But I did just want to get my thoughts down on the climactic moment of The Name of the Doctor before I read anyone else’s. So read on if you’ve seen the episode; and if not, then be aware that SPOILERS FOLLOW!

“Introducing John Hurt as The Doctor”, says the caption.

But our Doctor (Matt Smith) says that what that Doctor (John Hurt) did was in the name of peace, yes, and in the name of sanity, yes, but not in the name of the Doctor.

So what did he do, and when?

First of all, I think it has to be something that he has done, rather than something that he will do. The grammar alone invites that conclusion — the past-tense references to what the Doctor did.

So the obvious guess is that this refers to the Doctor’s bringing the Time War to an end by destroying Gallifrey. It’s something that we already know he did, and it seems a bit much to multiple entities by assuming he has two atrocities in his past.

We’ve always assumed that this was the work of the eighth Doctor, and that the ninth was his post-Time War incarnation — hence some of the more erratic aspects of his behaviour, especially in S01E06, Dalek. My take is that there was another regeneration in between — that Paul McGann regenerated into John Hurt, and it was this Doctor (the eight-and-a-halfth, if you like) that destroyed Gallifrey. When he regenerated in Christopher Eccleston, the new Doctor disowned the previous one, did not allow him the title “Doctor”, and took the number nine for himself. So Matt Smith is really the twelfth body that the character has had, but only the 11th the bear the name Doctor.

Is all this terribly obvious? (I don’t know because I’ve not yet read what anyone else has said about it.)

Uh, not so great. Why do you ask?

I know … I’m not helping myself.

That is all.

None of us was blown away (“It definitely wasn’t anything like as terrible as the previous episode” — Andrew Hickey) and we all had significant criticisms. But we all found interesting things to discuss about it. And this is the important point: we all somehow landed on different interesting things.

Even when Doctor Who is off its game, it generates discussion like no other program: not just discussion of the plot-speculation kind (“what is Clara?”) but investigations of the nature of drama, of metatextuality, of morality, of the nature of the “soul”, of whether scientific and moral worldviews are in opposition or mutually reinforcing, and so much more.

Much as I love Veronica Mars, The West Wing and Arrested Development, none of them do this. I admire all those shows more than Who, but I don’t love them as much. No other show throws out so many issues for the unsuspecting viewers to chew on, or catalyses anything like the same breadth of discussion.

Dcotor Who, I salute you!

But on the other hand …

I am afraid I am really starting to lose patience with Clara. When we first met her as a human, in The Snowmen, her defining quality was her quick intelligence and articulate speech. This time, we get:

So we’re moving … through actual … Time. So what’s it made of? Time? I mean, if you can just row through it it’s got to be made of stuff like jam’s made of strawberries, so what’s it made of?

It’s incoherent and ignorant, all at once. That is not the Clara that the Doctor was so delighted by. And then this terrible, terrible anti-climax:

OK. So … so … so. So … I’d like to see, I would like to see, what I would like to see is … [looong pause; Clara spins on the spot an looks straight at the camera] Something awesome.

The poverty of imagination and intellect is palpable.

So that’s a problem with the writing. Unfortunately the acting is no better. Coleman perpetually addresses the camera, preens, mugs, and generally behaves more like children’s TV presenter than an actor. When she cracks a joke, she stops to feel pleased with herself. It’s “look at me” acting.

It’s taken four episodes for me to reach this conclusion — partly just because I am trying to be charitable but also for another reason. In Asylum of the Daleks, Clara wasn’t human, so Coleman was playing a character impersonating her own idea of what she’s like — a subtle challenge. In The Snowmen, she was playing a character who led a double life, and so who we needed to see to be acting. In The Bells of Saint John, she spent quite a bit of time being dead, so can be forgiven for not quite feeling her usual self. But this time, there is no excuse: Coleman’s job is to play the role of Clara, to play it straight, and to show us a person we can believe in. And we don’t.

Am I being harsh by going on so much about Clara’s deficiencies of writing and acting (and for that matter direction)? Maybe. But the companion is a hugely important character. Doctor Who is a series in which only two characters recur from week to week, so when one of them  is below par that’s 50% of the recurring cast. That’s bad. When Riley was not particularly compelling in Buffy series 4 and 5, that was unfortunate but not disastrous, because he was one of an ensemble cast of ten (Buffy, Joyce, Willow, Tara, Xander, Anya, Giles, Spike, Dawn). But if Clara’s character doesn’t pick up soon, it’s going to undermine the whole of the rest of the series (and likely the next one, too).

