Father's Day
Sunday, 15 May 2005 - Reviewed by Matt Kimpton
Like any field of expertise, Dr Who fandom is blighted by jargon. 'Umbrella season'. 'Cancellation crisis'. 'Season 6b'. Phrases with no meaning outside the geeknoscenti. But among them all, few loom larger than 'base under siege'.
A staple format of the Troughton era, such stories place the Doctor, his companion(s) and a selection of guest stars into a claustrophic environment, attacked from without by some malevolent alien force. Our heroes can then fret and fight off incursions for however many episodes are required, without the need for a single new idea. All you needed was a new monster (or failing that the Cybermen) and a girl with a good pair of lungs, and you were off.
But that was the 1960s. Dr Who then was action adventure, plain and simple; all fist-fights and derring do, like Robin Hood with airlocks. In 2005 the series has moved on, and its first base-under-siege story – while admittedly featuring Billie Piper's scream debut – absolutely epitomises that contrast.
>From the get-go (which these days comes in the last minutes of the previous episode), it was clear this was going to be an ambitious, high concept story. Time is damaged; trusts are broken; people die. But more than that, it was also going to be essentially a character piece, which the classic series (even in its slower under-siege moments) had little time for. Gone are the familiar Troughton tropes – A Traitor Unmasked; The Coward Endangers Us All; The Cyberman Turn Up For No Good Reason – and in its place is a tight, fiery, emotionally intense piece about the dangers and importance of self-knowledge, that treads the sort of emotional territory ordinary dramas genuinely cannot reach.
It's brilliant stuff.
Mind you, that shouldn't be surprising. The writer of this episode, Paul Cornell, is best known to fans as the author of some of the best original Dr Who novels around, and it's the same techniques that made them work that gives this one its strength. Indeed, many aspects of Father's Day – the playing around with time; the use of symbols and images; the exploration of real-world relationships and emotions (particularly guilt); the epigrammatic Doctor and the brittle, argumentative nature of his relationship with his companion; even the impact of fathers – are all core elements of the spin-off 'New Adventures' series that made his name.
These days the NAs are often summed up by the single word 'angst', and undeniably this is an angsty story. But Paul Cornell's books in particular were also known for their powerful emotional focus, and this is where Father's Day really shines. The author's trademark linguistic cleverness (Jackie gloriously describing her husband as 'an accident waiting to happen'); his attention to structure (the delicate bookending voiceovers), and the elegant, double-layered possibilities of the closing sequence would be worth nothing if the story lacked a soul. In his creation of Pete Tyler, brilliantly written as an intelligent, open-minded individual rather than a foil to circumstance, and brought to life flawlessly by Shaun Dingwall, he gives us one that's truly to be reckoned with. The fluttering, hopeful uncertainty of his relationship with Rose does a better job of depicting fatherhood than half a century of soap, and, through a series of genuinely moving, perfect vignettes, fuels a tragic story that really does have two hearts.
Unfortunately, the downside of all this is that the action adventure aspect is rather put to one side. Consequently, while the first half bundles along at a fair old pace, by the second half pretty much everything has happened that's going to happen, and there's nothing left to do except explore character arcs and just generally be besieged until the finale. And indeed, while the siege some features tremendous dialogue, as well as two of the best performances ever seen in the show, this is nevertheless essentially what happens, with lots of rather talky scenes separated only by repetitive establishing shots. In dramatic terms, the whole thing feels like it's crying out for another beat in the under-siege sequence, leaving the story simply too short on events.
It's only fair to note that budgetary constraints may have played a part in this, given Cornell's admission that after repeatedly being told to think bigger he was finally told to think rather smaller for the final draft. It's perhaps telling, therefore, that while the monsters are impressive in both design and realisation, particularly when seen as shadows flitting half-seen past windows, they never really do anything. Their cgi unworldliness, though arguably in keeping with their nature, is only heightened by their conspicuous lack of real-world interaction, and this limitation (as well as their lack of dialogue, or any visual evidence of their supposed global impact) ultimately undermines the threat. Given, too, that all the visual set-up is there for a climactic bursting-through-the-stained-glass-window sequence which never comes – and given that the whole point of setting something in a church is to have something climactically burst through the stained glass window – it's tempting to suppose that at least some of the sagginess of the final act was due more to money than to over-egged angst.
Ultimately, then, Father's Day is monumentally effective... just not, perhaps, as Dr Who. With its curiously minimal science fiction element, and touchy-feely emotions in place of rampaging monster sequences, it's hard to imagine younger audiences feeling entirely comfortable with the sudden change of pace. But while it's not quite what viewers were expecting, which is arguably no bad thing, and not quite as good as it could have been – and when has that not been true of a Dr Who story? – it remains, on its own terms, a tremendous piece of television.
