Rate and Discuss 6.7: A Good Man Goes To War

[Paul Monk]

I so want to address all those points but I'm on my phone so I'll have to prove you wrong later.

[Rob McCow]

The Independent have a bold go at reviewing Saturday's episode, and they're doing very well until the last sentence of this paragraph:

Showrunner Steven Moffat is leaving behind the days of spoon feeding the audience and is pushing them to watch closely and think for themselves. For most of the time, ‘A Good Man Goes To War’ will have the viewer scratching their head and they may even re-watch the episode to better understand what is happening. In a subtle way this confusion draws people more into the show and gets them thinking about it. Conundrums like why is Rory a Roman centurion again? And why did an Atraxi eat Jack the Ripper?

So much for paying attention

http://blogs.independent.co.uk/2011/...-war%e2%80%99/

[Si Hunt]

Maybe the Cyber Ships were just supply ships or space stations contain supplies or something?

Am I the only one who thinks it's quite funny that River goes in and out of Stormcage as she likes? I think they should make it a running gag, so she leaves notes saying she's popped to the shops etc. And there's a really incompetant head of security there with a comedy sidekick, like Boss Hogg and Roscoe P Coltrane.
"You's a tellin' me that River Song has escaped again?!?"

And then reveal it to be her in that Spacesuit in The Impossible Astronaut. Yes, this is a guess. I could be wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised at all.

Surely that's obvious, given we've seen the child in the spacesuit and River is the child. I mean, it may not be the child, but if it was that would the most obvious answer? You say it as if it's predictable, but wasn't that just something that was almost-revealed by the revelation over River's identity?

Si.

[Perry Vale]

Am I the only one who thinks it's quite funny that River goes in and out of Stormcage as she likes?

It's funny, but it's quite deliberate, imo, and I'm fairly sure we'll see why in the second half of the season. At the end of 'Day of the Moon' the Doctor asks River to come with them. She says she can't because she "made a promise to someone"...

[SiHart]

I loved the fact that the Cyberships were just like the ones in The Invasion. They looked gorgeous!

[Jason Thompson]

1. Massacring the Cybermen. Yes, this is probably the most commented thing. But there was no need for it. It was simply there to establish "just how pissed the Doctor is"(tm). It was extremely out of character (especially since they were entirely unrelated to the whole kidnapping of Amy and Melody thing) and just plain unnecessary.

On the one hand you say it was unnecessary, then in the same line you point out why it was there!

The Doctor is massively pissed off. Things are going on. His TARDIS has exploded for reasons as yet unknown. He has just learned that he has been seen dying. He has also finally figured out that his copanion has been taken from him and someone is trying to pull an almighty con with him. He's angry. He's been pushed beyond the line. His whole fury is now being released. Yes, it's out of character, but so is an awful lot of human behaviour under extreme emotional situations if you compare it to their normal behaviour.

So he wants to find Amy. Easiest way: find out if a fleet of ships monitoring the whole area of space has any information. They happen to be Cybermen. Are they just going to hand over the information? No. So he has to make a big point and make sure they know they are under serious threat to obtain it.

Is it over the top? Yes. Would the pre-credits have been any good if he'd just wandered into any other alien tracking station and asked? Not a chance. Would we be even more upset had he blown up a load of ships belonging to anyone other than his second greatest alien enemies? Absolutely.

Guys, these are Cybermen! You know, big bad emotionless monsters that want to convert us into them to expand their numbers. Why are we suddenly responding to the destruction of part of their fleet as if the Doctor has walked in and massacred a bunch of peace-loving aliens?!


And the point about the TARDIS not being able to just locate Amy: why is this a big problem? Has the TARDIS ever demonstrated an ability to specifically locate one person in the whole of time and space without any prior knowledge of their location? In The Parting of the Ways the doctor was able to materialise it around Rose, but he already knew where she was as he'd seen her on the communication screen. In Love and Monsters he materialised next to Elton, but he already knew the date and the rough location. Both times he's used it to rescue River Song he knew exactly where she would be and when.

He needs info, and he blows up a couple of hundred Cybermen to get it. So what? It was cool!

[Anthony Williams]

Yes, he WAS pissed off.

Were the Cybermen involved with the whole kidnapping at all? No. Was there any evidence that they were doing anything wrong at all? No.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that it was "genocide", but it was certainly VERY out of character. It wasn't necessary to advance the plot at all. Frankly, I think it was just poor writing.

[SiHart]

Surely it was also to show how far he'd come since the old days and why his enemies are teaming up to get rid of him? It all ties into the theme of the Doctor's fall and seemed fine to me.

[Jason Thompson]

Were the Cybermen involved with the whole kidnapping at all? No.

They had the information he needed.

