The nice people at WordPress, ever concerned with disseminating this nonsense to the widest possible audience, sent me a lovely email telling me what my most popular outpourings have been over the last year and recommending I should ‘consider writing again on these topics’.
Well, try as I might I can’t think of a new angle on the glandular page 3 marvel Lacey Banghard so I suppose I’ll have to fall back on my other big draw from years gone by – wittering on about Doctor Who bad guys. To be honest I was going to do this anyway, but, you know: sometimes it takes a little nudge.
To recap: at the end of 2010 I began a series of pieces looking at the changing nature and role of antagonists on the show, and argued that here was as clear an indication as any other of the increasing sophistication of the series as the decades passed. In the initial run I covered everything up to the end of Season 31 – has anything significant occurred in the 18 months since?
Well, I feel obliged to open this look at Series 32 and associated bits by quoting Piers ‘plague victim in the radiation ward’ Wenger, to wit ‘there will be no returning monsters this year’. While it’s true that this is the first series since the revival not to have the reinvention of a 60s or 70s monster as a significant element (unless you really want to stretch a point by counting the Cybermats), this is plainly nonsense given that he’s talking about a series featuring appearances by Ood, Sontarans, Silurians, Cybermen, Judoon, a Dalek…
On the other hand, with the exception of the Cybermen none of them were major antagonists in the stories in which they appeared. The reason for their inclusion is very much in tune with the thinking of recent years – recurring monsters appearing not as a shorthand for evil, but to make it quite clear that this particular story has Significance. Most of the monsters on the list up the page are in one or other of the series finales, to provide added Gosh – the Cybermen’s typically underwhelming outing in Closing Time was added to the script to give a bit more gravity to the Doctor’s (supposedly) final battle prior to his (ahem) death.
(The appearance of the Ood in The Doctor’s Wife doesn’t fit this pattern, admittedly, but then it was apparently a cost-cutting measure. It worked for me, at least, and didn’t feel intrusive or obvious.)
With the appearances of old enemies restricted, whichever way you look at it, the roles of antagonists were taken by exciting new alien races like… er… and here we come to what’s developing to be one of the distinctive features of Moffat-era Who: he’s not that interested in inventing new aliens per se. Not alien aliens at least – some of the monsters may be described as aliens in passing, but this is really just putting an SF fig leaf on what are rather more archetypal fear-figures.
Series 32 is strong on nautical spirits, doppelgangers, minotaurs and haunted wardrobes – all creatures of fantasy or fairy tale, given an SF rationale (of varying degrees of credibility, admittedly). This shouldn’t really be a surprise given that ‘it’s going to be like a dark fairy tale’ was basically how Moffat introduced the Matt Smith era when asked how it would be distinctive. Even the series’ most prominent aliens appear inspired by folklore more than traditional SF – derived from the greys of UFO mythology, they are unnamed and strangely nebulous.
I thought up a very witty caption but for some reason I appear to have forgotten it. Hey ho.
This fits them rather well for a season with the most complicated relationship with the concept of evil to date. Writing about Davies-era Who I commented upon its notable lack of actual villains – something which has continued in Season 32. Automated alien machinery is key to the plots of Curse of the Black Spot, The Girl Who Waited and The God Complex, while a hardware glitch of a different kind initiates the plot of The Rebel Flesh and The Almost People. Of course, it’s not quite as radical as that – in addition to the Cybermen returning, the leader of the gangers proves to be a traditional raving maniac, and Neil Gaiman’s love letter to Doctor Who features a terrifically well-conceived and performed villain in the form of the House.
However, all of the above are from the ‘stand alone’ episodes of the series. When the likes of us discuss Series 32 in the years and decades to come, we’re going to be talking about it in terms of the overall plot just as Season 16 is remembered for the Key to Time storyline. And what’s notable about this arc is how vaguely defined the ostensible antagonists are.
We know what the Silence’s objective is (getting rid of the Doctor) but we’ve still only the vaguest idea why. We don’t know their origin, their history or any wider ambitions they may possess. They are largely ciphers – a brilliant visual and a striking schtick, but very little else. In this they are rather like the Weeping Angels and various other recent monsters. Our only clue is their vague afiliation with the Church, as depicted in A Good Man Goes To War. Writing about this episode I saw it as the series finally coming out openly in favour of rationality and in opposition to religious dogma. (No-one else has discussed it in these terms, so maybe that’s just me reading too much into it.)
It seems to me, however, that the story of the season isn’t really about the Doctor taking on the Silence, or vice versa – it’s about the problems resulting from the incredibly convoluted temporal relationships the Doctor finds himself entangled in with respect to both his opponents and those closest to him, compounded by the (ahem) inevitable fact of his impending (ahem) death. The series isn’t really about the Doctor fighting an enemy, but attempting to solve a rather abstract (and, although I hesitate to say so, wholly contrived) metaphysical problem.
Does this mean that the series is operating in a moral vacuum? Well, not quite – Frances Barber’s panto villain turn as the Silence’s housekeeper makes it quite clear who we are supposed to be rooting for, especially considering the treatment meted out to Pond in the first half of the season. That said, the Doctor has become a more elusive and slippery figure than he has been in decades – he lies, as we’re endlessly reminded, he cheats. (The promise that this year we would see what happens when the Doctor gets really, really angry turned out to have a pay-off that was, at best, peculiar – apparently he blows up a load of relatively innocent onlookers and then goes to ridiculous lengths to avoid hurting anyone directly responsible. Hmm.) Of late, he’s also afflicted with self-doubt to an unusual degree – and given we still don’t quite know what the Silence’s beef with him is, it could well be they are justified in seeing him as a legitimate menace.
There are more questions than answers here, of course. The most recent season has been a very atypical one, as everyone involved is at pains to stress. So we will have to see whether this fragmenting of the series’ narrative focus, so that conflict between good and evil is only one element alongside SF-derived metaphysical and emotional crises, is now the default shape of the series, or just a fluke of this very odd season. My personal suspicion leans towards the former – what we’re seeing is the latest development of trends away from traditional villain and evil which have been in progress for a few years.
We are promised great things in the course of the next couple of years, although at the time of writing not a single detail has been disclosed. Whether the plans of Moffat and the BBC will continue to develop the series’ conflicts in new and even more baffling directions, or return it to a more recognisable form, we have yet to see. The future is this way.
No Chic. Just Geek. 
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