Review: Doctor Who, ‘A Town Called Mercy’

OK, when Doctor Who wins its obligatory Hugo next year, I vote we give it to this episode. I thought that was stonking.

That said, I can see my Twitter feed is already a flutter with voices of dissent. I won’t pretend to know everybody’s reasons (people always take the trouble to tell me that it was for something different when I guesstimate), but US set episodes are always a slightly tougher sell. I know there have been grumblings around the blogosphere about catering to the growing US audience, but in all honesty, I can’t see why that’s a reason to complain. I mean, it isn’t like all the UK-based episodes aren’t catering to the UK audience. I grant you, ‘Daleks in Manhattan‘ was not the most successful of gestures in that direction, but Doctor Who has a long history of flirting with locations across the pond*. William Hartnell, the first doctor, even had a wild west story arc himself, in ‘The Gunfighters‘ (1966).

I also rather liked the touch of the Doctor saying that they were heading for a Mexican day of the dead festival (before someone spilled from crumbs on the console). Like so many science fiction programs, Doctor Who has always been limited in its realism by its centring on the country of its origin for its plots. Budget has been a big factor in this – I don’t suppose we shall see a Doctor Who episode set in New Zealand in the near future. Curiously, New Who has had, if anything, even more of a problem in this way than Old Who, setting unusually high numbers of episodes on Earth in an attempt to not scare away mainstream viewers, and consequently giving more time to Great Britain over alien locales. Exploring a bit of Earthly culture outside the European therefore seems rather healthy, to me.

But then, I spent a couple of years growing up in the US as a child, and have a longstanding affection for the wild west as a result. Perhaps I am biased because of this, but overall I thought this episode was tightly plotted, original, well-acted, challenging, and exciting. We were not tortured by the notoriously bad American accents that were one of the many flawed elements of the Manhattan based episode mentioned above. Moreover, rather than the recycling of old favourites that we have seen so much of, lately, we got a new (to my knowledge) alien race and a cyborg. (OK, so it is hitting a lot of the Ro buttons, but surely everyone likes cyborgs, right? Right?)

Minimally Spoiltastic Plot

The Doctor, Amy, and Rory arrive at the town of Mercy, somewhere in the US. The town is surrounded by a mysterious ring of rocks and wood, as well as a pointed ‘Keep Out’ sign, which the Doctor pointedly ignores. Almost immediately upon arrival they are challenged by the locals and when the Doctor confirms that he is both a Doctor and an alien, they unceremoniously evict him. In response to his crossing the ring around the town, an ominous figure, named by the locals as ‘The Gunslinger’ materialises in fits and starts, slowly getting closer to the Doctor, hefting a big gun.

At the last moment, the local sheriff, Issac (Ben Browder), declares that the Doctor must be allowed back in, and takes him aside to explain. There is, apparently, another alien doctor in the town, and the Gunslinger wants to kill him. The other doctor, Kahler Jex (Adrian Scarborough), has apparently done a lot of good. The sheriff mentions that the war he, Issac, fought in is only a few years in the past, and the experience convinced him that if a man wants a second chance, he can have one. Kahler Jex has done a lot of good to the town, and Issac is determined to protect him from the Gunslinger.

The Doctor agrees, but is naturally curious as to why it is that the Gunslinger wants this other doctor dead, and whether Kahler Jex is truly a man worth protecting, whatever he may have done for Mercy.

Analysis

I felt like there were a lot of geek nods hovering around this one. You can’t say ‘The Gunslinger’ to me and not have me think of Roland of Gilead, who is so termed in Stephen King’s magnum opus, The Dark Tower. But I’m willing to concede that I’m super sensitive to such things. I also don’t know if it’s just me who found that the Gunslinger bore a striking resemblance to a warped version of Kryten from Red Dwarf, which, of course, had its own western episode. I dunno, maybe it is just me, but the black, bulky clothes; the waxy, cyborg face; the awkward stance and movements; the misshapen hands… it just felt familiar. On the other hand, I know that the Terminator font used for the cyborg-view writing that said ‘TERMINATE’ was intentional.

So what were all these references (or putative references) doing? I’m not entirely sure. They might have been just nods. However, this episode was particularly concerned with exploring the themes of warfare, justice, law and order, and the impact of the past on the present, as well as whether an individual can change. The responsibilities and changeability of the individual is a frequent question where artificial intelligence is concerned. Dave Lister, in Red Dwarf, is constantly trying to get Kryten to change as a way of enabling freedom by defying his programming. This is positive freedom, and yet could also be seen as a restriction of Kryten’s negative freedom to simply be who he wants to be. Kryten seems to enjoy the positive freedom that Lister grants him, yet he is also frequently wracked with guilt over the minor transgressions Lister persuades him to because they are in conflict with an existing moral code that Lister is not entirely successful in providing him with reasons to reject. I’m not saying Red Dwarf has any especially in-depth discussion of these things, but it is a feature of debates about artificial life that they always bring with them questions of responsibility and freedom. Programming is taken as restrictive – yet arguably, we are just as predetermined by the laws of physics and our circumstance. Can programming free one from responsibility? If a choice is unavoidable, does that mean it was not chosen? Was it really as unavoidable as we like to tell ourselves it was? And if we create life, are we not responsible for the actions of that life? Or does accepting such responsibility deny the power over its own life that each individual has?