Was there any evidence that they were doing anything wrong at all? No.

As I said before, they're Cybermen. They're not exactly known for sitting around contemplating flower arranging or well-prepared meals. The Doctor needed information from them. The fact that he put a bit of a dent in their forces at the same time was just a bit of a bonus really.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that it was "genocide",

Nor could it be genocide, as I pointed out, since a) the Cybermen Rory was talking to were manifestly not blown up, b) we have no evidence that any more destruction that what we saw out of the window actually took place, and c) this was specifically identified as the twelfth Cyberfleet, so even if the entire fleet was obliterated, it no more qualifies as genocide than the gunning down of any enemy squadron in a fire fight.

but it was certainly VERY out of character.

But that's the whole point, isn't it?

It wasn't necessary to advance the plot at all.

Nor is the entirety of The Deadly Assassin part 3, and yet most people are happy with that because it was doing nothing with style. Necessary or not, Rory walking into the control room demanding information with the fleet exploding behind him was certainly stylish.

Frankly, I think it was just poor writing.

I think it was a bit of flair that lasted all of two minutes and should be looked at as such.

[Rob McCow]

It wasn't poor writing. It was huge, muscular and subversive writing. It was a two-part story condensed into 15 seconds. It allowed the Doctor to find Demon's Run in a more interesting way than simply pressing the doo-hickey thingy on the TARDIS. It also clearly demonstrated the Doctor's anger and how his enemies are in big trouble, because the Doctor is carrying an overwhelming bag of kick-ass and he's going to tip the contents on your doorstep.

[SiHart]

I suspect it was the kind of tactic he picked up during the Time War.

[egdcltd]

I thought Rory was impressive in the Cybermen scene.

A question: I can't remember for sure without seeing it again, but was it the Doctor who blew up the 12th Legion, or was it Rory? Admittedly, with the Doctor's help. Or was it never really clear?

[Anthony Williams]

At the end of the day, whether or not it was rational to blow up all of those Cybermen with little exposition about what they were up to (beyond listening in on that area of the galaxy), it just didn't sit right with me.

On a personal level, I just didn't like it.

[Alex]

It wasn't poor writing. It was huge, muscular and subversive writing. It was a two-part story condensed into 15 seconds. It allowed the Doctor to find Demon's Run in a more interesting way than simply pressing the doo-hickey thingy on the TARDIS. It also clearly demonstrated the Doctor's anger and how his enemies are in big trouble, because the Doctor is carrying an overwhelming bag of kick-ass and he's going to tip the contents on your doorstep.

I couldn't agree more, and that's why I thought it was such a superb scene. I guess it comes down to what you want from Who - the same old same old, or a character who actually develops - and perhaps might not always do the right thing...

[Perry Vale]

Will probably give it a 9/10, but need to give it another watch.

Ended up giving it a 10 after a couple more viewings. This is exactly how I like my Doctor Who!

Oh, and to throw in some random specualtion that just deposited itself in my mind....

What if "Silence Will Fall" in some way refers to a silence falling across the universe about the Doctor's existence? To stop this holy war that is growing?

[SiHart]

At the end of the day, whether or not it was rational to blow up all of those Cybermen with little exposition about what they were up to (beyond listening in on that area of the galaxy), it just didn't sit right with me.

I don't think it was supposed to Ant. It was designed to make the viewer feel uncomfortable about the Doctor's methods... at least that was what i took away from it anyway.

[Stephen Morgan]

I strongly suspect that most of the people voting 10 or 9 or even 8 for this will probably quietly regret doing so in the days and months ahead

It was all rather fluffy and insubstantial really. Just with nice big epic baubles to stop you noticing initially.

That's exactly how I felt about the whole episode, all froth and no substance.
I have never been so disappointed about a Dr. Who episode, EVER. The Cybermen were only in it for, what? two minutes, A Sontaran with a Welsh accent, really!! We're suddenly asked to believe that a Silurian lives in Victorian London, while The Doctor, portrayed as some kind of fearful "god", has to summon up an army to rescue his companion from an asteroid because it was used as the base for one of the most bitter and fearful wars, The Battle of Demon's Run. Some battle, the Doctor simply tells them to run away, and they do. As for the reveal, the "biggest cliffhanger ever" it should have been blatantly obvious from the start what that would have been.
I'm willing to accept that there are still unanswered questions that will be addressed later, but I still feel let down by the whole thing and not just those minor points I stated above..

[Rob McCow]

On a personal level, I just didn't like it.

Which is entirely fair - and what 99% of the arguments on here are going to come down to.

