(This one’s coming to you late because someone – probably accidentally – reported my newsletter as malicious content or something, so I was locked out of sending new ones. Buttondown had to audit and then clear it. We’re back in business!)
As mentioned in Part 1, here’s my reviews for the week. If you prefer my personal rambles to these, you can just skip this one.
TV
Rick and Morty Season 7: The meta-story for this show has gone pretty weird by now. There’s the fact that its fandom is almost universally disliked, largely for good reason, there’s both Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland being accused of wrongdoing at various points (out of whom Harmon seems to have taken responsibility for what he did, while Roiland has been surgically excised from the show), and there’s the aesthetic of the show, which, depending on who you ask, is either nihilistic, edgelordy, bleak, or plain nasty.
The discussion on whether it’s “okay” to enjoy Rick and Morty, though, borders on puritan moralising – I think we can take it as a given, among us friends here, that watching something with a “bad” morality has no direct reflection on you as a person. If it were the case, anyone who watches or reads horror is suspect. The question seems to revolve around whether Rick is the “good guy” here, and whether that’s the case or not, if it’s okay to “enjoy” watching him be awful to his family and the universe at large. Honestly, this question is so tedious that I’m going to leave it there and move on.
I think the snarl here is that R&M, rather than being a literary/prestige show, is purely genre tv, and a sitcom at that. And genre shows, let’s face it, tend to have simple morality with people cleanly divided into good and bad, so with Rick, even if you’re not meant to approve of his actions, it’s not clear if it’s alright to laugh at them. I’m not saying here that this makes R&M a complex show. It’s just not interested in morality as a big part of the aesthetic of its universe. It’s Doctor Who where it doesn’t matter if the Doctor is a good guy or a bad guy.
The second tricky bit is that R&M often arbitrarily switches between treating its characters as joke devices and as actual people, and expects the viewer to do the same. This is something modern sitcoms do all the time – continuity/consistent characterisation is conveniently thrown out for a joke, but the rest of the time, you’re supposed to think of these people as “real”. In R&M, as opposed to, say, Friends, the characters act as devices for much longer than they do as characters. And a lot of the horror that viewers feel at the terrible things that happen in the show is based on a) whether you read some of these things as punchlines to jokes rather than things that happen to people and b) whether you think it’s okay to have terrible things happen to fictional people. After all, you’re then laughing at an ongoing abusive relationship, which is … icky, I guess. (There’s a strand of defence here that R&M is descended from American kids’ cartoons, which have a nasty streak anyway – that’s an essay for someone else to write.)
Where does that leave us? Why, then, is Rick and Morty interesting to watch? As a writer, what engages me about R&M is its pace, and the speed at which it burns through science fiction ideas. Like the 2005 Doctor Who series, R&M is very aware of being television, sometimes textually, and it tries to take as many tropes as “read” as possible (including the switch I’m talking about above), and then tries to do the next thing. Part of the joy is to watch them take a concept that’d sustain any other genre show for at least an hourlong episode, burn through it in ten minutes, and then figure out where to go next. And if the received wisdom about Doctor Who is that you can tell any kind of story with the format, then with Rick and Morty, you can even tell stories where the Doctor is a bad guy. This means it’s useless as character-based drama, but it’s excellent genre commentary – when it’s good, of course.
The last few seasons weren’t very interesting (though they recovered some momentum in the back half of Season 6), but Roiland’s departure, and the retroactive public impression that he was somehow the core of the show and it couldn’t possibly exist without him, seems to have lit a fire under the creative team’s collective ass to prove themselves a cohesive and vibrant storytelling unit.
This is helped by their decision to tell standalone stories this season, because they comprehensively proved over Seasons 2-4 that long-form storytelling didn’t actually matter in this universe, and it would be going back on that lesson to do that trick again. All of R&M’s history – including Rick’s friends, Mr. Poopybutthole, Rick’s dead wife, evil Morty, are now atomised and have become part of the universe, available to be deployed not to tell a single overarching story (which was a feint anyway) but as part of the overall engine to tell stories.
Strangely, given that El is a big fan of Steven Moffat and seems to dislike Rick and Morty (that post is well worth a read, even if I disagree with roughly half of its conclusion), this actually mirrors the overall shape of Moffat’s run on Doctor Who – starting with tight one-offs that show off a knowledge of structure and form, then expanding to tell epic stories of great consequence, only to pull the rug out from under the viewer and lightly make fun of them for thinking that epics “mattered”, and then taking those lessons into a late phase of confident but smaller stories.