These are questions that the Terminator movies (especially Terminator 2: Judgement Day) are more overtly concerned with. Questions of responsibility and freedom stem from both the AI plot elements and the time travel ones (another shared theme with this week’s Doctor Who. John Connor’s message to himself, via Kyle Reese and his mother, is that ‘The future is not set. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves’. It’s a bastardisation of a quote from Sartre’s seminal paper, ‘Existentialism and Humanism‘**:

Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself… man is, before all else, something which propels itself towards a future, and is aware that it is doing so

Terminator 2 is all about choices, and I’ll restrain myself from getting too deep into my thoughts on T2***, but I hope this is sufficient to show the connection. Anyway, ‘A Town Called Mercy’ is also about choices and the weight of responsibility – the weight of the past. The Doctor is a man who has tried to wipe his past away – a thing that might feel like freedom, but must also be dangerous, especially for a man with a past as weighty as the Doctor’s. Here he is confronted by a number of mirrors: the sherif, who has responded to his experiences of war with kindness, and a resolution to judge all as though their crimes can be written off if they can prove themselves valuable members of the community. The other doctor, who has worked hard to atone for a murky past, but whose past has followed him, anyway, and now threatens others because it has been ignored. And the Gunslinger, another dealer of death, who is bitter and full of anger for the role that has been thrust upon him, yet who follows a certain code nonetheless. The nature of morality and when and whether it is ever right to kill is constantly challenged and interrogated from a number of angles. And hanging in the background, addressed with a subtlety that New Who has sometimes lacked in the past, is the issue of the Doctor’s own past, of his war-crimes, of his status as a warrior, and whether he even has the right to call himself the ‘Doctor’ and not the ‘Predator’ or something more ominous.

One senses that the Doctor can never truly resign himself to the passive role of healer. The clean slate that Issac wants for others (and tacitly for himself) is perhaps an ideal that cannot be attained precisely because the history of our past actions frames our present and our future. The Doctor was always more the sort of doctor who searched after knowledge than who stopped to attend to the less exciting business of tending to the sick. He has helped people, countless people, but he has also left a wave of destruction in his path. The ‘Oncoming Storm’, if you like. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: ‘He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy‘. Or perhaps, he’s a little bit of both.

The Doctor is one of the more interesting heroes – one of the most enigmatic, charismatic, and magnetic – precisely because he is both darkness and light. Even before this episode aired certain corners of the Interwebs were muttering about the Doctor handling a gun and behaving in a morally questionable manner. But he’s always been a bit morally questionable. He’s not a comfortable hero, and his value lies precisely in that, because he makes us question ourselves. He’s makes us question whom we choose to idolise, and whether people can be fitted into neat categories of ‘good’ and ‘bad’. Not a lot of television shows suitable for children dare to muddy the waters in this way, and yet I think it’s a thing that children respond well too. It’s an important lesson, not only that good people can do bad things, but that bad people can do good, and that maybe the distinction between the two is not as clear as our parents might like to pretend when they tell us that ‘No – don’t do that. That’s wrong – only bad children do that’.

This is a challenging and nuanced look at morality and responsibility all packaged up in a great ball of fun filled with aliens and cyborgs and the wild west. What’s not to love? I might just go watch it again.

In the mean time, and because I cannot resist it, I just have to post this glorious video again, as a reminder of the Doctor’s darker side…

*He-he, I said ‘pond’.
**The literal translation is ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, but the title is usually rendered in English as ‘Existentialism and Humanism’.
***Give me enough time and freedom and space to write in and I will almost always end up talking about existentialism and Terminator 2 – it’s like monkeys and Shakespeare.

Doctor Who: Night Terrors

I liked this. There were no obvious gender issues, which made it a relief after last week. The plot was solid and the Doctor was wonderful.

Brief, non-spoilery plot synopsis

Little boy is so scared he sends a psychic message out so strong it is registered by the Doctor’s psychic paper inside the TARDIS. It says “Please save me from the monsters”. And the Doctor comes – to save the day and solve the mystery of what the monsters are and how to stop them.

Thoughts

Creepy little children are such a cliché, but overall this episode strikes a nice balance by keeping us guessing as to whether the child is creepy or creepy things are happening to the child. It certainly achieved something that would be scary for children, which is something Doctor Who has something of a duty to perform, but doesn’t always achieve. If you’re a small child, you want to at least say that you were hiding behind the sofa watching Doctor Who at some point in your life, even if you couldn’t ever physically hide behind your sofa.

I also felt it dealt well with the tensions inside the home that children feel but are so often ignored, or that parents assume they can keep from children, and thereby make worse. More than this, it showed the resolution of such tensions, which is something children need to see. I got no problem with sound resolutions like that happening in Doctor Who.