The only comment I really don't like is the 'Poor Writing' one. Doctor Who may be bombastic, insane and take too many shortcuts, but 'Bad Writing' doesn't mean anything to me. What, was the script full of spelling mistakes? I would argue that 'Shonky dialogue', 'confusing plots', 'easy escapes' are complaints you could sensibly level at Doctor Who, although I don't think it does too badly on those counts, but 'Poor Writing' isn't. It might be that you find it an unsatisfying story?

One of my guilty pleasures are reading the 'Comments' sections on news articles. There is always at least one comment that says 'This is a badly written article!' when what they mean is 'I disagree with this opinion!' And the fact that they've understood what the article was about indicates that actually, it was at least adequately written!

[Anthony Williams]

The only comment I really don't like is the 'Poor Writing' one. Doctor Who may be bombastic, insane and take too many shortcuts, but 'Bad Writing' doesn't mean anything to me. What, was the script full of spelling mistakes? I would argue that 'Shonky dialogue', 'confusing plots', 'easy escapes' are complaints you could sensibly level at Doctor Who, although I don't think it does too badly on those counts, but 'Poor Writing' isn't. It might be that you find it an unsatisfying story?

I would always argue that either taking shortcuts or inserting too much padding is poor writing. Maybe I look at it from too much of an academic point-of-view, but when writing an essay, if something isn't clear or you really labour a point for no particular reason other than to pad out the essay, both would be considered poor writing.

The whole trap with the second wave of the attack was simply padding. There was no actual need for it. It didn't add anything to the overall plot.

I'd make a very similar argument about the Cybermen scene - it was a huge shortcut. There was a significant amount of space for more exposition and potentially an entire story. But instead we got Rory going "WHERE IS MY WIFE!?!?" and then Cyber-ships blowing up behind the Cybermen. What were the Cybermen doing there? Were they really just listening? How did the Doctor blow up their ships? How did he and Rory get so far into them? Done properly, that could've been a truly amazing story. Instead, we got two minutes of Cybermen, and then "boom" - ships gone.

If neither are "poor writing" as I initially put it, then I'd certainly make a case that they were lazy.

[Jason Thompson]

The Cybermen scene is certainly less lazy, however, than having the Doctor press a few buttons in the TARDIS and having it activate a magic 'recently pregnant ginger Scots girl locator' and zip straight into the base. It does illustrate how far the Doctor is going to go to get her back.

[Paul Monk]

If neither are "poor writing" as I initially put it, then I'd certainly make a case that they were lazy.

Sometimes in fiction you can come up with a brilliant idea that would make a fantastic story all on its own. Only when writing another story you suddenly find that the idea you thought would be brilliant on its own works much better as a smaller part of a different story. I did it loads when writing Once Upon a Time Lord and Eye of the Daleks. Big ideas suddenly slip in as shortcuts in a story that would have otherwise dragged. Both stories were well liked and as far as I know neither was considered poor writing (Maybe I'm setting myself up here!) and I can tell you they certainly weren't lazy. If anything it makes the script more efficient.
Moffat is doing the same thing here. Rather than have a long two parter in which 45 minutes are used on the cyberman story, he's realised that the important parts of that story can be put across in a punchy, exciting few minutes which ups the pace and excitement levels, ideal for a mid season finale. So you don't find out everything the cybermen are up to, but its not important to the main story. Why are they listening to transmissions in that sector of space? Probably to gather imformation. We don't know and more importantly knowing that does not add or move the story on. The fact that the cybermen do know it is far more crucial than why they know it.
Therefore Moffatt is setting up the Doctor's questionable actions by being efficent with his script. Far from being lazy in my book.

[Rob McCow]

What were the Cybermen doing there? Were they really just listening? How did the Doctor blow up their ships? How did he and Rory get so far into them?

We don't really need to know any of that. This was about tracking down Amy in the most thrilling way possible. There's obviously some kind of Doctor Who adventure going on here, but we've just tuned in for the ending. I'd liked to have seen the adventure, but surely it's just as much fun to imagine it.

I would always argue that either taking shortcuts or inserting too much padding is poor writing.

Not neccessarily - writers must take shortcuts all the time, but provided it doesn't hamper the themes or thrust of their story and they're comprehensible, then they work. There are many Shakespeare plays that jump about in similar ways (Antony and Cleopatra has a huge gap in the middle) for example.

As for padding - well, it slowed up a bit towards the end, but that was all about winding up the viewer with the delivery of the answers to the questions.

But padding is padding. It can be exciting padding - James Bond movies are padded out with car chases, for example. It's not bad writing, in entertainment it's 'Bits that you didn't find as interesting'.

[Perry Vale]

AI of 88 (equal best this year) according to Moffat on Twitter.

