As big a fan of David Tennant as I’ve always been, I never really had any serious reservations about Matt Smith. He strikes me as a clever person and a bold actor, so I expected that he’d pretty much be okay. Yet “The Eleventh Hour” shows him to be better as the Doctor than I ever imagined: every line reading a totally logical yet surprising and delightful choice, his energy both lively and tragic — as the Doctor should be. In every moment of every scene, he’s great.

So there’s that out of the way. Yet here’s the thing: though I truly love Matt Smith, and though I found “The Eleventh Hour” to be really enjoyable and possessed of several brilliant scenes, I can’t help but think that both ‘The Eleventh Hour” and “The Beast Below” are technically terrible episodes.

No one is more surprised by this than I am. I love Steven Moffat’s previous Who episodes, and not only do I love them, but I love them because they are possessed of exactly the things that “The Eleventh Hour” and “The Beast Below” lack. If you look back on “The Empty Child”/”The Doctor Dances” or, especially, “The Girl in the Fireplace” and “Blink,” their most striking feature is what I would describe as clockworkness: all the details in each episode fit together perfectly, with little to no extraneous material and with a stylistic cohesion that, on television, is rare. The internal logic of each episode is fairly flawless, at least enough that it never feels like there are either plot holes or stylistic skips in the episodes. They’re meticulously constructed. Exactly the opposite of “The Eleventh Hour” and “The Beast Below.”

The first part of “The Eleventh Hour” is great: a fairy-tale garden, a fairy-tale little girl, a spooky crack in the wall, a mysterious extra room. (Surely someone else was getting a very strong Sapphire and Steel vibe from that sequence.) Yet then there are a shapeshifting escaped prisoner speaking through coma patient, and also giant eyeball ships. And then the Doctor instantly gets in touch with all the Great Minds of the world and writes a computer virus that hacks all the something something I don’t even understand what was going on there or what it achieved, really, except that it was a huge worldwide computer thing that came out of nowhere. And then we’re kind of back to the fairy-tale garden. Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against any of the individual elements that I’ve just listed. But the jumps in pacing and tone (from spooky crack in wall to Prisoner Zero to worldwide computer virus) felt ragged and odd, like two or more stories had been sewn together badly. The change in the scale and range of the story (from Amelia Pond to worldwide space threat) was also peculiar and abrupt.

Still: I understand that it’s the first episode, and there’s a temptation to throw everything in the crock pot. That excuse doesn’t, however, hold for “The Beast Below,” which struck me as an even worse example of the above problems. Here you had a bunch of individually terrific elements: a giant spaceship Britain (with great visual design work), schoolchildren in mysterious peril, strange toy-things turned sinister, a strange nursery rhyme, a Hidden Menace, and the Queen of England as an awesome Robin Hood-style vigilante. Not to mention the very apropos political thread of an entire population choosing again and again to forget the suffering that makes their lives possible. Yet when you throw all these elements together, without attempting to really link or explain them, and without giving sufficient weight to any, it makes no sense and comes off as rushed and shallow. Why are the children being taken? No idea. Are we supposed to care about either child in the teaser? We never really find out anything about them. Why do the Smilers exist? What do they do? What does their design have to do with their function? (Was someone just like: You know what, we’ll design these creepy clowns to use?) Who are all those people in the command room? Seriously, Amy outthinks the Doctor? Also, shouldn’t the Doctor know about the star whale, since it seems to be a major era in human history? I know that one of the tricks of watching Doctor Who is not to ask too many questions, but when nothing in a plot seems to make very much sense, there’s no place to hang your logic hat. It doesn’t help that the time taken away from things-making-sense (logically or stylistically) was instead given over to a very perfunctory, abrupt, and hammer-to-the-head obvious introduction of the theme of “The Doctor as last of his kind.”

