2008 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Short Form – “Blink,” DOCTOR WHO

Another year, another Steven Moffat Doctor Who script win in this category.  That’s three in a row.
With each season the cast and crew seem to get more confident and self-assured, and Tennant has settled into the role wonderfully; he’s the favorite of many Who fans, both new and old. The Doctor also has a new companion, a young medical doctor named Martha Jones, who I prefer to Rose in almost every way. She has a crush on the Doctor, which maybe isn’t quite as interesting as the mutual attraction with Rose, but it seems to suit the dynamic of the show better and the actress who plays Martha, Freema Agyeman, is far more charismatic and talented (and attractive, for that matter) than Billie Piper. She’s great. In my opinion, the two nominated storylines of season three are two of the best Doctor Who stories ever.

So, things keep getting better all around. *Most* of this season is darn near perfect. The Doctor and Martha meet-cute with alien rhinos on the Moon in “Smith and Jones,” there’s a fun spaceship hurtling towards the sun suspense story in near-real time called “42,” and I have an unreasonable affection for the first Doctor Who episode I ever saw, “Gridlock,” which is about a decades-long flying-car traffic jam on a distant future colony of Earth. Even some of the throw-away stories like “Lazarus Man” and “The Shakespeare Code” are miles ahead of some of the lame season two episodes, though a Dalek two-parter in Depression-era Manhattan is appallingly bad. And then there’s the “whonimees,” which appeared back-to-back in the second half of the seasons:

“Suddenly Human”/”The Family of Blood” – Another Paul Cornell story with good focus on character, this time the Doctor, though Martha gets several good moments as well. To hide from evil aliens called the Family of Blood, the Doctor disguises himself as a human at a British boarding school in 1913. Even the Doctor can’t know his real identity, but his pseudonymous John Smith personality falls in love with the school’s matron, making for a tough decision when the Family attacks and Martha feels that she needs to return the Doctor’s true identity. The Doctor’s love story is interesting, the show plays with some issues of class, gender, and race with the disguised Martha, World War I hangs in the background of the story in some brilliant ways, and the last few moments are brilliant.

“Blink” – Steven Moffat knocks it out of the park with one of the greatest hours in science fiction television history. Maybe I’m overhyping it, but it is universally beloved. The villain is creepy (though it doesn’t always entirely make sense), and there’s a fun "timey-wimey" plot. The Doctor isn’t actually in the episode all that much, but Academy Award-nominated guest star Carey Mulligan carries the show fantastically.

Following these episodes, the Doctor and Martha go trillions of years to the future in “Utopia,” a creepy episode with a great cliffhanger reveal.  Then…we go into a not-so-great finale where Russell T. Davies’ one-upsmanship gets out of control and things get pretty rough.  But, take out that Dalek two-parter and replace the finale two-parter with something that makes more sense and hangs less on clapping for Tinkerbell, and it would’ve been a perfect season.

Season 4, by the way, is even more consistent in that it has even fewer dud episodes, but also fewer truly great ones. Of course, the Steven Moffat two-parter “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead” is great. It’s nominated next year, but it did lose (for once).

Grades: “Suddenly Human”/”The Family of Blood”  A
“Blink”   A
Season  A-

2007 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Short Form – “The Girl in the Fireplace,” DOCTOR WHO

The Doctor Who reboot wins this category for the second year straight in what’s becoming something of a tradition. For its second season, most of the cast stays in place, but the Doctor “regenerates” from Christopher Eccleston to David Tennant. I mentioned before that I wasn’t a fan of Eccleston’s performance. Well, I think Tennant is brilliant in the role, and that alone makes this season a significant step up.

Once again, the season received three of the five nominations in this category (it’s received two or three of five in every year of its existence). So, on to the Whominees!   ….sorry….