[Logo Polish]

It wasn't poor writing. It was huge, muscular and subversive writing. It was a two-part story condensed into 15 seconds. It allowed the Doctor to find Demon's Run in a more interesting way than simply pressing the doo-hickey thingy on the TARDIS. It also clearly demonstrated the Doctor's anger and how his enemies are in big trouble, because the Doctor is carrying an overwhelming bag of kick-ass and he's going to tip the contents on your doorstep.

It's not a new idea in the context of the series though, it or something like it has been hanging around it since Eric Saward's time, one way or another. Whether it be the implication that the Doctor is destined to become the Valeyard, the Cartmelian manipulative Doctor tricking the Daleks into blowing up Skaro, the Time War-scarred ninth and tenth Doctors, "No second chances, that's the kind of man I am", the hubris at the end of Waters of Mars which the Doctor senses he'll have to pay for, the Time Lord Victorious... the concept of an embittered Doctor lashing out mercilessly because he's out of control, won't take any more... it's a concept which has been done to death by now.

All it really indicates are ways in which society and culture have changed, and how the relationship between the series and its makers have also changed. All popular culture reflects the society that produces it in some way, and in the 80s with its rise of the New Right and developments like The Dark Knight Returns reinterpreting old pop culture heroes as flawed and obsessive characters, from Saward's time onwards, various pressures were pushing the character towards being a vigilante Hero archetype with similar problems about his own morality. Saward and Cartmel both struggled with how they thought the Doctor ought to operate, in my view, Saward because he seems to have had a rather bleak and pessimistic worldview that tended towards force and violence being the only solutions that worked, so the Doctor was either left to try and resist that and fail, seeming diminished in the process eg Warriors of the Deep and Resurrection of the Daleks, or to willingly take on the avenging man of action role. Cartmel actually said that he disliked it when the Doctor would get captured or fooled, as he felt that if that happened, it should only be as part of a trap the character had prepared secretly beforehand. His ideal for the character was that he was like a distant mountain range, only occasionally glimpsed through the mists, that he played chess on multiple levels with his enemies.

The ironic thing about this attitude of Cartmel's is that despite his own claims toward left wing views, it's actually a rather socially Darwinistic philosophy in that it has no patience with weakness and fallibility, it's concerned with strength and power, it exults winners and hates losers, it has no compunction about using people for its own ends, it's very much an 'end justifies the means' philosophy. Winning is all that counts. This was picked up on further in the New Adventures and indeed the DWM comic strips at the time, with the theme of the Doctor having to observe the bigger picture and allowing other people to be used for those ends being touched on several times, with Ace and he sometimes being pushed at loggerheads with each other.

From the early 90s onwards the series or its off-screen substitutes have been largely in the hands of fan writers, and as people who had grown up with a strong interest in the programme in its own right, they had an emotional attachment to it of a kind which very few writers of the original series are likely to have had. In their hands this emotional link was replicated in the fiction, reflected in the way he was built up as more of a mythical figure. It was a kind of self-consciousness about the heroic stature of the character, fed into by the significance he and the series had for many of these writers, and the fact that it had become such a well known and iconic part of British culture. Steven Moffat's own short story from 1995, Continuity Errors, is a clear precursor of the kind of landscape he envisages the Doctor existing on in stories like The Pandorica Opens and A Good Man Goes To War. The story presents a historical interpretation of the character from a future civilisation of some sort, insisting that the Doctor's activities indicate that he's an extremely dangerous and powerful menace. It also has the Doctor going back in history several times and changing someone's opinion of him incrementally, stage by stage, similar to A Christmas Carol. The themes of the Doctor being powerful in the sense of manipulating time, of his becoming remembered as a legend and interpreted, even if mistakenly, as a villain, are all there.

So the Doctor-as-myth, Doctor-as-Hero, Doctor-as-lonely-God, whatever, it all predates the 2005-onwards series by a long way, at least embryonically. The new series was simply following on from that mythologising, especially as some of the writers had also written for the novel ranges.

What's interesting now is where Moffat intends to go with this. I don't think it actually is ultimately sustainable for the Doctor to be depicted as an avenging force of nature, and frankly I think it's demeaning to the character for him to be depicted as apparently believing in his own publicity and uttering the kind of forced macho cliches which the series has periodically been putting in his mouth. "There's one thing you never ever put in a trap... me...", or all these warnings about how if he gets angry there's no telling what'll happen. Warnings that he can do anything he likes to anything, even with one look or six words. It's banal superhero stuff masquerading as dramatic weightiness. Power fantasy posing as profundity. None of that makes the character more interesting or impressive. He's not all-powerful, he never has been, he never should be, and if Moffat is writing all this so as to lay to rest these kind of pretensions on the Doctor's part, so much the better, because otherwise I think it diminishes the character.

[Paul Monk]

I'd never considered that the theme ran all the back to the Saward script editing days. Fantastic post, Logo!