Both of these episodes badly needed a story editor/co-writer. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was more or less the job that Russell T Davies did as head writer. I am not a die-hard Davies defender (though I do have great love for his work), but I think if you compare the Moffat-edited-by-Davies episodes with the Moffat-edited-by-Moffat episodes, it’s clear that Davies performed an essential addition or subtraction. Hopefully Moffat will find his own pace– he has the tools at his disposal, with a great Doctor and a good companion.

As has been said elsewhere, in other, more conventional recaps, this was definitely the best episode of season six so far. With that in mind, I’m going to start off anyways with something that has been an insurmountable problem for me so far in the season:

“Lapidus: So you guys met when you were kids, huh?

Ben: No, Frank. I was a kid. Richard looked just like he does today.

Lapidus: You’re saying this guy doesn’t age.

Ben: That’s exactly what I’m saying.

Lapidus: And how the hell do you think that happened?”

Let me ennumerate what’s wrong with this dialogue, and what’s wrong more broadly not only with the entire campfire scene at the front of “Ab Aeterno,” but with a surprising amount of the dialogue so far this season. Firstly: the only reason for Lapidus to say, “So you guys met when you were kids, huh?” is to set up the discussion of Richard’s immortality for the less knowledgeable viewers. This is an out-of-show reason. In-show, in the conversation, the question is awkward and out-of-place. As is Lapidus’ following line: “You’re saying this guy doesn’t age.” This conclusion is not something drawn by Frank Lapidus from what Ben’s said; it’s the writers outlining a point and putting it in Frank Lapidus’ mouth. Ben’s response, “That’s exactly what I’m saying,” is so forced and redundant that it literally made me smack my forehead. It exists as a line solely to (A) further clarify the point for the less knowledgeable viewers, and (B) fill a space in the dialogue so that Lapidus can deliver the line, “And how the hell do you think that happened?” This latter line also exists for purely out-of-show reasons: to serve as a transition into Richard’s flashback. In-show, it’s simply not a sensical thing for a human being to say in that context. In other words, this entire conversation (and the entire conversation round the campfire, barring Ben’s snarkier asides) exists for purely out-of-show reasons. It isn’t characters communicating with each other; it’s the writers communicating with less knowledgeable viewers through the medium of the characters. And it’s unbearable. As someone who dabbles in screenwriting, I realize that there exist times when you have to write a scene to communicate information to the viewer. However, that should never be all a scene is doing. It has to make sense within your fictional world.

However. That aside. Once we escaped into flashback, this episode was so very much stronger than any other episode of season six has been. I think the reason for this can be seen in the scenes on board the Black Rock after it’s crashed on the island. For a surprisingly long period of time we see Richard/Ricardo struggling to free himself from his chains, struggling to reach rainwater, seeing a wild boar eat the flesh of his dead comrades. These scenes serve no immediate plot purpose. However, I would argue that they’re vital in terms of telling the story. They’re vital for rhythm and pacing, and in order to set up the emotional context of the Man in Black’s liberation of Richard. I feel like it’s been an extremely long time since Lost allowed itself this kind of artistic grace note. This episode was full of them: the beautiful wide shots of Richard in the dense jungle of the island, the odd and somewhat uncanny CGI butterfly that drifts into the Black Rock… these are the things that may, on the surface, seem dispensable– but in actuality are the most important building blocks of cinematic story.

It’s also helpful that Nestor Carbonell has untapped reserves of mad acting skillz. I’m biased; Cuban-accented Spanish is, after English, the language I find most beautiful and easiest to understand, and so I could listen to Carbonell speak Spanish all day. But he also possesses an immediacy as an actor that’s striking, something to do with his physicality or the expressiveness of his eyes. He anchored even the most abstract and mythological scenes in this episode in a way that was sorely needed. (One of my problems with the mythology of this season is that it simply doesn’t seem to matter very much. It exists as an abstract idea that doesn’t feel vital to any of the main characters except, perhaps, Ben. Yet here, when tied up in the immediate fate of Richard, it felt real. I wonder also how much this has to do with the context that the historical flashback allowed: for Ricardo, a 19th-century Spanish Catholic, Hell and the Devil are meaningful and present in a physical way that they’re not for modern-day characters. Once I let myself sink into this mindset a little, I liked it. It made Jacob and his nemesis feel — again — real.)