I think, honestly, this might be the healthiest Rick & Morty has ever been.
Books
TARDIS Eruditorum Volume 7 (reread): This one covers the Sylvester McCoy series, and the ensuing New Adventures novels. Once again, as I mentioned in the last post, there’s no point in my reviewing a TARDIS Eruditorum book – you either already like them or are uninterested. I read this after the McGann/Eccleston book, because the New Adventures novels are a hole in my Doctor Who reading (except for Human Nature and The Also People), despite being the most acclaimed prose output within Doctor Who. I read this so I could have a rough reading list, and having now got that, I’m planning to read the more interesting entries, starting with Timewyrm: Revelation, and write about them on the blog. This will be an adjunct to an eccentric blogging project I’ll be telling you about in a few days that I plan to do over the coming year.
A Mild Curiosity in a Junkyard (reread): As you can see, I’ve been in a bit of a Doctor Who mood recently. This isn’t going to change over the rest of this entry, to be sure. Having some Doctor Who going on on television that isn’t a complete embarrassment reminded me that I like this thing most of the time. I don’t tend to rewatch the show much, though I used to dip into some of RTD’s episodes on and off, but I used to reread a bunch of the Eighth Doctor Adventures and the classic Target novelisations, and I don’t seem to have done that over the last 5-6 years, since Chibnall took over. Good to be interested again.
Anyway, I mentioned in a recent post that her Joan Baez post was the second time El Sandifer had dropped a whole book in a single blogpost. This was the other one. This was supposed to be the Eruditorum entry for “Silence in the Library/The Forest of the Dead”, which El had been doing (if I’m correct) in the order that River would’ve met the Doctor in her chronology rather than in the order that they came out, except, instead of an essay on those episodes, this is … an entire history of the production of Doctor Who, presented as the book that the Vashta Nerada are reading when the Doctor tells them to “look him up”, interspersed with other people – most of them characters from Doctor Who, though there are some surprises – interrupted in their reading of the book. I don’t know if I’d recommend this to someone who is completely unfamiliar with Doctor Who, but if you have a broad idea of the show, and would like to read a straightforward history, this is a great place to start.
The Day of the Doctor (reread): It’s interesting to me that, given the chance to novelise one of his Doctor Who episodes, this was the one that Steven Moffat chose. It’s straightforwardly a good decision, but I do wonder why he chose this over, say, “Silence in the Library/The Forest of the Dead”, or “Dark Water/Death in Heaven”, both of which would’ve made for cracking reads. There are others where the reason is obvious – “Blink” relies far too much on being television, as does “Flesh and Stone/Time of the Angels”, while “Name of the Doctor” or “Time of the Doctor” are very much “season finales”, and “The Eleventh Hour” is too much of a season opener with lots of strands left dangling.
I think apart from the two-parters I mentioned above, the only other episode I imagine Moffat might want a crack at is “The Wedding of River Song”, which was a production-induced disaster that I for one would love to see a rewritten version of, though he’d then have to redo the trilogy of “A Good Man Goes to War”, “Let’s Kill Hitler” and “The Wedding of River Song”, and that sounds like too much reworking of a decade-old story for anyone to volunteer to do.
“The Day of the Doctor” was designed to address the entire new series rather than just the Matt Smith run (which was thematically over in the previous episode, and on a character level in the one after this), and it is the story, from beginning to end, of one particular Doctor (8.5), while also giving Doctors 10 and 11 a clean one-off adventure that happen to dovetail into 8.5’s story.
“The Day of the Doctor” also happens to be the episode that brought me back to Moffat’s Doctor Who after Series 6 disappointed me enough that I skipped Series 7 entirely till I watched “The Day of the Doctor”. It’s among my top five Doctor Who stories in the new series – possibly ever – and it brought me back in time for my favourite era of the new series, which is the stretch from “Kill the Moon” in the middle of Series 8 to the end of Series 9 and “The Husbands of River Song”. So I’m happy he chose this one.
It is also the one that would allow him to do the most showboaty writing on, and if it’s one thing Moffat wants to show us (a quality that is in turns endearing and infuriating), is how clever he is. In this case, this is reflected in the structure – the chapters are out of order, largely corresponding to the Doctor appearing in a particular chapter (so “Night of the Doctor” is Chapter 8, but also the first chapter of the book), and there are interstitials from an unknown narrator who rather aggressively keeps pointing out that most of the book is narrated by the Doctor himself, and the Doctor just has a tendency to refer to himself in the third person (which you realise as an “I” shows up in odd places), there is even a missing chapter that the interstitial narrator assures you is in fact there (which leads to a fun joke by the end).
