clunky, but what’s funny is that it’s clunky in exactly the same way “Rose” was.
Russell Davies is now in the unique position of having written the introductions for three Doctors and four companions, which puts him in solidly in the forefront versus anyone else that’s worked on the show.
(Okay, anorak time: Prior to this, RTD and Moffat had both done two Doctors. Terrance Dicks was involved with two—3rd and 4th—but script-edited one and wrote the other. JNT was the producer for three new Doctors—5th, 6th, and 7th—but had a different script editor and writer each time. Moffat did four companions if we include Rory, which we do. If I’m counting off the top of my head right, JNT hired seven companions, but again with different creative staff nearly every time.)
So how does this compare to his other two?
The first time—“Rose”—was a full reset of the show, assuming that the vast majority of the audience had never seen the old show. That episode spent a lot of time setting up the “Rose Tyler Show” so that the Doctor could crash into it.
The second time—“The Christmas Invasion”—was mostly a character piece about existing main character Rose Tyler reacting to her friend changing, and then David Tennant swaggers in with ten minutes to go and takes over the show.
This doesn’t resemble either of those so much as it does “The Eleventh Hour” in that it has to introduce a whole new cast and serve as a jumping-on point, but assumes that most of the audience already knows the score.
Besides, the “swagger in and steal the show” scene came two weeks ago, this is more worried about getting on with it and showing what the show is going to be like going forward.
RTD has an interesting tic where the Tardis is sidelined for a companion’s first story, and then the story ends with “all that and also a time machine!” “Rose” gets the Tardis involved earlier, but doesn’t time travel, but both “Smith and Jones” and “Partners in Crime” leaves it to the end. (“The Runaway Bride” has a lot of Tardis, but, like “Rose”, obscures it’s more unique features.)
Compare that to “The Eleventh Hour” or “The Pilot”, where the fact that it’s a time machine factors heavily into Amy/Bill’s first encounter.
“Rose” was pretty deliberately designed as part of a triptych with “The End of the World” and “The Unquiet Dead”; that first part ends with her running towards the Police Box, and most of the “Tardis Stuff” gets handled at the start of the second; that is, other than the big “bigger on the inside” beat halfway though “Rose”.
“The Church on Ruby Road” kind of awkwardly straddles the middle The perfunctory ending would play a lot better if the next episode was next week instead of in 4 months. And the show spends a lot more time setting up the mystery about Ruby’s birth than exploring what her life is like now, and why she’s willing to run off with the Doctor at the end other than a vague sense of “waiting for her life to start” malaise.
But, having typed all that out now, I actually think that’s pretty savvy. “Rose” was about pulling in a whole new audience. “The Christmas Invasion” and “The Eleventh Hour” were about telling that existing audience not to worry, it’s still the same show.
“The Church on Ruby Road” is doing something new, it’s trying to get the old audience back. It’s no secret that the ratings, however you measure them, have been in a slow but steady decline since the 50th anniversary. These four 2023 specials aren’t really about attracting new people, their job is to reel back in all those people who were watching in 2008 and saying “that show you like is back in style”.
Much like how “The Eleventh Hour” accidentally became the jumping-on point for everyone in the US who discovered the show on BBC America, this might be that for a next generation of Disney+ first time viewers, but: no. Those people all clicked “Special 1” instead of “Special 4” and discovered the show with “The Star Beast.”
Historically, the closest analogue to what the show is doing here is “Remembrance of the Daleks”, but in a parallel universe where they had bothered to tell anyone that the show was about to be better than it had maybe ever been.
So, this can get away with having Millie Gibson pop onto screen, deliver her character brief directly to the camera, and the audience goes “got it, new companion. So about those goblins from the trailer?”
Something that does come through clearly is that RTD has been watching the show since he left. Ruby Sunday doesn’t feel like anything so much as Davies looking at Clara and thinking “ooh, I’ll have one of those, please”. And the casual use of time travel in way the Doctor goes back in time to make sure the baby gets where it needs to be isn’t something that really entered the show’s vocabulary until Moffat took over.
And, after having Neal Patrick Harris look the fanbase directly in the eye and say, essentially, “you can’t trust anything the Master said about the Doctor’s origins”, he picks out the most interesting nugget—that the Doctor might be adopted—and runs with it.
Love that “mavity” is going to be running thing.
There’s a long running fan “tradition” of breathlessly claiming any mysterious character is the return of the Rani/Romana/Drax/Susan, etc. That last shot seems to be there specifically to wind those people up, but okay, I’ll play along. I think Mrs. Flood is going to turn out to be… K'anpo.
What would you do if you woke up, and you were young, and beautiful, and all the pain was gone? You still had your memories, you’re still the same person, but healed?
How great would that be?
One of the big innovations when the show came back into 2005 was to massively expand the emotional palette. Now, this is as much a ding on the old show as its a compliment to the new one; the old show went off the air less than four months before Twin Peaks started, which is a remarkable demonstration of how behind-the-times the show had gotten. Expanding the emotional palette was less an innovation and more admitting that there are other shows on TV.
