Written
by Toby Whithouse
Doctor Who has always
been good at scary. From the end of Episode one of The Dead Planet, with the
sucker arm closing in on Barbara, the show has had ‘scare the bejeesus out of
the audience’ as a fundamental part of its mission. While remaining for 51
years a family show, it’s also never been afraid to intellectualise and realise
some heavyweight fears – The Daleks are a comment both on the horrors of
nuclear war and on the attitudes of
racial purity that countenance the extermination of lesser races. The Cybermen
are both big stompy monsters, and comments about the fear of death and the
dangers of replacing human frailty with mechanised convenience. The Autons are
both shop window dummies gone mad and a comment on the sacrifice of an organic
world to plastic uniformity and commercial culture. The Axons are what happens
if you choose easy solutions over hard work. The Sontarans are the ultimate
evolution of military – and more pedestrian, bureaucratic officiousness – and
so on. And this was all before we even had the gift of Philip Hinchcliffe’s
‘gothic’ imagination.
Since the show’s rebirth
in 2005, there’s been a dedicated resumption of the ‘scare them senseless’
mentality as an ingredient in Doctor Who, and it’s retained that sense of
allegory – the scares mean something,
or they’re a Roald Dahlian twist of something innocent and familiar. The
gasmask people were a twist on the game of “Touch” but can also be watched as a
metaphor for rumour, everybody becoming the same, even when the same has been
“written by an idiot”, by the power of passing it on. The Weeping Angels were a
twist on the game of “What’s The Time, Mr Wolf?” but they can also be watched
as a metaphor for political brutality – they can only get you if you’re not
watching. And so it goes.
The God Complex has at
least a claim to being the best example of this heavyweight metaphor mixed with
genuine visual and emotional scares so far in New Who. Unlike some other
episodes (more subtle episodes? Maybe), it puts its agenda right there in the
title. In fact, the title itself is an analogue of the central idea – a
positive Rubik’s cube of meanings: it’s a complex, with a “god” in it, as well
as being what drives both the villain of the piece and the Doctor in their
motivations throughout the story. And indeed, The God Complex is pretty
explicitly an anti-religious morality tale – fear is replaced by faith, which
feeds a monster and ultimately leads you to your death, happy, changed from who
you were, robbed of your self-determination and sacrificing yourself to the
pleasure of the beast.
Whoa. Heavy.
So much then for the
sub-text. The God Complex is so much more than that – right from the get-go,
the combination of performances, set-design and creepy, fresh direction from
Nick Hurran wakes you up like a bad dream. The naff 80s-Crossroads hotel looks
like Fawlty Towers in Hell, the open shots take their time to breathe you into
the creepiness of the story, the flashes of written text and scrawl show you
you’re in nightmare territory, and whoever it was who came up with the idea of
having the victims of the minotaur do crazy, blissed-out smiley acting,
followed in a jagged cut by shots of their fear or terror was on to a new way
of Doctor Who storytelling. By the time the opening credits roll, it’s given
you enough oddness and spider-down-the-back creepiness to get you on the edge
of your seat.
Post-credits, let’s go
out on a limb and say The God Complex delivers the most complete package of
Eleventh Doctor characterisation you get in three years of Matt Smith. Amy and
Rory are delicious immediately, Amy channelling classic companions from Tegan
“I just wanna get back to Heathrow” Jovanka to Peri “Purposeful travel, not
aimless wanderings” Brown in her opening speech about how they’re not where the
Doctor has promised them they’d be. And there he is, the fully-rounded Eleventh
Doctor, marvelling at the detail of the reconstruction of the hotel, and
sniffing the leaves of a cheese plant.
The wall full of
“guests” with their strange attributions – Defeat, Daleks, having his photo
taken, Plymouth…that brutal gorilla… sends a shudder down the spine as we
appreciate the scale of what’s going on here, and then, before we get the
chance to dwell on it, the other guests arrive, all talking at once, and again,
Smith is on top form as the alien investigator – he hears everything, deciphers
everything, and takes each strand in turn: Gibbis must be from Tivoli because
he wants to surrender, Howie explains the shifting architecture, and Rita, the
clever clogs who the Doctor clearly wants to take away from all this. It’s the
Eleventh Doctor in full flow, setting the banter-engines to max (the Twelfth
Doctor would be so unimpressed) and
doing his bandy-legged Chaplin strut about the place, but he’s still at that
point treating it as larks – he gets involved because apart from anything else,
the idea of a hotel that shifts its configuration and has “things” in the
bedrooms is “just rude.”