I’m not going to even get into whether any of the mythological stuff revealed makes sense. I don’t think it does, but I also don’t really care. For me, the important thing is not whether the mythology all fits into a logical, consistent framework — it’s whether it feels logical and real. I didn’t quite get there with Jacob and The Other Dude this week (too much of their dialogue falls into the template described above, of facilitating communication between the writers and viewers rather than between characters),  but… moreso than before. Some of this is down to the camerawork, which was just shockingly good in this episode — the strange angles and light used in shooting Jacob were effectively creepy.

Nitpicks: the scene between Jacob and Ilana at the front of the episode grates so much on account of the near-incomprehensibility of the Russian spoken. “Я очень рада тебя видеть,” I think is what Ilana says… but even I– and I am by no means fluent in Russian — could pronounce it more convincingly. Along those lines I should point out the wildly varying accents of the Spanish speakers in the episode… but I’m not going to, because they all at least sounded fluent in Spanish, which makes for a nice change.

Touch wood that next week will continue this quality trend…

First, I must get something out of the way: I hate the flash-sideways. I did not start out hating the flash-sideways. I was an enthusiast in “LA X,” and even in “The Substitute.” Yet along the way something struck me: they don’t matter. The thing about both flashbacks and flashforwards was that they impacted the character you were watching. You could sit through an interminable round of I Am Jack’s Daddy Issues knowing that at the very least they would enrich your understanding of how Jack became the Jack Shephard we see on the island. They were intriniscally part of the Island story because they haunted the character in question. The problem with the flash-sideways is that they have no relationship to the characters we’re watching. This makes them at best mildly affecting, fan servicing, less interesting rewrites of characters. (Because, let’s face it: every single person in the world is less interesting than he or she would be if stranded on a magical jungle island.) And, yes, I’m sure that in the end the two universes will unite — but that doesn’t change the fact that I have sat through these episodes with a terrible sense of frustration at the disconnect.

It doesn’t help that I think the writing this season has been subpar. I have a huge amount of respect for the Lost writing team and the work they’ve done, and I don’t really feel that this respect has diminished — we’ll always have “The Man Behind the Curtain,” et cetera. But there has been something faintly unpolished and utilitarian about the writing recently. Dialogue that mechanically conveys information, oddly flat and awkward sentences, scenes that feel contrived and unreal. I find myself wishing every week that I could have at least done a polish on the script — eliminating arrhythmic words here and there, crossing out thudding repetitions.

However. I did think that this episode was, for this season, incredibly strong. It’s hard to write dialogue that Michael Emerson can’t break your heart with. The man is just an honest actor. How satisfying to see Ben standing in his own grave, and finding a sort of salvation. I also thought the moral point was beautifully made: that the right choice is to return in shame and make amends to the people who despise you, rather than to run from your sins and seek power in another place. I find myself hoping that Ben really is, as indicated by the book in the tent*, The Chosen. At the end of this journey I think he will have acquired the wisdom that the role would take.

Also, although I had reservations about the new despondent!Richard, I find myself as captivated as ever every time he’s on screen. Richard is my dark horse favorite character on the show, “dark” being the operative word because I feel it’s the word that in all its aspects best describes Richard. There is something depthless about him that hints at depth, an obscurity, a hint of the darkly comic, a secrecy that you want to explore. Richard’s suicide mission was not as well-set-up as it really needed to be, but Nestor Carbonell absolutely sold it to me. It’s the something mysterious in his eyes when he sits there in the dark — dark again — almost like laughter, but also like trust, or fear, or hope. I wanted that scene in the Black Rock to never end.