“School Reunion”: In the present day, the Doctor goes undercover at a school that is brainwashing British children into supercomputers to control the universe. As weird as that sentence sounds, this is a very generic Who plot, and Anthony Stewart Head is somewhat wasted as the alien headmaster. The real attraction here is the return of (the late *sob*) Elisabeth Sladen as Sarah Jane Smith, a long-running and popular companion of the Doctor from the ‘70s incarnation of the show. This causes all sorts of jealousy between current companion Rose and Sarah Jane and prompts several conversations about exactly why the Doctor abandons his companions every couple of years and never mentions them again. The obvious answer is that actresses/producers want to move on, but this episode manages to use the old conceit to enrich the characters. There really is some good development there, and the reunion is very welcome. It’s too bad the damn monster-of-the-week plot has to get in the way.

“Army of Ghosts”/“Doomsday”: The two-part season finale takes us back to contemporary England, where ghosts start wandering around the planet on a set schedule. The Doctor spends most of the first episode trying to puzzle this out, and runs across a secret government organization called Torchwood. Turns out the ghosts are harbingers of an invasion from another dimension.  Meanwhile, Rose and her mum have some mother/daughter class tension that feels real enough to be a bit annoying.  Then things get really crazy in the second episode. Torchwood comes off as comically evil (and the episode should lose points for inspiring the mediocre-to-bad spin-off as well), and the ending is pretty melodramatic (and it cheats!), but the episodes are pretty fun. Russell T. Davies goes right up to the edge of ridiculousness with his action finale one-upsmanship, but he doesn’t quite go over that edge until season three’s finale.

“The Girl in the Fireplace”: And, once again, the Steven Moffat script for the year wins the big prize. The Doctor finds himself on a brokedown spaceship that is using all of its energies to open a variety of windows into the life of Madame de Pompadour, the intelligent and beautiful mistress of King Louis XV of eighteenth-century France. The ship has clockwork robots that dress as creepy French aristocrats and harass Madame de Pompadour, hiding under her bed and generally acting scary and planning to harvest organs. The Doctor jumps into various parts of her life to save her from them, and she falls in love with him. I thought it might dilute the episode somewhat that Moffat has gone back to the “Doctor meets someone as a child then adult” well a couple of times in his own run on the show, but this episode isn’t about that aspect nearly as much as it is about the Doctor’s loneliness, and the bizarre temporal maze of the spaceship. It’s quirky, fun, and mindbending like all the best Who, but it also manages some character development for the Doctor and some real poignancy.

So, overall, it’s a significant improvement over season one. The production is much more self-assured, and Tennant brings a ton of charisma to the roll, without losing any of the nuances (like the hints of sadness and fury) that Eccleston brought to the character. There are a couple of really terrible episodes: the deadly dull “Idiot’s Lantern” and “Fear Her,” as well as the much-hated “Love and Monsters” (I kind of like it, but it really does have some bizarre/awful moments). These episodes bring it down some, but the rest of the season is quite strong, and having a finale that’s only mostly insane rather than completely bonkers (like seasons three and four) helps to compensate somewhat.

Grades: “School Reunion”  B+
“The Girl in the Fireplace” A
“Army of Ghosts/Doomsday” A-

         Season 2 Overall  B+

2006 Hugo for Dramatic Pres., Short Form – “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances,” DOCTOR WHO

The original Doctor Who ran on BBC from 1963-1989. The premise, if you’re somehow unfamiliar with it, is that an alien Time Lord steals a time machine, called the TARDIS (forever stuck in its camouflage as a 1960s London police box) and travels randomly through space and time with various companions.  When an actor wants to retire, the Doctor “regenerates” into a new body with a slightly different personality.  It was originally conceived as an educational children’s show with alternating history lessons (travels to the past) and science lessons (sf stories), but the producers quickly dropped that premise when campy adventure stories (usually involving the alien-mutant-cyborg Daleks) garnered big ratings. The show ran forever, and became iconic in the UK. As I understand it, Doctor Who in the UK is a lot like Star Trek in the US – pretty much everyone watched it at some point as a kid and gets the basic references, but fandom is considered a sure sign of extreme geekiness.  From my internet experiences, I’d say that Trekkies have nothing on hardcore British Who fans.