All right, I am done criticising Clara now. Let’s move on …

As a morality tale, Rings has something going for it. As I noted above, all the different alien species seem to get on fine together. They’re in a functioning society, and that is a valuable thing. (It’s more than you can say for most purely-human societies in Doctor Who.) But as is so often the case with fictional ideal societies, a dark secret lies beneath the surface. This time, it’s that peace is bought at the price of a periodic sacrifice: a young girl, The Queen of Years.

Now this is a fascinating setup. It parallels Ursula Le Guin’s famous short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, in which (to quote Wikipedia) “Everything about Omelas is pleasing, except for the city’s one atrocity: the good fortune of Omelas requires that a single unfortunate child be kept in perpetual filth, darkness and misery.” (I seem to remember reading something similar as an in-passing part of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, but I wouldn’t swear to it.) In Doctor Who, the situation is simplified by killing the sacrifice outright, or at least handing her over to the evil god to be killed; in some respects The Beast Below more closely parallels the Omelas situation.

Much could be done with this. Sadly, not much is. The situation is rather thrown away because of the crowd’s complete non-reaction when the Queen, who we’d been led to believe would merely be required to sing, is taken by the evil god. Is that what the crowd expected? Is it what they wanted? Are the horrified? Are they complicit? If so, do they feel guilty? It’s impossible to tell, because they all just go on singing.

Now it would be possible to interpret this charitably, as indicating that the production team wanted to leave the crowd neutral to provide a blank moral canvas that we could project out own attitudes onto. Done well, this could draw us to think more intentionally about our own choices — buying clothes made cheaply in far-East sweatshops, for example. But in fact the effect was one of moral abdication. The civilisation, and so the programme, just didn’t seem to have a stance.

Once the girl is sucked into the Pyramid Of Doom, the Doctor and Clara go off to rescue her on a flying motorbike (a motif appearing for the second consecutive week). Jolly japes ensue with some Tusken Raiders armed with blue light. The Queen is rescued, and so needless to say a vampire breaks out of a fish-tank and a nearby planet turns into a giant pumpkin — I hate it when that happens.

Once the Giant Pumpkin starts making faces, the only way to defeat it is with a leaf, which happily Clara has to hand.

Now all of this sounds much more negative than it really is. Despite my apparent scorn for the plot, I did throughly enjoy the episode — not least for its powerful use of genuinely beautiful diegetic music. It’s always fun to see the places and things, and the Doctor himself remains a delight (though perhaps less so in this episode than in most).

Still, Rings of Akhaten feels like two thirds of a great episode: rich setting, beautiful visuals and sound, fascinating moral dilemma, and … then nothing much. Just some running around and shouting. It feels like the production team did all the groundwork, then went for lunch when they should have been building an actual structure on that foundation.

I’m going to leave you with a link: the bizarrely named Millennium Dome, Elephant does such a good job at taking apart the specific failings of plot that it would be redundant for me to attempt something similar. Go and read his article. (Then come back here and comment on this one!)

First, jwerpy is right to point out the ubiquity of surveillance, not only in London but in most British cities. It’s shameful not just that this has happened, but that it’s happened so quietly and unobtrusively that almost no-one has even objected.

I’d agree that incursions into freedom of expression in Britain are a very fundamental problem — not least because it’s the kind of meta-issue that makes it much harder for the country to protect itself against other issues. Lizard rightly points out the example of our terrible libel laws: we saw that culture most immediately in the vote two days ago against libel reform *headdesk*. But our culture of restricting expression applies in many other ways, and, yes, often results in people being arrested for tweets.

The progressive erosion of freedom that the last two points represent arises from a yet more fundamental issue which I’m surprised no-one picked up on: we have no (written) constitution. So if I want to assert my right to freedom of expression, I can’t just point to the First Amendment and say “look, it’s right here in the most fundamental laws of the land”.

It’s a surprise to me that so many people see the BBC as such an oddity. I know it’s an unusual way to finance broadcasting, but I’d never have seen it as one of the stand-out differences about Britain. For what it’s, I think it’s pretty good value for an as-close-to-independent broadcaster as you can get, free from the need to court advertisers. It’s always astonishing to me that a 45-minute episode of, say, Buffy takes a full hour to air in America. (I wonder how £12 a month compares with what typical Americans pay for TV?)