I have no comment on the flash-sideways, though, for the reasons previously mentioned. All the actors are great in them, but there’s something lessening about — for instance — playing out the drama of Ben and Alex in the tiny world of a high school. Think how huge that drama was on the Island. One of the most shocking, horrific things we’d ever seen. It loses its power if reduced to our little modern world. There’s a moral in there, probably, but I’ll take the sublime over the beautiful every day.

*Chaim Potok’s The Chosen is, by the way, a fantastic book and one that everyone should read.

1.  One of the things I found most intriguing about Battlestar Galactica was its complex portrayal of religion. It got right to the heart of what makes religion attractive, dangerous, lasting, a comfort. You could both understand and question its characters’ religious faith. They lived in a universe very much palpably powered by mysticism. As a religious person, I found that compelling — but was also glad that the show didn’t let religion off the hook.

Caprica purports to be as interested in religion. After all, its primary act is one of religiously motivated terrorism. Yet its depiction of religion feels flat and mystifying rather than mystical. Why were Zoe and Lacey devout enough monotheists to plan on leaving their families? What exactly do they believe? Why does Sister Clarice believe strongly enough to devote her life to religious terrorism? The answer seems to believe that they believe in One God because they are characters who believe in One God. But that kind of tautology is dissatisfying. Real-life fundamentalists are fascinating, and far more comprehensible. They believe because they’ve had intense experiences of conversion, or because religion provides them with a profound and satisfying sense of purpose in their lives. Their beliefs are immediate, specific, and very real to them. They don’t just sort of vaguely decide that there’s one god instead of twelve, and they’re going to give up their lives for him. We saw this on Battlestar Galactica: the monotheist movement there, with its obvious parallels to early Christianity, drew its popularity from a sense that the complex rituals of the twelve gods had, in the atmosphere of crisis on board the Fleet, become empty and meaningless. The new message preached… “preached”… by Baltar was one of immediacy, intense mystical experience, and radical salvation. It was easy to understand the attraction of these ideas, especially in that context. By contrast, on Caprica we have no idea of why these fundamentalist monotheist ideas have such apparent power for people. As a result, the idea that someone as headstrong, savvy, and clever as Zoe Graystone would give her life to them is almost ludicrous.

2. Caprica, please stop torturing me with the Tauron “language.” I am all in favor of inventing and/or demuertifying languages for science fiction/fantasy worlds. In fact, I find ConLangs fascinating. And I have, at one time or another, however briefly, studied both Latin and Greek. However, I have also spent enough time seriously studying living languages to know what a living language sounds like. A living language does not sound like the Others on Lost speaking Latin*; it does not sound like two guys reciting syllables of more-or-less Ancient Greek. Living languages have their own rhythms: stressed syllables, vowel reductions, elision. They’re fast and fluid. They sound like people talking. It’s easy to tell when people are actually speaking a language and when they’re reciting syllables. The latter is torturous for anyone with a linguistic ear.

3. It seems to me that Caprica is in some ways ignoring its own centrally interesting issues. Really this ought to be a show about — on some level — a world searching for authenticity: a world in which people escape to virtual reality, or else to a religious fundamentalism that promises them meaning and purpose. It also ought to be a show about what makes us human: is a data reconstruction of Zoe Graystone still Zoe Graystone? If implanted into a body, so that this body possesses all Zoe Graystone’s memories and mental abilities, does that body “become” Zoe? What does it mean to be a human being in the technological world? These are huge and resonant themes, much more interesting than the simplistic wheel-spinning taking place with Sister Clarice (who is, btw, totally boring) or Caprican talk shows.

I don’t know. I’ll keep watching for now, because I’m mildly entertained. The show has so much promise — it would be a shame if it failed to make good…

*Except for Richard Alpert, because Nestor Carbonell speaks Latin like it’s Spanish — resulting in a natural feel to the language.