Also, camp.  The show operated on cheap BBC budgets, and us full of campy effects and overacting.  This is what many people love about the show, but it’s a real challenge to any modern version. A 1996 revival coproduced by Fox tried to decampify the show and failed miserably.  Their only success was hiring Paul McGann to play the Doctor.  Russell T. Davies produced this 2005 revival, now past its sixth season, and he does a decent job making the show modern, integrating some of the season arc and character arc formats of Buffy for instance, while keeping some classic elements (even, occasionally, veering into embarrassing camp).

This is the first time ever that Doctor Who received a Hugo nomination.  I guess that’s not all that surprising – classic Who was shown too inconsistently on PBS for the show to gain a solid US fan base, even among WorldCon types – but I’m still surprised the likes of "City of Death," a classic episode written by Douglas Adams, didn’t get a nod. Even if WorldCon hadn’t created a Short Form category, I think some episodes of the revival would have won the Dramatic Pres. Hugo.  The first season of the revival, starring Christopher Eccleston, got three episodes nominated and beat out the hugely popular Battlestar Galactica.

First, the other nominated episodes: “Dalek” is the last good episode starring the Doctor’s most arch-nemesii fascist cyborgs. The premise of the new series is that the Time Lords and Daleks have wiped each other out in a massive “Time War.” In this episode, the Doctor meets the “last surviving Dalek” (so far…) in the collection of an eccentric American billionaire in 2012 (the distant future!), which makes for a fairly tense confrontation. It nicely avoids all of the excesses of many Dalek episodes and actually manages to ask some decent moral questions about how the Doctor should deal with a terrible foe that’s been laid low.

“Father’s Day” was written by Paul Cornell, a fan favorite, and it deals with the consequences of wanton timestream altering. The Doctor changes history in almost every episode, but this time his companion tries to alter her own past by saving her father in front of her own eyes and creates a wound in time. Everyone around ends up hunted by creatures in a weird time loop.  The soundtrack sounds ridiculously cheap, and the monsters are some pretty bad cgi (though the design is interesting), but it’s still a very strong episode.  The key is that it’s character-centered – most of the episode is taken up by characters chatting while holed up in a cathedral. It also adds a great deal of depth to the family of the Doctor’s new companion, Rose – something that the classic series never bothered with.

Finally, the two-part winner: “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances.” Of course, Steven Moffat’s first Doctor Who episode wins a Hugo. As usual with Moffat, there’s a lot going on here; the episode introduces rogue time agent Captain Jack Harkness from the 31st century, who leads the Doctor and Rose to London during the Blitz. Once there, they meet a group of street urchins who take advantage of the blitz to find food, and they discover a weird alien plague that possesses people then makes them grow a gas mask over their face and wander around saying “are you my Mommy?”  Yes, creepy. It ends with a surprisingly redemptive moment that is a nice change of pace in what’s a fairly bleak season and really pushes the episode to the best of the season.

As for the season overall, it has its ups and downs, but it’s generally pretty strong. As I mentioned, some of the cgi is dodgy, and the music can be quite awful (recorded with a lone Casio?), but the scripts are solid, and the increased character focus and inter-episode continuity are welcome improvements on the original series. As for Christopher Eccleston, I think fan consensus is that he’s not as good as his successor, but he did a great job at the time. I, on the other hand, actively dislike him. He’s probably one of my least favorite Doctors. Eccleston plays the Doctor as manic, cranky, and he wears a broad grin at odd times. Overall, these choices make the Doctor a bit edgier and more alien, which I appreciate on an intellectual level, but find off-putting in practice. I can’t say that Eccleston played the part wrong; I just didn’t particularly like it personally. And that drags the season down a bit for me.

Grades: Dalek: B+
          Father’s Day: A-
     Empty Child/Doctor Dances: A-

             Season 1 Overall: B

And now...I'm on a break for a week or two.
Happy Holidays!