Wyrd points to the tendency for people to get into fights at football matches. (This is much less common than you’d think from the news, but it does happen.) That is very strange to me; but it’s far from being a characteristically British problem, and is more pan-European. I don’t know what lies behind it, unless it’s a tendency for Europeans to be more partisan regarding their sports. Perhaps it’s just a matter of cultural momentum? Violent people going to a football match in Europe know that violence happens at football matches, so they act accordingly and the cycle is perpetuated. I’ve been to one American sporting event in my life (Boston Red Sox) and despite not understanding more than 10% of what was happening, thoroughly enjoyed it. I think the American approach to enjoying sport is much better than ours. (Shame the actual sports are so lame.)

Wyrd also suggests that anti-intellectualism may be less ubiquitous and pervasive in Britain than in America. That may be true, but if it is then I’m not sure the difference is one of kind, only of degree.

Then there’s the monarchy, as mentioned by Sean Conner and others. I’m sure no-one would advocate it as a system of government. In practice, it’s purely ceremonial. We could argue about whether the economic benefit of a monarchy outweighs its cost, but in terms of what it means to live in Britain it has almost no impact at all beyond providing a set of celebrities for tabloid newspapers to obsess over.

Did we miss anything? What else about Britain makes Americans (and other non-Brits) go “what is this i dont even”?

1. Heath Care

Americans live in a civilised and technologically advanced country, one of the richest in the world. Yet people die because of not having health insurance. To British eyes, that is utterly inexplicable. Barbaric. Inexcusable.

2. Cheerleading

Overt sexualisation of teenaged and pre-teen girls. Sheesh.

3. Guns

A country where convicted felons can buy assault rifles automatic weapons without background checks, and the government actively affirms their right to do so. Evidence that this is a bad idea is not only ignored, but research is legally prohibited from being federally funded. And every year, thirty thousand citizens are shot dead. Holy heck.

I wonder if Americans have any idea how bizarre and backward their country looks from the outside?

… and then I wonder whether there are aspects of British culture that look equally bizarre and backward from outside the UK? Americans, help me out. What is truly weird about Britain?

The Bells of Saint John had rather a nice little prequel, which I saw after the main episode. Andrew Rilstone argues that it shows the Doctor at his best: cosmic loneliness distilled down a gentle, thoughtful moment. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I think the episode proper could probably have used a bit more of that.

It faced the classic problem of introducing a new companion while telling an actual story; or it sort of did. But not so much, because we’ve already met (a version of) the character not once but twice. That should have made things easier for BOSJ, but somehow the episode didn’t seem to capitalise on this work already done, choosing instead to do an essentially cold intro to the character. More frustratingly, it didn’t quite seem to be the same character.

And that’s important, because at this point, the character looks like a definite downgrade. In The Snowmen, there was a quickness to the governess, a sharpness of mind (particularly in all the business with the umbrella) that sold me on the idea that the Doctor might feel an immediate bond with this person, and even become obsessed with tracking her down through time and space. This time around … not so much. She came across much more as Generic Spunky Girl Companion, with none of that sense of her being a worthy counterpart to the Doctor.

But enough of Clara. What of the actual story?

It worked for me. I know enough about networking to realise that the premise is nonsense from step one, but then Doctor Who has never stood or fallen on the realism of its premise.

The point of the WiFi monster is that that it’s a retargeting of the primal ghost-in-the-machine fear for today. It’s certainly becoming a familiar trope in Who: something familiar, even comforting, that becomes the conduit for a threat. We could point to the mobile phones of Rise of the Cybermen, the televisions of The Idiot’s Lantern and the sat-navs of The Sontaran Stratagem. For that matter, the Weeping Angels of Blink and other episodes, while not everyday objects, are essentially the kind of statuary we’re used to seeing in public gardens (at least those of us who are English).

Of course this idea of the familiar made uncanny goes back much further than the series reboot in 2005. The most obvious example from the old series is the autons — shop-window dummies come to life. But it’s really only since Doctor Chris that this theme has become such a recurring part of the show, to the point that now when you think of Doctor Who you think of the TARDIS, Daleks, and familiar technology gone wrong.

Now to a certain point, I am perfectly cool with this. I certainly have no truck with those who criticised BOSJ for resembling The Idiot’s Lantern because it has screens and Partners in Crime because it has a businesswoman. Doctor Who has been running for fifty years, and has racked up 234 stories. It simply isn’t possible to keep coming up with stories that don’t resemble something in that vast backfile.

More than that: it’s right and proper that Doctor Who should do some of its work with the familiar rather than on alien worlds. And if I may be permitted to stretch a point a bit, it’s laudable if one of the effects of Who is to make us see the familiar in a new way, perhaps even to look with wonder on marvels that we’ve grown overly used to. Wireless Internet is magical — I well remember less than a decade ago being astonished and delighted by it. It’s good to be reminded of that.

