The Long Game

Is it RTD's secret wish to rename the show Doctor Rose? If RTD was so obsessed with needlessly infusing New Who with just a hint of Buffy (a deplorably stupid programme in my opinion anyway), and have the series give a nod to Girl Power, why didn't he go the full hog and have a female Doctor? God, and to think some of us used to tire of the serial emphasis on Ace in the McCoy era! At least, to be frank, she was a more interesting and troubled character than Rose is, especially in the latter part of Season 26, and though at times Sophie Aldred's mock-cockney vernacular could be grating to say the least, at her best she was truly engaging and had a more natural attractiveness about her than the heavily made-up, paroxide blond Rose. (A female friend of mine, new to Who, recently commented that she thought the series looked quite good, but was put off by the cliche of having a blond, Buffy-style girl in one of the main roles!) If the Doctor was to get infatuated with one of his female companions couldn't it at least have been one more enigmatic and genuinely attractive such as Tegan, who at least had some grit and charisma about her? I don't say much for the Doctor's taste to be honest. Yes, Ms Piper can act, so what? That doesn't in turn make her character any more interesting does it? The character of Rose is quite mediocre because although Piper infuses it with some energy and believability, the basis/background for/of the character just isn't very interesting. I would have preferred a grittier, more cynical kid from the council estates as a companion. In my opinion, excepting Sarah, Romana, Tegan, Turlough and Ace, most companions have been traditionally irritating and superfluous anyway, and while Rose is certainly one of the more fleshed-out of companions, to me she is increasingly irritating, especially in the general air of smugness which she shares with her Timelord travelling companion in The Long Game, much to the detriment of TARDIS Temp Adam, who at least has a vaguely distracting curiosity and ambiguity about him (reminiscent of Adric's and Turlough's disobedience in various Davison stories), only to be swiftly deposited by the Time-Travelling New Avengers (perhaps Eccleston should start donning a bowler hat and umbrella?) in the rather pathetic and implausible denouement of this weird and scrambled episode. The Ninth Doctor is an elitist, even a Social Darwinian (like the villains of Season 26); previous incarnations, especially the Fifth Doctor (as evidence in his retaining an obviously treacherous Turlough in his TARDIS crew in Season 20), would have kept Adam on board precisely because of his suspect character - this Doctor dumps him back home because he threatens to upstage his more superficially appealing sidekick. Plus, apparently, and unforgiveably, he appears to fancy her. This is all rather absurd and I predict potentially detrimental to the series in the long run. What's the point of building up such an over-written and over-emphasized rapport between Eccleston and Piper when he's going to change into David Tennant in a few months anyway? Or is this superfluous and highly intrusive thread to RTD's New Who going to be stretched out into the Tenth incarnation? I sincerely hope not.

After the virtually immaculate Dalek, and the best performance so far of Eccleston as the Doctor (bar a couple of clumsy scenes which portrayed him as a gung-ho assassin), RTD brings the Ninth Doctor's characterisation back down to base level with a thump! We're back to the self-consciously emphasized 'working class blokeishness' of Eccleston's other RTD-episode portrayals, with plenty of 'Oi you' and 'tough''s and even a 'grub' or two. There's nothing really wrong with a Doctor sporting a regional accent as long as articulation isn't compromised, which it is sometimes with Eccleston's Doctor (though not as much and as gratingly as with Rose with her constant and equally self-conscious t-dropping), but why the constant use of bloke-ish vernacular and expressions? All class issues put aside, this just isn't right for the Doctor I'm afraid. It just doesn't convince; it just doesn't work; it just detracts from the character and grounds him far too much in present day Earth, or rather, Salford. I would be one of the first to say it is a welcome social wake up call to the complacent middle-classness of classic Who to have a more obviously 'ordinary', more casually spoken incarnation - but you don't need to take it to the absolute extreme from the RP Doctors 1-6 do you? McCoy's Doctor had the right balance of approach: more casually spoken, with a hint of regional accent (rolling R's etc.), but still essentially lifted in manner and (on occasions) gravitas of verbal command and vocabulary than the average parochial drawl of the apolitical man on the street who mistakenly thinks it is socially progressive to drop your t's. Apart from anything else, in the same way that the so-called BBC English/classless accent makes it hard to pin down where someone has come from in English real life, I feel the RP of previous Doctors translated onto screen in a similar way, adding to the alienness of the character in that on a sort of metaphoric level it emphasized how his own special categorisation was hard to pin down. This over-emphasized regional accent of Eccleston's Doctor is all the more noticeable when surrounded by the received pronunciation of incidental characters - why not have everyone in Who, including the aliens, talking in Salford accents? Why just the Doctor? Of course his attire also needlessly gives even more emphasis to his bloke-ish persona. One can only assume when he had first regenerated from his 8th incarnation, the 9th Doctor must have releaved a paralytic bouncer of his clothes and steel-toecaps! The Doctor was not particularly likeable in this episode, and wasn't even particularly interesting either (Simon Pegg outshone him in a far more enigmatic performance, albeit a completely unsubstantiated one - what exactly was his motive? I suppose he was as much a slave as everyone else. Wow, what a profound message.) We had, as one reviewer has observed already, a manipulative Doctor giving Adam all the green lights to inevitably meddle with the future, only to smugly berate him for it at the end! Does he have a bit of an Old Testament God complex this 9th incarnation? He's very good at dangling the fruit of knowledge at people, encouraging them to 'throw themselves in' to time travel, only then to be judgmental and pompous by the end. What's the point? Or doesn't RTD ever redraft his scripts and spot all these inconsistencies and holes? Obviously not. We also had the Doctor threatening to beat up the Editor while - perhaps then justifiably - restrained; and he did seem very physically intimidating pushing Adam back into the TARDIS at the end. I thought he was going to shove his face up to him and holler 'Are you looking at me?'