But why is she so terrible? There are usually quite easy answers to this sort of question: the inability of television writers to craft rich and believable female characters, a tendency in television to favor broad, easy types over believable human beings, the fact that many so-called “actresses” are little more than leggy swimsuit models who can read lines. Yet on the latter count: from what little I’ve seen of Evangeline Lilly, she seems like a genuinely grounded, interesting, and complex person. This isn’t to say she’s a great actress, but she’s not terrible — certainly adequate, at least. And on the former counts…

I know that people can and do argue that Lost is as sexist as any other television show. However, as I’ve written before, I strongly disagree. It isn’t perfect. But many of the allegations levelled against it are confused, and disingenuous in the extreme. There’s a tendency to highlight certain statistics and ignore others — for instance, saying that Lost “kills women” while ignoring the many male characters who’ve also been killed (on the one hand Shannon, Ana Lucia, Libby, Charlotte, Rousseau; on the other hand Boone, Mr. Eko, Charlie, Michael, Faraday), or taking “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” positions such as condemning the death of Ana Lucia whilst simultaneously hating on her character. Haters gonna hate. I believe that Lost has some of the best female characters on television, and by “best” I mean not “most saintly” or even “most heroic,” but rather “most complex and interesting.” I love(d) Juliet (does it count as dead if she’s probably almost immediately going to live on in Mundo X?) because she was her constant coldness and calculating manner had an odd air of delicacy, because she was ruthless with a rifle and her intelligence constantly shone through. I also loved her because I felt that she was not an accessory to the male characters on the show: her character fought against that subordination, and her aloofness lent her the sense that she was always on her own mission. I love Eloise Hawking for the same reason: she’s a better adversary to Ben Linus than Widmore is, because in every era she has that sense of lone wolf-ness: a combination of monastic devotion to the Island and powerful self-interest. Note also that in neither case (Juliet or Eloise) did this independence preclude romance or, in Eloise’s case (though perhaps it ought to’ve) motherhood.

So given that I don’t feel Lost‘s writers are incapable of writing powerfully interesting female characters, what is so wrong with Kate that it’s proved unfixable over five years?

I suspect the answer lies in a point I’ve already raised. Juliet, I said, was not an accessory (or more than an accessory) to the male characters on the show. I think that Kate, fundamentally, is. If one were to craft a one-line description of Kate’s role on the show, it would read: Love Interest. That is the primal part of Kate’s character. It comes before all other things. Kate exists to be desired by Jack and Sawyer; the fact that this defines her very existence as a character explains what is, for me, the most irritating aspect of the Love Triangle ™: its inexplicability. You can’t explain why Kate loves either Jack or Sawyer — ontologically, she has no other choice. She exists to love and be loved by them. Everything else about her (her “tracking skills,” her ludicrous career as a fugitive, her baffling decision to raise Aaron) is tacked on secondarily, to lend color and/or some kind of foundation to her Love Interest role. They don’t arise from some intrinsic understanding of who Kate is*; in an important sense, Kate is no one. She is like those roles in scripts that say simply, “Police Officer,” “Checkout Girl,” or “Waitress #3.” For five years, the totality of her existence has been functional. No wonder she’s dull.

I will raise the flag of institutional sexism only in this place: that I feel Kate’s failure to evolve beyond her functional character is the result of a pervasive sense that it’s perfectly okay for the female Love Interest to not have a character beyond that function — the result of a lack of need for the female character to be more than that. At the start of the show, all the lead characters were types: the Man of Science, the Man of Faith, the Funny Con Man, and so on. These types can be equally flattening and limiting — if the Con Man cons because he’s a con man, the Man of Science refuses to believe because he’s a Man of Science, the Man of Faith believes in everything because he’s a Man of Faith. Characters can become tautologies. But there’s a sense (at least on intelligent shows — I’m not touching procedural dramas) that male characters have to be more than that. They have to have depth; they have to have agency. Female characters lag behind in this department. As long as they (a) are attractive, or (b) service the development of male characters, they escape attention.

