The Doctor's Wife REVIEWED

Oh hai there internet. Our conversations have become a lot more unidirectional lately because of my revision and such. But now I finally get the chance to talk to you after all this time.

Much like the Tardis in the latest Doctor Who episode!

(Nice segue.)

So the Doctor's Wife. Well, I loved it. Definitely in my top 20 of all time, and possibly top 10. God, it was so frikkin' good!

I love everything that Neil Gaiman has ever written, so I was expecting to love this episode too. The steampunk setting of the Tardis graveyard and the patchwork people were such intrinsically Gaiman concepts. I thought the whole episode was so beautifully realised by the design team. It's a world away from the bright garish colours of earlier series, and of that I am hugely thankful. (On Confidential, Gaiman read from the stage directions of the script, which even written is a thing of beauty, and I was particularly taken with his description of the asteroid as the "Totter's Lane at the end of the universe". And if you don't understand that reference, go and watch An Unearthly Child now.)

The idea of the Doctor talking to the Tardis could have potentially been a terrible one. I think if another writer had done it, it could have descended into a sentimental, over-reverent pile of slush. But, Gaiman being Gaiman, he gave the Tardis character, Idris, such a mad, sexy, weird and wonderful characterisation that I instantly fell in love with it. Suranne Jones' fantastic portrayal really brought the Tardis to life, and her interactions with Matt Smith were simply joyous to watch. I loved the Pull To Open sequence, which has in an instant solved a debate that's been going on for forty years in the fandom, and there were so many other little references to Who history that it'll take me a number of rewatches to take them all in, I'm sure.

Finally we got to see the inside of the Tardis! Oh man. So good. The last time we really saw any of the other rooms was way back in The Invasion of Time, where it looked, as Neil Gaiman put it on Confidential, like an old-fashioned brick-built Victorian hospital. Probably because it was filmed in an old-fashioned brick-built Victorian hospital. But anyway, the idea of the Tardis being able to move its rooms around and delete them is very cool, and it was great to see the previous control set once more. It did amuse me that the corridors Amy and Rory were lost in had obviously not changed since the early 1970s! Rory's death this week was very unpleasant, and the whole thing about being lost in time in the corridors I thought was handled brilliantly. Though I don't know where the paint to write "Hate Amy, Kill Amy" on the walls came from....

Other things very quickly: Michael Sheen is a complete dude, I loved Auntie and Uncle and hope similar characters reappear, the built Tardis was brilliant and the little keyboard was such a great touch that only a child could have designed it, and, well, I wouldn't mind being inside Suranne Jones. *clears throat quickly* Er, I mean the Tardis. Yeah. 

Verdict: 10/10

Twitter: antmoorfield. kthxbai


PS. Since I didn't bother to review The Curse of the Black Spot last week, here's a one sentence reaction. Fun, throwaway episode, short on character and with a thin premise that could have been explored further, but still worth watching. Verdict: 6/10.

Pretenders (BSDA #19)

I've pointlessly spent the last few hours reading several Wikipedia articles on the lines of succession to various monarchical countries, and, in particular, pretenders to such thrones. A pretender is basically someone who believes they have the legitimate right to a particular throne. Examples include the Jacobites, who felt the exile of James II and VII, and his replacement by William and Mary in the 1688 "Glorious Revolution", was illegal and that therefore his descendants were the rightful kings of England and Scotland. Jacobite spirit was a huge part of the lives of many Scots in the eighteenth century, affected as they were by the awful Highland Clearances, which explains the massive support for the Jacobite pretender Bonnie Prince Charlie in the rising of 1745. Charlie's army marched down from Scotland, gathering hugh support, but, facing the military might of the British king, they stopped at Swarkestone Bridge (near to where I live, in Derbyshire) and then went home. The Jacobite succession currently rests on an obscure German aristocrat called Franz, Duke of Bavaria. Thankfully I think there is little likelihood of him trying to regain the throne any time soon.

Other interesting people are the Carlists, in Spain, who argued that Philip V's Pragmatic Sanction of 1830, in which he gave the succession to his daughter Isabella, was illegal as, following pure Salic law, women could not take the throne. They supported instead the Infanta Carlos and his descendants, and were a major part of Spanish politics until the restoration of the monarchy in 1975. For example, they were part of the broad coalition who supported General Franco throughout his fascist dictatorship.

Even more interesting are the four different claims to the French throne, the legitimists, the Orleanists, the Bonapartists and the Jacobites again. This, however, is so incredibly confusing that you should go to Wikipedia now, as you basically have to understand in detail a century of French history, if you want to make sense of the different arguments. And let's not even get involved with English claims to the French throne, or French claims to the Spanish throne, or Spanish claims to the Dutch throne....

Obviously today was some wedding or something. I like the couple, and by and large I liked their wedding. Republican I may be, but I do feel that the presentation of William and Catherine as just two ordinary people highlights their appeal to the public. I don't begrudge monarchists their day of fun. The support for William and Kate is based in a pure utopian "romantic nationalism", just as were the fantasies of the Jacobites about the King Across The Water. These myths and fantasies draw us together, give us hope and even write stories for us about good and evil. In an age of bland media saturation, cynicism and worldwide coverage of the horrors that humanity is capable of, we all need stories that make us feel good, that make us fight for what we hold dear, that make us think life is worth living. These stories may be just stories, but they're damn good stories.

I just want to, you know, have a choice about who our head of state will be. (Did I mention how much I enjoyed the music at the wedding? It was good. Although the number of conservatives who seem to misunderstand the radical socialist sentiment of Jerusalem continues to annoy me. It should be England's national anthem, you know. Because it's bloody progressive.) 


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