NuWho Rewatch: The Aliens of London/World War III

[purplecat]

The Aliens of London/World War III is an interesting sidestep for Doctor Who into something much closer to the CBBC style of drama. I'm not sure I'd call it a mis-step exactly, since at this point the production team can't have had much idea what their actual audience demographics were going to turn out to be. But to old-Who fans at the time, and I suspect to anyone watching now, it seems oddly out of place with a broad, childish sense of humour under-pinning most of of the drama. Someone, somewhere, at some point, remarked that the Slitheen worked much better in the Sarah Jane Adventures where their giggling and farting fit much more naturally into the overall tone of the show and I think there is some truth in that.

Not there aren't some serious things going on. The most obvious of these is that there are consequences to Rose's disappearance. There was a reason, I suspect, that so many Classic Who companions are orphans and we get shown why here. Rose has been away for a year and has to cope with the fall out from that and, again, we see RTD's desire to ground things out in something approaching realism. "I don't do domestic," mutters the Doctor while he wrestles for control of the TV remote with a toddler.

No-longer-so-small child chose this episode to start asking, of prominent characters, "will she survive?". It started with Harriet Jones ("well she survives this episode") and then Dr. Sato ("umm, well, that depends there was this spin-off..", "Doctor Who had a spin-off!!?!"* ). This episode actually sets up a lot that continues going forward, both accidentally and on purpose.

I've also been pondering RTD's lexicon in this series and his fondness for the letter x - Moxx of the Balhoon, Raxacoricofallapatorius, The Mighty Jagrafess of the Holy Hadrojassic Maxarodenfoe - I don't recall him having quite such fun with made up words in later series.

On the whole, leaving the Slitheen's slightly over-the-top comic personas aside, it's a pretty strong pair of episodes. You get the sense that the show has finished introducing itself to the audience and is now underway properly, with previous decisions coming home to roost, relationships moving forward and a number of ideas - Harriet Jones, the idea that new history can happen, Mickey's role in fighting aliens - being set up for the future. The Slitheen do seem out of place amid the rest and it is telling that they never appear in Doctor Who again after this season.

*I have no idea what she thought was going on in the umpteen episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures she watched with her cousins.

Comments

[gominokouhai]

I think AoL is the episode in which RTD really sets out his stall. We had a couple of weeks when we could just gawp at the fact that the big blue box was back on the screen, and now he starts to show us his grand plan for New Who. It's a deeply childish story with fart jokes and stupid keyboard-mashing names. Nonetheless it deals with certain specific elements in a much more mature way than Old Who, in particular the thing that companions no longer exist in a vacuum, and they have families and lives and backstories that actually affect the plot from now on. This could have been brilliant, but the execution was ruined when he tried to carry it off entirely by the inclusion of characters like Jackie and Martha's entirely pointless extended family.

I do have a particular fondness for the Doctor's speech about standing up and making a decision, because no one else will. And Rose got to be cool when she took charge of an emergency situation, even if all she actually did was find a cupboard to hide in.

[purplecat]

I don't think Jackie's such a bad idea, especially given they were obviously thinking they might end up being more comedy focused than they eventually were. Martha's family did seem a bit pointless though as if RTD couldn't really think of anything to do with them beyond a retread of the dynamic driving the Tyler family. Rory's dad, I think, was handled much better.

[gominokouhai]

Rory's dad was ace. I want him to be my dad.

I wonder if there's a class element to it? I get the impression RTD was frantically trying to broaden the appeal, so he was cramming working-class characters in there despite having never met one, and he's not a particularly good writer, and he never bothered to make them likeable or engaging or interesting in any way, which is why we get caricatures like Jackie. Every time he introduced a gay character, despite it being his area of expertise, it felt forced and raised all of those complaints about the gay agenda.

The Moff, on the other hand, sticks to what he knows, which is why all of his characters are straight white middle-class cisgendered and heteronormative (going right back to Coupling). His characters are, nonetheless, fun to watch in a way that Francine and Whatshisface never were.

[purplecat]

You know, I always assumed RTD had a work-class background but I just looked him up and, yeah. I've always thought he was an oddly frustrating writer. He can produce absolutely storming stuff but a lot of the time he seems not to be really paying attention and just ignores details it would be easy to tighten up and get right. The weird thing, reading his Writer's Tale was that he obviously did obsess about the details but, it seemed, largely irrelevant ones, leaving massive howlers unnoticed and untouched. It's odd.

Moff is also frustrating, but in a different way, I think he gets a bit too tied up, somehow, in viewing all the characters as chess pieces in some intricate game.

[gominokouhai]

The Writer's Tale bugs me for similar reasons---he clearly knows his stuff, he just chooses not to apply it sometimes, and the only reason that I can think of is arrogance.

And you're quite right about the Moff. Somebody needs to tell him it's okay to have a standalone story once in a while.

[purplecat]

I think part of his problem may be that he thrives on adrenaline. If you need the sound of deadlines whooshing past you to actually get you down to work then you are going to miss stuff in the panic.

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

Margaret (Blon the Slitheen) is the main bad guy in "Boom Town"The Slitheen appear in "The Pandorica Opens", though only in the background (they are mentioned by name amongst the list of races present and then a few appear without speaking parts in the underhenge as the Doctor is imprisoned in the Pandorica).

[purplecat]

I'd not spotted them in the background. Even so I think "they never appear again after this season (apart from in blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameos)" conveys much the same point.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

I don't know what the writing order was, but these episodes were the first filmed, alongside Rose (I think the spacepig has the cache of being the first new Who scene recorded). This makes the change of direction even clearer (and note the burping bin in Rose).

[purplecat]

I wonder what made them decide to take a more serious approach? At that point it must before they got any real audience feedback - maybe it was just that they could see the actors upping their game when they had something more meaty - like Dalek or Fathers' Day to sink their teeth into.

[daniel-saunders.livejournal.com]

Interesting question! I wish I knew the answer. Dalek really does feel like a paradigm shift in new Who story-telling, perhaps that's it. Or maybe they were deliberately trying different styles early on to see what worked and decided that this style did not.

It may also be noteworthy that the first bloc (Rose and Aliens of London/World War III) was directed by Keith Boak, who never directed for the programme again - perhaps some of the tone came from him? He certainly came in for some fan criticism at the time, if I recall correctly.

[purplecat]

I recall quite a lot of dissatisfaction being expressed agains Boak. The farting must have been in the script, I think, but all the giggling may not have been.