As fan jargon would have it, it's rad, not trad - and it's not half bad.
A staple format of the Troughton era, such stories place the Doctor, his companion(s) and a selection of guest stars into a claustrophic environment, attacked from without by some malevolent alien force. Our heroes can then fret and fight off incursions for however many episodes are required, without the need for a single new idea. All you needed was a new monster (or failing that the Cybermen) and a girl with a good pair of lungs, and you were off.
But that was the 1960s. Dr Who then was action adventure, plain and simple; all fist-fights and derring do, like Robin Hood with airlocks. In 2005 the series has moved on, and its first base-under-siege story – while admittedly featuring Billie Piper's scream debut – absolutely epitomises that contrast.
>From the get-go (which these days comes in the last minutes of the previous episode), it was clear this was going to be an ambitious, high concept story. Time is damaged; trusts are broken; people die. But more than that, it was also going to be essentially a character piece, which the classic series (even in its slower under-siege moments) had little time for. Gone are the familiar Troughton tropes – A Traitor Unmasked; The Coward Endangers Us All; The Cyberman Turn Up For No Good Reason – and in its place is a tight, fiery, emotionally intense piece about the dangers and importance of self-knowledge, that treads the sort of emotional territory ordinary dramas genuinely cannot reach.
It's brilliant stuff.
Mind you, that shouldn't be surprising. The writer of this episode, Paul Cornell, is best known to fans as the author of some of the best original Dr Who novels around, and it's the same techniques that made them work that gives this one its strength. Indeed, many aspects of Father's Day – the playing around with time; the use of symbols and images; the exploration of real-world relationships and emotions (particularly guilt); the epigrammatic Doctor and the brittle, argumentative nature of his relationship with his companion; even the impact of fathers – are all core elements of the spin-off 'New Adventures' series that made his name.
These days the NAs are often summed up by the single word 'angst', and undeniably this is an angsty story. But Paul Cornell's books in particular were also known for their powerful emotional focus, and this is where Father's Day really shines. The author's trademark linguistic cleverness (Jackie gloriously describing her husband as 'an accident waiting to happen'); his attention to structure (the delicate bookending voiceovers), and the elegant, double-layered possibilities of the closing sequence would be worth nothing if the story lacked a soul. In his creation of Pete Tyler, brilliantly written as an intelligent, open-minded individual rather than a foil to circumstance, and brought to life flawlessly by Shaun Dingwall, he gives us one that's truly to be reckoned with. The fluttering, hopeful uncertainty of his relationship with Rose does a better job of depicting fatherhood than half a century of soap, and, through a series of genuinely moving, perfect vignettes, fuels a tragic story that really does have two hearts.
Unfortunately, the downside of all this is that the action adventure aspect is rather put to one side. Consequently, while the first half bundles along at a fair old pace, by the second half pretty much everything has happened that's going to happen, and there's nothing left to do except explore character arcs and just generally be besieged until the finale. And indeed, while the siege some features tremendous dialogue, as well as two of the best performances ever seen in the show, this is nevertheless essentially what happens, with lots of rather talky scenes separated only by repetitive establishing shots. In dramatic terms, the whole thing feels like it's crying out for another beat in the under-siege sequence, leaving the story simply too short on events.
It's only fair to note that budgetary constraints may have played a part in this, given Cornell's admission that after repeatedly being told to think bigger he was finally told to think rather smaller for the final draft. It's perhaps telling, therefore, that while the monsters are impressive in both design and realisation, particularly when seen as shadows flitting half-seen past windows, they never really do anything. Their cgi unworldliness, though arguably in keeping with their nature, is only heightened by their conspicuous lack of real-world interaction, and this limitation (as well as their lack of dialogue, or any visual evidence of their supposed global impact) ultimately undermines the threat. Given, too, that all the visual set-up is there for a climactic bursting-through-the-stained-glass-window sequence which never comes – and given that the whole point of setting something in a church is to have something climactically burst through the stained glass window – it's tempting to suppose that at least some of the sagginess of the final act was due more to money than to over-egged angst.
Ultimately, then, Father's Day is monumentally effective... just not, perhaps, as Dr Who. With its curiously minimal science fiction element, and touchy-feely emotions in place of rampaging monster sequences, it's hard to imagine younger audiences feeling entirely comfortable with the sudden change of pace. But while it's not quite what viewers were expecting, which is arguably no bad thing, and not quite as good as it could have been – and when has that not been true of a Dr Who story? – it remains, on its own terms, a tremendous piece of television.
As fan jargon would have it, it's rad, not trad - and it's not half bad.
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