It’s only when they meet
the tied-up Joe, perfectly rational, but spouting self-destructive dogma of
praise to “him” that the situation they’re in becomes clearer to the Doctor,
and it’s a subtle sub-arc that he acts on standard Doctor instinct, taking Joe
with them, telling them all to stay together and the like – instantly assuming
it’s his role in the situation to save them. As his successor was to say –
“It’s my special power.”
Except here, it quickly,
gruesomely becomes clear that it isn’t. Joe dies, welcoming the breath of the minotaur,
and the Doctor gives one of his “no more people die today” speeches. It’s a
difficult listen coming out of this young Doctor’s mouth – When the Ninth or
Tenth Doctor said it, it sounded like they were coming to kick causality’s
teeth in, but when the Eleventh says it, it’s tinged with a kind of desperation
that seems on the verge of weeping. And so it should be – Howie, the conspiracy
theorist with the stammer and the fear of ridicule by girls is next to ‘Praise
him’, and the Doctor and Amy join forces to egg on his sudden enthusiasm for
death, using him to find out more about the mindset of the minotaur’s victims,
and then to capture it.
Here’s another key
Eleventh Doctor scene – the odd stand-off discussion with a creature whose
language even the Tardis can’t translate for us. There are resonances of the
Grafayis discussion from Vincent and the Doctor, the weary creature wanting an
end, but here the minotaur is more expansive, explaining Howie’s contention
that the people who end up in the hotel are ‘raw,’ and that the point of the
rooms is to ‘cook’ them. Still though, the Doctor doesn’t get it.
Not until Rita – brave,
clever clogs, rational religionist Rita – has succumbed to her room and the
stripping of her faith and her human dignity in the face of the minotaur’s
influence, and is added to the body pile, does it start to make sense. We see
the Doctor starting to unravel here: as Amy demanded of him in Amy’s Choice, if
he doesn’t save everyone, then what is the point of him? Clearly it’s a point
he tries to stave off by saving everyone, and when he can’t, his rage means you
should remove anything valuable from the room he’s in. This is a Doctor
potentially out of power, out of control. And then, as Amy explains to Gibbis, (who’s
more than a little stroppy for a man who untied one of the victims and let them
go to their death) about the Doctor and how he never lets her down, there’s a
slow, sick lurch of understanding for us all, right at the moment the Doctor
has the same sensation, and those of us of an age are young again, remembering
The Curse of Fenric, where Ace’s faith in the Doctor stopped The Ancient One
from moving, and he spat words of disdain of her to the world, to the shocked
viewer, to his heartbroken companion. That was one of the Seventh Doctor’s most
hard-edged and cruel scenes, and perhaps it’s a thing the Twelfth Doctor could
do – but not Eleven. Eleven is fundamentally kinder than that, and his bursting
of Amy’s bubble of faith is softly done, collaborative, almost 3AM-party talk
from friends who’ve thought of becoming more, but realise how foolish that
would be. It’s underplayed as he tells her of his vanity, his need to be
adored. As he tells her he is not her hero, not the man she’s always thought he
is, and that, in essence, the fairy tale ends when the princess gets her
prince, when she stops being “Amelia Pond.” and begins to really live as “Amy
Williams.”
For reasons that are
never entirely made clear, the dismantling of Amy’s faith dissolves the hotel’s
structure, and brings the minotaur to its knees; it appears, from this, to be a
creature always one meal away from death. Having dropped Gibbis home, the
Doctor’s new understanding of himself and his reality continues. He drops Amy
and Rory at a new home, with a new car – a palace and coach, in fairy tale
parlance, and tells Amy that the fairy tale ends with the fairy godfather
flying away, because that’s the only way
everyone lives happily ever after. He’ll pop in from time to time (except of
course he knows he won’t – the secret he thinks he’s keeping is his date with
death), but their time as Tardis regulars is done, because the alternative is
him standing over their graves.
Looking back of course,
we know he’s right. So very, chillingly right.
The God Complex is a
high point – arguably the highest point – of storytelling, characterisation and
emotional and intellectual issue-tackling in the Eleventh Doctor’s time in the
Tardis. With the exception of the sudden disintegration of the hotel structure
and the death of the minotaur, there’s not a flawed note throughout the piece,
and it adds new directional strength and fresh air to the telling of Who
stories, making it feel like one of the best things to happen to the show in
series six. If you haven’t seen it before, or even if you haven’t seen it
lately, take a look at the God Complex and prepare to be blown away.
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