Some of this borders on annoying, I think at least in part because prose isn’t Moffat’s native medium, and some of what he thinks is clever is well-worn in genre novels. For the most part, though, he uses prose to his advantage, and you can tell that he loves the interiority this affords him. The best aspect of his use of the medium isn’t the formal trickery, it’s what he does with his characters. You get to see the internal choices the Doctor is making before saying the dialogue you say in the tv episode, you see why some of the annoying tics are there, and the fact that even the breeziest line has been thought through by Moffat. Each line of dialogue is geared to tell you something about each of the three Doctors that appear in this story, and with prose, Moffat can tell you exactly what that is. This increased my respect for him as a dialogue-writer, because unlike on tv, you can sit with the choice and see how it works.
There are chapters narrated by Kate Lethbridge-Stewart and Osgood, and Moffat captures the internal narrative voice of each character very well. My favourite narrative voice, I have to say, is that of the War Doctor. He was my favourite thing about the tv episode – an avatar of the classic series showing up to critique the new show – and Moffat captures both his anger and his anguish, his disdain for the man he becomes, and his slow realisation of why.
There are also many little bits strewn through that let you know that Moffat has thought about the Doctor – as a writer and not just as a fan – in quite a bit of depth, and whether or not you always like his portrayal, there are so many more choices going into this than you might realise as a casual viewer.
Moffat’s vision of Doctor Who is, for its flaws, epic and exhilarating, and it’s all here in this book for you to read.
Dead Romance (reread): I’m entirely unsure who I might recommend this to. It’s a spin-off of a spin-off of a spin-off, one of the furthest things from the centre of Doctor Who, based on years of lore that happened only in two different ranges of spin-off books. And yet.
So, some background. Dead Romance was part of the Bernice Summerfield New Adventures range, which was spun off from the 7th Doctor New Adventures published by Virgin, in which Bernice was a companion of the Doctor’s (an archaeologist from the future, whom River Song was very much inspired by), which were in turn spun off from the Target novelisations when the tv show ended in 1989. Dead Romance, however, does not feature Bernice herself, pushing it one degree farther. In fact, a lot of the concerns of this book emerge from Alien Bodies, which is an Eighth Doctor Adventure also written by Lawrence Miles, which in turn builds on many concepts from the New Adventures, particularly those of Marc Platt, and which would later lead to the Faction Paradox universe.
All very straightforward and clear, of course. Now, given all of those things, holy crap, Dead Romance is a better novel than it has any right to be. It’s part of Miles’s attempt to treat the Doctor Who universe as a cohesive science fiction universe, and to worldbuild in it. Given that this book takes place in (MILD SPOILER) a bottle universe inside the world of the New Adventures, Miles takes the opportunity to rhyme with himself, testing out ideas that he’ll expand on later in a laboratory that he’s allowed to destroy as he leaves (this isn’t a spoiler, the narrator tells us this in the first couple of pages).
There is some writing in Dead Romance that smacks of the late nineties, and Miles’s “viewing science fiction concepts from the outside” narrative approach doesn’t always work, especially when it comes to exposition (there’s a reason people use jargon, you know), but for most of it, Dead Romance is a surprisingly effective portrait of a young drug-addicted, disaffected woman being thrust into a universe she can’t comprehend. There is some real heft added to the Doctor Who universe, using its outsider lens to allow children’s tv ideas to distend and sometimes explode.
I’m talking around a lot of things here because if someone decides to pick this up based on my review, or because they’re interested in Doctor Who or Faction Paradox, I don’t want to spoil what is an intense and extremely enjoyable first-reading experience.
But I’ll note it’s a shame that a stellar book like this is so little-known outside marginal nerd circles. So let me try and sell this to you. Dead Romance is what you get when you mix a working-class Bridget Jones with Roadside Picnic, except the incomprehensible aliens in this case are the Time Lords from Doctor Who.
How about that?
Lots of Doctor Who stuff up there, as I noted. Even Rick and Morty could be considered Doctor Who-related. I guess I’m just in that kind of mood this year. Having fallen off comics, I need some replacement comfort reading instead of the hundreds of comics I’d usually make my way through, and Doctor Who’s been in my life since I was a kid, so it’s just as lulling as superheroes punching each other, with similar occasional bursts of brilliance.
There’ll be more variety next time, but mind you, I’ll be writing quite a bit more about Doctor Who this year for the blogging project I mentioned above. This was a test drive for that, and I had a pretty good time writing this post.
More soon!