2011 Hugo Nominee: Best Dram. Pres., Short - Doctor Who: "Christmas Carol"; "Pandorica/Big Bang," Steven Moffat; "Vincent & Doctor" by Richard Curtis

After a disappointing set of specials dominated this category last year, it was to be expected that the strong fifth season would do well. I’m actually a bit disappointed that season opener “The Eleventh Hour” and the Angel two-parter didn’t get nods…not that I was rooting for a category sweep. Lots has changed since those specials. The Doctor has regenerated into a new body with a slightly different personality, meaning that young actor Matt Smith is playing him rather than David Tennant. Smith’s Doctor is more awkward, eccentric, and all around geekier, though my wife swears he’s cuter than Tennant’s. I’m not sure I like Smith as much as Tennant, but that in itself is quite a compliment, as Tennant has probably done more to define the role than anyone since Tom Baker. We also have a new showrunner in Steven Moffat. Moffat wrote most of the best episodes of the previous Russell T. Davies (and picked up four Hugo nominations and three wins for his four stories). People expected Moffat to do great things, and he more or less delivered (though for some people, expectations may have been too high). Finally, and not to be underestimated, we have a new companion in plucky Amelia Pond (Karen Gillan), who is engaged, but also manages to sexually harass the Doctor a few times.

The highlight of “Vincent and the Doctor” is first time Doctor Who writer Richard Curtis. Curtis is more famous for his very British film comedies like Four Weddings and A Funeral, Notting Hill, and Love Actually (Hugh Grant is not in this episode for some reason). The Doctor and Amy are viewing a Van Gogh exposition when they notice a monster’s head portrayed in the window of a cathedral in one of his paintings. So, being time travelers, they zip back to 1890 and ask him about it. They learn that Vincent is tormented by an invisible chicken monster that only he can see, and they spring into action. It’s very unusually paced for a Doctor Who episode; the monster fighting is a small part of the episode and is resolved early. Most of the episode is given over to quieter, reflective scenes and some light comedy, and that fits nicely into the overall arc of the season, considering that something tragic happens in the episode before. And, the invisible monster is an effective metaphor for Vincent’s mental illness (he committed suicide in 1890). This is not mind-bending speculative fiction…there’s not much new in here at all in fact, but it is very well executed.

The next two nominees are both Moffat-written, and I think they illustrate both his strengths, and some of his tics, which have become clearer as he writes more episodes. “The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang” is the big season finale that ties together several running plotlines. We’ve seen cracks running through space and time in several episodes – in this one, the Doctor’s enemies believe that he is responsible, so they attempt to imprison him, but the universe explodes anyway. Oh well. So, tic #1: Moffat is great at coming up with cool images and catch-phrases (“don’t blink,” “cracks in the universe,” gas mask kid, etc.) and he seems to build episodes around them. For me, “The Pandorica Opens” is a giant exercise in this. We get a flashy beginning that runs through several guest characters and across space and time to get a simple message to the Doctor, then we get aliens versus Romans at Stonehenge, the greatest prison in the universe, the Doctor threatening a horde of circling spacecraft, and the universe exploding. Yeah. A lot of big, impressive stuff happens…but I’m not sure there’s enough story there to hold it all together. Then, “The Big Bang” has the unenviable task of dealing with the fact that the Doctor was defeated and the universe exploded in the previous episode. There’s no way fixing all this isn’t going to feel like a cheat, and it more or less does, but it’s a good, exciting cheat. Previous showrunner, RTD, was often derided for his “clap you hands if you believe Doctor” deus ex machine season enders. We get much the same thing here, without all the complaints. Maybe people just aren’t as sick of Moffat yet…or maybe Moffat just does it better. I tend to favor the latter theory. Moffat keeps things small and character focused (it looks like most of the budget went into the “Pandorica” half, as we spend most of this episode in one location, and there’s really only one physical villain). “Pandorica” is exciting, but it feels dangerously over-the-top; “The Big Bang” is quieter, and gets progressively calmer. The two episodes balance each other out nicely, though they also leave behind a lot of big questions that are still unresolved, half-a-season later.