But, the upshot was the main character was suddenly allowed to have actual feelings for the first time, which tremendously widened the scope of what kinds of stories the show could tell.
The last time RTD rebooted the show, the character and the show had both been though some stuff. The Time War was pretty explicitly a metaphor for the show’s cancellation; and both the character and the show were pretty angsty about everything that had happened since we saw them last.
Now, almost two decades later he’s rebooting it again, and both the show and the character have been though even more stuff. It’s been a weird time! But now, the characer and the show’s reaction is to just be glad to be here, thrilled to be alive. That feels like an older and wiser reaction.
Here in 2023, having an angst-filled tortured main character feels positively old-fashioned. Instead, now we’ve got one that seems motivated more by joy and raw enthusiasm.
Good to see you, Doctor. Glad you’re back. Roll on the future.
Only Victory Laps in the Building
I’m behind in my TV watching, so I’m only just now catching up with the new season of Only Murders in the Building. What an absolute delight of a show; what a joy to watch a cast full of old pros turning out the best work of their careers.
There are a lot of pleasures to this show, not the least of which is finding out that Selena Gomez is the real third Amigo.
But in many ways, it’s a career victory lap for a whole group of comic actors, More creative people should get to do a victory lap like this—not a greatest hits tour, but a final showcase of everything they’ve learned how to do over their careers, a best possible version of everthing they’ve ever done.
(As an aside, the all-time best victory lap is still David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, which spends 18 episodes moving through a riff on just about every movie he’s ever made with long stops at both Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive, an experimental movie about the atomic bomb, all full of actors he’s worked with before or wanted to ork with and never had a chance to, before turning out a surprisingly satisfying Twin Peaks movie. More people should get one of these.)
While the cast is stuffed full of old pros (Andrea Martin! Nathan Lane! Jane Lynch! Tina Fay!) the centerpiece of course is the pair of Steve Martin and Martin Short.
Both Steve Martin and Martin Short have their respective personas they’ve mostly stuck with over the last 40 years—Steve Martin as a self-important blowhard who’s not nearly as important as he thinks he is, and Martin Short swinging from frantic/neurotic to unhinged. Here, though, they play mostly in the same space, but let their age add some extra notes. Steve Martin plays this particular blowhard with a deep sadness in his eyes, as if he can’t quite muster the energy to keep up the act, but doesn’t have anything else to fall back on.
Martin Short is the absolute standout, though. He does his array of wacky antics and neuroses, but adds a weight to all of it. On the surface, “Oliver Putnam” is a Martin Short character, but weighed down by decades of failure, a character who is just self-aware enough to be unhappy, but not self-aware enough to be able to do anything about it. It’s everything he’s ever done before, but better than you’ve ever seen it, refined to absolute diamond purity. It’s an absolute masterclass in comic acting and character work.
And this year, he manages to take it up even further, more than holding his own against Meryl Streep of all people, conclusively proving how good he’s been all along.
So, hypothetically speaking of course, if a big web outlet whose name rhymed with Plate asked me for a 1500 word hit piece on my choice of the cast of OMITB, for most of them I can kind of see what shape such a hit piece would take. I wouldn’t agree with any of this, mind you, but I can see how you would do it. Steve Martin—“been doing the same schtick for 40 years!” Selena Gomez—“Disney Channel go home!” Nathan Lane—“should have stayed in animation!” Paul Rudd—“go back to ant man!” Even with Meryl Streep you could do something like “let someone else have a turn!” But Martin Short? I wouldn’t even know where to start with that one. He’s always been good in everything. The bad movies he’s been in, and he’s been in quite a few, he’s always the best part. Even Clifford, which might legitimately be the worst movie I’ve ever seen, is the kind of bad that required an actual genius to just completely take the governor off. The thing he does with his face when Charles Groden shouts “look at me like a real human boy!” is pure art.
Anyway. The good news is that everyone has been sharing their favorite Martin Short bits, which mostly means a whole bunch of Jiminy Glick I hadn’t seen. A perfect Martin Short character, deeply weird, very silly, willing to make himself look very stupid, and a masterclass in improv… combat, basically?
The best part about the Glick bits was the way Martin Short was blatantly trying to crack up the people he was interviewing, and he’d just continue escalating until they broke. And I’d love to know what the behind-the-scenes of filming these was like, because when they start the guest always has this stunned look on their face that seems to say “I was just talking to Marty, and then he just turned this on.”
So I’ll take this opportunity to leave you with a couple of my favorites:
Nathan Lane, who tries hard at first to roll with whats happening and then gets completely sideswiped.
Stephen Spielburg, who also does pretty well, until Short hits him with something that cracks up the crew and then just gives up and surrenders to the flow.
Alec Baldwin, who is one of the very few people to manage to wrestle away control and then do his own material for a minute or two, to Short’s obvious delight. A couple big laughs from the crew in this one.
Also, go watch Innerspace.