And yet …

It can all feel a bit consequencesey. Roll the D20: technology of the week comes up WiFi! The Big Bad will be … (roll another D20) … The Great Intelligence! Roll a D6 and find that the baddie’s collaborator will be: a businesswoman! There’s nothing wrong with any of these choices. The problem is that they’re not made to work together, and so they feel arbitrary. What is it about the businesswoman that makes her a particularly appropriate conduit for the GI? We don’t know. Why does it choose to use WiFi rather than 3G? We don’t know.

Worst of all, the WiFi doesn’t seem to represent anything. The premise, that joining an uncanny network can steal your soul, is creepy, but it’s not made to mean anything. And that seems like a terrible missed opportunity. Because of course the ubiquitious availability of WiFi does steal your soul — just slowly and incrementally rather than all at once. That is an issue worth thinking about, and one that Doctor Who is perfectly capable of shedding light onto.

In the same way, the office that operated the soul-stealing operation was staffed by people who had been there for years, in at least one case decades — people who had literally given their lives to their jobs. There again is a pervasive and important issue, and one that Who could usefully address via metaphor. At its best, Who has a capacity for insight and even wisdom which can illuminate complex concepts. Right now, it doesn’t quite feel like it’s trying to do that, just racing through each standalone episode. I’d like to see the program work a bit harder to draw out the substance of its raw materials.

Part of the problem might be the lack of two-parters recently. Although The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People ultimately muffed its exploration of the human status of the eponymous beings, I look back on it now and think that at least it tried — the two-part format gave it the time and space to stop and breathe and look at its issues. I find myself wondering whether the problem now is a failure of nerve: because the ideas in BOSJ were certainly rich enough to sustain a two-parter with no fat. Slow down, Moff! Show us the concepts! Explore the ideas! Leave us to chew them over for a week before you start to resolve the problem.

Anyway — I am complaining more than I should: I thoroughly enjoyed the episode, particularly the (in retrospect obvious) twist when the Doctor confronted Miss Kizlet in her office. And there was a brief — too brief — moment of real poignancy when her history became apparent.

As is so often the case in recent years, this episode raised questions — potentially important ones. Of course we already have the core mystery of the series: who or what is Clara, and why does the Doctor keep running into her? To this, we can now add: why was the family’s WiFi password based on Clara’s previous dying words ”Run, you clever boy, and remember”?

And why did Clara’s call to technical support get routed to the TARDIS? Her conversation with the Doctor runs thus: ”Where did you get this number?” / “The woman in the shop wrote it down. She said it’s the best help-line in the universe.” / “What woman? Who was she?” / “I don’t know. The woman in the shop.” So who was the woman? We’re being invited to assume River Song, I suppose, or maybe Aged Amy. Maybe someone cleverer.

In her book of places to go, the “Property of Clara Oswald age 9″ inscription has the age repeatedly crossed out and rewritten to form the sequence 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24. What happened to ages 16 and 23? She seems too methodical a girl to have just overlooked them. Do I detect the distinctive aroma of timey-wimey?

The problem is that, after the let-down at the end of series 6, I just don’t trust the Moff like I used to — I’m not confident that all the clues necessarily point anywhere. That may be a bit harsh: after all, the spectacular denouement of Series 5 did tie up most of its loose ends, most notably the “wrong” jacket in the garden in Flesh and Stone. But somehow I feel that Who has slightly lost my trust and has to win it back again. I could do with one of these mysteries being resolved very soon indeed, so I can relax and believe in the master-plan again.

…

And another thing: who did make the TARDIS explode as the end of Series 5? We never did find that out, did we?

Bat-exceptions: proper bat-nouns and bat-titles, such as “Batman: the movie” are exempt, as are direct bat-quotes. Certain nounal bat-phrases, such as “bat-utility belt” are evidently treated as a unit and receive a “bat-” bat-prefix before the bat-phrase as a whole; in bat-others, such as “nounal phrase”, the bat-prefix seems to fit more naturally between the bat-adjective and the bat-noun. I’ll decide how to treat such bat-phrases on a bat-case-by-bat-case bat-basis.

Finally, needless to say, we won’t be employing the bat-prefix for bat-pronouns. Bat-that would be silly.

(It now occurs to me that this would make rather a good Radio-4 bat-panel game, in the bat-style of Just a Minute. Hey, BBC! Don’t forget the bat-royalties!)