Finally, at the end of 2010 we got the usual Doctor Who post-season Christmas special. I liked “A Christmas Carol” very much, but I got the feeling that general reception was not so positive. It does fall prey to Moffat tic #2, he does repeat himself sometimes. There are motifs he likes – shadowy figures in space suits ("Silence in the Library," "The Impossible Astronaut"), monsters talking in crackly radio voices of dead friends ("Forest of the Dead," "The Time of Angels"), and the Doctor meeting someone several times throughout their life in rapid succession ("Girl in the Fireplace," "Eleventh Hour"). “A Christmas Carol” does the latter, and the set-up to get there is pretty contrived as well. But, those two flaws aside, I think this may have been the finest hour of Doctor Who in a very strong year. The Doctor’s companions and thousands of others are in a crashing space liner, but the Scrooge-like plutocrat Karzan Sardick (the great Michael Gambon) that runs the planet below refuses to save them. The Doctor decides to make Sardick a better man by time travelling to every Christmas of his youth and giving him a better childhood. Young Sardick finds a tragic love along the way. Yes, we see some repetition of themes, and yes, the plotting can be a bit ham-fisted, but the fine performances and the sweet holiday story made this a favorite of mine.

It was an excellent year for the Doctor. I don’t know how long this show can dominate this category without some sort of backlash developing. I also haven’t been as fond of season 6 as I was of season 5 so far. I guess we’ll see what happens next year.

Grades: “Vincent and the Doctor” A-

“The Pandorica Opens/The Big Bang” B+

“A Christmas Carol” A-

2010 Hugo nominee, Dramatic Pres. Short: Doctor Who: "The Waters of Mars" Writ. by Russell T Davies & Phil Ford; Dir. by Graeme Harper (BBC Wales)

Just when the silliness of the 2010 Dr. Who specials was starting to overwhelm, Davies delivered what I consider to be his finest Dr. Who story as a writer. This was the one special that I said should receive a nomination, and it is really good.

This serial does two things that Dr. Who doesn’t do often: 1) it takes place in the near future and deals with early efforts at space colonization (Mars, in this case), and 2) it explores the nature of time travel.

The basic story is that the Doctor stops off on Mars in the twenty-first century, takes a walk in his spacesuit, and runs across the first human colony on Mars. The humans are understandably confused by his arrival, but they’re soon caught up in an attack by some strange water-sucking entity. It’s a great change of pace for the series over the usual trips to a few millions of years in the future, and allows for some decent hard-sf moments (in Classic Who, Mars is home to rubber-suit aliens called Ice Warriors and pyramids dedicated to evil Egyptian deities). The colony looks great (though maybe too roomy), the monsters are effectively creepy, the guest actors are fantastic (especially Lindsay Duncan as Captain Adelaide Brooke), and there’s only one embarrassing moment of camp from Russell T. Davies (it involves a rocket-powered robot).

So, it’s a very good horror tale set in a Martian colony. What pushes it into the realm of greatness is that it does take on some of the central themes of the show. In the classic series, the Doctor often mentioned that you couldn’t change history and then proceeded to do so every week. In the new series, they came up with the compromise that only some moments must remain unchanged and only certain situations create paradoxes. This special focuses on one of those unchangeable moments and then asks if the Doctor can stand by and watch people die. The central conflict is not some crazy monster-of-the-week, it’s with the Doctor’s own ego. There’s a device that Davies used so often that it grew tiresome: everything looks bleaker than bleak, many people have died, the odds are overwhelming, there no way the Doctor can win, and yet, he still manages to turn everything around at the last second. This special has that exact moment – one of the best-realized versions, in fact – and yet manages to subvert it completely. It’s wonderfully dark and challenging, and by far the best of the 2009 specials.