The Long Game itself? Seemingly retro in realisation with a very 80s view of the future about it - the twist about human society being held back 90 years could have been much more convincing if, given the ludicrously ambitious year of 200,000 (RTD seems to suffer from an inverse parallel ailment to the equally though prematurely ambitious Arthur C Clarke with 2001; not to mention whoever invented Space 1999), if the society had been stalled at something like 900 years ago at the very least! Again it just doesn't hold up datewise as in End of the World. RTD might also stand for Relative Time Disorder! To hint at the retro aspect to this backward society, we have Suki (her other names were actually quite imaginative) dressed like an extra from The Good Life; not to mention a (nicely satirical) private healthcare system for non-emergencies, but does the satire backfire timewise here too as this seems very similar to how things are today in terms of NHS ethics.

What the hell was the Face of Boe doing a) in the year 200,000 when we have seen him in the year 5 Billion? Is his lifespan really that long? and b) doing being pregnant? Ok, he's an alien, maybe male Boes or whatever they are can have babies, that's probably perfectly possible, but that just leaves one other nagging question: How can a 'face' procreate? I'd be interested to know how RTD was graded in GCE Biology.

Good things about The Long Game? Apart from the Editor, there were some well-realised sets, particularly Level 500's Logan's Run-esque ice-scape; an admittedly brilliantly realised alien which did look genuinely convincing considering it was CGI again - however, I think the story would have benefited from an alien who was more accessible and less unwieldy, something more like a floating Moxx of Balhoon type thing, and also an alien whom we could actually understand (what's happened to the Doctor's TARDIS translation component then?); there does seem to be an interesting parallel between the parochial vernacular of the Ninth Doctor and his alien enemies' equally parochial vernacular in that they speak untranslated in their own home tongues re: the Nestine, Face of Boe and 'Max' (sounds a bit like Mox doesn't it?) The Moxx managed to speak near-perfect English, as did (perhaps unfortunately for us) the Slitheen. Puzzling to say the least.

Other flaws: Adam apparently knowing everything about the Doctor down to him being the last of the Timelords: is the Doctor likely to have related all this to a companion he'd only just met and who he obviously didn't want to recruit in the first place anyway? Also, why did entrust the TARDIS key to Adam? Also, what's happened to the isomorphic nature of the TARDIS key? In the classic series only the Doctor could use the key (see Pyramids of Mars) and it could not be used to open the TARDIS by any other hands (unless he willed it so). Are we to take it then that he would have willed the Editor to use it? No, of course not, hence no real threat there.

Overall, a fairly average sort of episode with an admittedly very good twist that the whole space station was a life support system for an alien - that was certainly a redeming feature to an otherwise uneven and typically clumsy RTD vision of the human future. A few quirky stylistic touches were not enough to lift this story beyond mediocrity, though it is certainly better than all the other RTD offerings so far in that it didn't embarass at any point, only mildly irritate (particularly re the Doctor's portrayal and Rose's growing smugness) - it definitely required two episodes to develop it properly and is thus also let down by its brevity and half-hearted, semi-developed but ultimately completely implausible setting in time. I'm sad to say after Eccleston's superb performance in Dalek, that The Long Game was, in extreme contrast, let down by his unlikeable and unengaging performance.

Oh, and it's also quite ironic that RTD, an expert press manipulator and spin Doctor himself, decides to dedicate an entire storyline to attacking the media - though admittedly this was a fairly nice satirical turn. 5/10.