The only minor points of criticism are that the dad was too easily convinced that the Doctor wasn’t a nutter, and that it wasn’t really clear what happened to the old lady. I loved her as a character, but whatever happened to her didn’t happen in the same way as what happened to the other people. (I know this is vague, trying to minimise spoilers.)

Anyway, creepy children and dolls are a little obvious, but I found the resolution original and satisfying. I also really liked the aspect of meta-textuality introduced by what initially seemed, to me, to be a film set. I don’t know if that was intentional, but I liked it.

Other than that, not much to say. It did exactly what a Doctor Who episode needed to do – nothing more and nothing less. Not the best Doctor Who ever, but perfectly satisfying and not at all irritating. For that much, Mark Gatiss should be commended.

Doctor Who, A Good Man Goes to War

Sweet zombie kittens that was awesome! The little I saw on Twitter before I wisely closed my feed for the duration suggests that the Internet may not agree, but I don’t care. I thought that was phenomenal. Somehow it managed to do the sort of motherload pay-off that RTD Who always went for and missed in the season finale. I’m stunned.

It’s a puzzle how to review this, because I’d like to avoid giving the Great Big Honking Spoilers away. Obviously the episode concerns the Doctor’s rescue mission for Amy. He basically calls in all his favours and goes to war. It all goes remarkably smoothly, and just as you’re starting to think ‘Good lord, this episode has no dramatic tension, it’s just about how awesome the Doctor is’… the game changes. And I won’t say any more about exactly how, except to say that there’s lots of fighting and it’s pretty cool, as well as sad and poignant at times. Also, at the end, we find out who River Song really is, but don’t worry, I shan’t say.

Madame Vastra and Jenny kick butt

Despite the potential for cheese, I really enjoyed the way the Doctor’s ‘favours’ are called in. Some of the friends he calls on we recognise, some are brand new, but of races we recognise. I was particularly pleased by the Victorian silurian lady, Madame Vastra (Neve McIntosh), and her human maid (or possibly lover?), Jenny (Catrin Stewart); and the sontaran who had spliced his DNA so that he could serve as a nurse (as punishment). Both concepts could have gone horribly wrong, and the sontaran walked a very close line, but they came out on just the right side. Additionally, we saw glimpses of some awesome war scenes had on a planet where men in gorgeous period-wear shoot laser pistols. I suspect much of the budget of this half of the series went on this episode, but it was worth it.

Rory. Nuff said.

Rory was also impressively awesome. I have this feeling there was meant to be more Rory this season, and it somehow got cut out. I very much appreciated Rory wandering around in a roman uniform calling himself the Centurion, but there was no build up. We’ve had the odd reference, but I have seen others speculate that there were originally more conversations between Rory and the flesh Jennifer in which he talked about his time as a Nestine more, and that it ended up on the cutting room floor. If so, that is a shame, it would have helped pave the way for this.

I also like seeing the bad side of the Doctor. I’m always puzzled when there’s an outcry that the Doctor did something not 100% OK. The Doctor has always been morally ambiguous. At first he was simply selfish and insensitive (recall how he ended up meeting the daleks in the first place, tricking his companions into thinking the TARDIS was broken just so that he could satisfy his curiosity?), but he’s made a number of morally dubious decisions in every carnation. If anything, he’s grown: his selfishness has expanded to encompass those that he cares about, and in general he tries to help those he encounters, and to impose rules for acting when things are not so straight forward. He definitely doesn’t like guns, but he has used them in the past*. He’s committed and contemplated genocide a number of times. This is not a New Who phenomenon. All that seems new, to me, is that he is more openly concerned by the consequences of his actions. This episode was a great exploration of these complexities in his character and I loved it.

I also loved the speechifying and the poetry: not a thing you will hear me say often. This virtually never works, in Doctor Who or otherwise, but they pulled it off and deserve the credit for it.

It’s not all perfect. Whilst I enjoyed the implied relationship between the silurian lady and her ‘maid’, the relationship between the two men identified by their weight, homosexual relationship, and religion, instead of by their names, sat ill with me. It felt like it was meant to be comment on how gay relationships or religious affiliations are usually token… but it actually just felt token, and uncomfortably so. Similarly, Amy is simply the princess to be rescued, not doing anything that moves the action along at all, either when she’s waiting for her ‘boys’ to save her, or afterwards. Apparently giving birth makes you go uncharacteristically passive?

On the other hand, there was no shortage of other women kicking ass in this episode. I’ve mentioned already how much I liked Vastra and Jenny – they were awesome throughout, but especially in the fight scenes. As were the other female soldiers, not to mention Madame Kovarian (Frances Barber) and River Song. I guess it’s swings and roundabouts, it’s just a shame that the lead female had all her umph taken out of her just ’cause she had a baby. I’d have imagined Amy as a fearsome momma-bear sort, rather than a ‘hide-in-the-corner-and-let-Rory-take-care-of-it’ lady. But ho hum, you can’t have everything.

All in all, there was very much to enjoy, and only a few reservations. I thoroughly recommend it!

* For true, that man knows his way around a gun:

In case this YouTube video is juddery (as they sometimes seem to be when I embed them) please go here to enjoy it in all its glory.