Grade: A-

2010 Hugo nominee, Dramatic Pres. Short: Doctor Who: "Planet of the Dead" Written by Russell T Davies & Gareth Roberts; Directed by James Strong

The Doctor Who Easter special. I mentioned last time that as a recent convert I have been watching some of the classic Dr. Who, and this special does work harder to evoke some of the feel of the old series than anything else since the revival began in 2005. There’s the winding, meandering plot (very common in the padded serials of the old series), there’s an appearance by the Doctor’s old partners UNIT, and there’s even a crazy zooming shot of a revealed alien.

In other words, it’s camp, which is often the show’s strength, and sometimes its weakness. For instance, the companion this go-round is a thrill-seeking cat burglar named Lady Cristina D’Souza (played by bionic woman Michelle Ryan). I like the idea of a morally ambiguous companion for the Doctor, but the thief idea gives writer Russell T. Davies license to do multiple descent-by-wire caper scenes that are…well…”super-cheesy” is the technical reviewers’ term. Making her an aristocrat doesn’t add to the plausibility.

The Doctor happens to be riding Lady Christina’s getaway bus, gets involved in a police chase, and then the whole bus is transported to a desert planet. As they try to get the bus back through the dimensional gateway, they meet some aliens with giant insect heads and learn that the whole Earth is threatened! The Doctor manages to call in his old friends from the alien-fighting UNIT, but must race against time to get the bus and its passengers back before UNIT closes the gateway.

The episode is probably a little too ambitious for its budget effects-wise, and the cg looks pretty bad (more vintage Who – too bad the sets don’t wobble!) I don’t mind so much, but when you add all of the little contrivances and pulp moments together, it’s just not great. It’s a fun way to spend an hour, especially if you’re a Doctor Who fan, but I’m sure there were hours of television more worthy of this nomination slot **cough**Fringe**cough** **cough**Caprica**cough**, and I’d be scandalized if it actually won. It was kind of hard to get through a second time.

Grade: C+

2010 Hugo nominee, Dramatic Pres. Short: Doctor Who: "The Next Doctor" Written by Russell T Davies; Directed by Andy Goddard (BBC Wales)

I’m a rather late convert to the Doctor Who revival, and the franchise in general, but I have been voraciously devouring new and classic episodes for the past year or so. After four seasons of Hugo-dominating, high quality television, the new series took a year to say goodbye to star David Tennant with a series of five holiday specials – two years of Christmas specials, an Easter special, a New Year’s Special, and….um…Guy Fawkes Day? Three of them were eligible for this round of Hugos, and, despite being fairly poorly received by a lot of fans, all three received nominations.

There are two big things going on in this special. First, it’s a very steampunk story that has the Doctor fighting Cybermen in Victorian London at Christmas. We get giant robots with gears, powered by Dickensian child labor! At the same time, we have an odd twist on the old “mulit-doctor story.” If you’re not all that familiar with the show, the Doctor has been played by eleven different actors (and that’s just canon!). Since he is a time traveler, it’s not too hard to do a story where he hangs out with different versions of himself. This has happened three different times on the show proper (but not for twenty-five years), and some more in telethon specials and in audio plays. In this special, we’re teased with the twist that Tennant’s Doctor is meeting a future version of himself played by David Morissey. It doesn’t quite work out that way, but it’s a fun idea.

So, steampunk, multiple doctors, bigger budget special – it all sounds good. Why the disappointment? I actually don’t have a great answer for this one, other than, it’s just not as crisp and exciting as the best Doctor Who always is. There are a couple of chase scenes, a big setpiece with the aforementioned giant robot, and lots of scenes of Morissey and Tennant chatting, but there’s not much going on underneath. Writer Russell T. Davies tries to do something with the villain being a woman of ill-repute, motivated by oppressive Victorian society…but there’s not much depth to that either. And, it’s a bit twee at times – instead of the Doctor’s usual TARDIS, a time travelling police box, the Victorian Doctor has the Tethered Aerial Release Developed In Style, a hot air balloon TARDIS. It’s not horrible, but it’s not up to the high standards of the show at its best, and it’s not Hugo-worthy either.

Grade: B-