Thursday, 7 September 2017

Who Reviews Closing Time by Tony J Fyler


Closing Time has three main jobs to do when the lights start flickering in Ipswich, and the order in which you rank them depends where your emotions are invested. For us, it has to 1) deliver a solid Cyberman story for their first stand-alone outing of the Matt Smith era (no, we’re not counting the action-figure advert that was The Pandorica More Or Less Sits There Being A Bit Naff), 2) deliver an agreeable sequel to The Lodger, the Craig and Sophie companion detour from the main Pond-life theme, and 3) give everyone a bit of a break from the overarching series-arc of the Doctor’s date with mysterious astronaut-based assassination on the shores of Lake Silencio, and, as was fairly limited throughout the run of Series 6, actually have some fun.

So let’s see. Does it deliver a solid Cyberman story? Not on practically any level, no. The Cybermen in Closing Time are in-story naff, exhausted, wounded, rusted, more or less running on empty, and dependent for the first time since Revenge of the Cybermen on Cybermats to do their dirty work for them. Now, in itself of course, this doesn’t make for a bad Cyber-story – you could argue that it makes them whatever the emotionless equivalent of desperate is, and more dangerous as a result.

It doesn’t do that in Closing Time, but it’s an argument you could make if you’d never seen it. In Closing Time, the Cybermen are more or less rent-a-villains until the very end, and when it comes, the very end makes them specifically less than that. Can we just remember, briefly, that Craig Owens, who for some reason, God knows what, is chosen to be the new CyberController, defeats the Cybermen by blowing them up with love. Yes, in all credit to Gareth Roberts, there’s the beginnings of a properly bonkers Who-style pseudo-science explanation, but even that, when it’s given, makes approximately bog-all sense, because even if it’s a spike of heightened emotion feeding through their systems, they’re Cybermen – their very existence is predicated on quelling, quashing, squeezing out and suppressing their emotions, and they’re supposed to be logical, but if they are, surely they’d have allowed for sudden spikes of emotion hitting their system. Essentially, we’re asked to believe that the Cybermen are defeated for lack of a circuit-breaker. Granted, it’s up there with gravity, radiation, nail varnish remover, gold dust, crossing the Floor of Death, doubloons fired by catapult, arrowheads and knowing what they look like in terms of Stupid Ways The Cybermen Have Been Defeated, but it’s still something that makes them less than they should be, and it treats the Cybermen with an almost Five Doctors disrespect.

So – an effective follow-up to The Lodger in terms of Craig and Sophie? Here, Closing Time is much more effective – they’ve finally managed to be declarative enough to bump their bits together and create new life, the scene-stealing Stormageddon, or Alfie as he’s known by the peasants. As a Craig and Sophie episode, you could argue it’s much less even of course, as Sophie has clearly come on far further than Craig (the urgency of pushing another human being out of your body will tend to do that for you), and she disappears before the credits, only returning at the very end. So this is Craig’s rite of passage into Being Able To Cope With Parenthood, and on those terms, it works a treat – re-treading some Lodger ground in terms of the blatant lies he tells the world and his utter inability to privately cope with life, it takes Craig through Cyber-Hell and Doctor-snogging to the blowing them up with love denouement which proves, apparently to both Craig and Alfie, that he has the ability to do whatever is necessary to help his son, taking ownership of his actions and responsibilities on a deeper level when the chips are down and he’s about to become an emotionless Cyberman. It’s funny to imagine how gently pathetic Craig would have been as a dad without the threat of alien invasion to spur him to resolve – but then, without the threat of alien invasion to spur him on, he would never, in all likelihood, have kissed the girl in the first place. We’re left to wonder whether he will now be able to deal with future ruts and sources of panic in his life without the threat of humanity’s extinction to focus him, or whether he’s ultimately doomed to revert to cheerful naffness later in life.

As a story aimed at giving us a breather and having some fun though, Closing Time comes right into its own and runs off into the distance with the Most Charming Episode award for Series 6, giggling every step of the way.

On a rewatch, what becomes evident almost immediately is just how hard Matt Smith worked at being the Doctor. You can say that’s part of the problem some people have with his Doctor – Tennant, for instance, played the Doctor as though the character was alive and real and had just strolled in front of the cameras for an hour each week, whereas Smith’s performance is a masterclass in craft, which means it always looks like he’s acting the role. But on the other hand, boy is he acting the role. Taking your eyes of Smith at any point is more or less impossible, because he packs every scene and every moment with high quality Doctor-acting. That leaves James Corden with the naturalistic heavy lifting as Craig, but it’s a thing at which he excels, seeming ‘ordinary’ on-screen, and between the two of them, what they give us is an hoursworth of Laurel and Hardy, with Eleventh Doctor characterisation baked in deep. To some extent this too is re-treading The Lodger’s ground – the Eleventh Doctor, the most quirky modern Doctor up to that point, and possibly still, Trying To Do Normal Things is still funny, and the choice of new normal things for him to do works well, giving him some time with children, some charm with people which, when tried by ‘everyman’ Craig goes spectacularly wrong. Gareth Roberts clearly knows he’s struck comedy Who gold in this pairing, and here he exploits it to the max, while still doing the spadework to give the story both an alien story that progresses towards a conclusion (however naff that conclusion actually is), and personal development stories for Craig and the Doctor both, (which work significantly better).

Ultimately, if you’re looking for a great Cyber-story, Closing Time isn’t it. It still, somehow, manages to be better than most modern Cyber-stories, but that’s more a tragedy than a triumph, and shouldn’t be held up as a mark of Cyber-quality. As a return engagement for Craig Owens, it’s engaging and cheeky and funny and frothy and silly and all the things that such a return should be. And as a break from all the dark, twisted, barely-clinging-to-sense shenanigans of disappearing time-babies and psychopath killer-wives and almost people and good men going to war that was Series 6, it manages to be one of two or three standout episodes, and by far the most actual fun of the year. In a series that depended more heavily than many on continuity-knowledge, you can re-watch Closing Time any day of any year and still get as much from it as you could on first broadcast.

Still, though…he blew them up with love. (Shudders). 

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