This problem is so endemic that on most shows it goes almost unnoticed. However, I think Kate stands out on Lost because other characters, male and female, have so transcended the issue — while she remains imprisoned by her function, forever limited by it. Imagine if the Love Triangle had been got rid of back in season 2. How might Kate have evolved once she was no longer required to dutifully anchor one of the LT’s three tiresome, unintelligible points? Sawyer escaped it, and turned into someone stronger, darker, more compelling, and more mature. But because Kate is a woman — because it is somehow, for some reason, so much harder to envision the purpose of a woman not anchored to men — she doesn’t have the same chance.

*What Kate Does, in other words, and What Kate Did, are actions unconnected to any central sense of Kate.

Previously, I thought: this destroys the mystery. The wonderful creepiness of that scene was in its ambivalence, the sense that there both was and wasn’t someone in the chair when Ben was speaking. There’s something cheap about the thought that he was faking.

But now I see a connection between this scene and the larger theme in Lost of fear & trembling (as explicitly evoked in the sixth season premiere by an actual copy of the book.) Fear and Trembling, the Kierkegaard text, concerns the nature of faith (more or less). It focusses on the story of Abraham and Isaac, and one of the observations it makes is that in order for the [averted] sacrifice of Isaac to be legitimate– a legitimate act of faith– Abraham had to be genuinely willing to kill Isaac. Yet he also had to have no real, concrete evidence that he would be rewarded for doing so. The legitimacy of his faith as faith was conditional upon a total lack of evidence as to the object or rewards of his faith. If faith were predicated upon evidence, it would not be faith– it would be something different.

Apply this to the question of Jacob and his absence from Ben Linus’ life. In order for Ben to have faith in Jacob, he necessarily could have no evidence of Jacob’s reality or power, yet was required to behave as though his belief were absolute. One could argue that the Island does provide concrete, tangible miracles– yet these, like all good miracles, are not of the cause-and-effect, scientific kind. They are somewhat arbitrary and do not strictly follow (as rewards) from faith.

Though I don’t buy Jacob as a sort of God stand-in, I do wonder if this is the point about faith that will eventually be made: that the faithful man has absolute faith, contingent upon neither proof nor reward. And that Ben Linus, in all his risible– as it seems now– blindness and naivete, was a faithful man until he confronted Jacob: the object of his faith.

“LA X” isn’t a perfect episode; but then, Lost isn’t really (with rare exceptions, see: “The Constant,” “316″) a show with episodically structured episodes. It’s a show that comes by the block, in seasons. And in terms of setting up a new season, “LA X” will do. It presents a “have your cake and eat it too” scenario in which two parallel worlds run side by side: the consequences of the last five seasons continue to be played out on the Island, but Oceanic 815 also lands in Los Angeles and we see the characters play out a strange, slightly altered version of their normal lives. You get the dramatic playground of a reboot without sacrificing the dramatic energy built up by the rest of the show. Plus, there were lots of amusing throwaways for longtime viewers: Arzt, Frogurt, even a cameo by Ezra James Sharkington.

As ever, the great strength of the show is its actors. Terry O’Quinn is a phenomenal villain– and yes, I’m going to go with “villain,” though the moral valence of Jacob’s nemesis is yet unknown and though Jacob himself came off as slightly sinister in his post-mortem appearance. (I’m digging the uneasy musical cue that appears to be Jacob’s theme tune.) Josh Holloway and Elizabeth Mitchell kill it (…sorry…) in Juliet’s death scene. Michael Emerson is ever my fave. And I will step up to the plate and defend, as I’ve been doing since “There’s No Place Like Home,” Matthew Fox. Perhaps because he’s ordinarily so stiff and action-hero-y, his portrayal of Jack’s spiral into uncertainty, faith, and despair has struck me as peculiarly affecting. (Nothing will ever make me believe that anyone is in love with Kate, though.)

As far as plot goes… I’m reserving my opinion. I so intensely loved seasons four and five, with their brain-breaking time travel theories, island-moving Arctic wheels, and allegories of faith. I’m dubious about the revelation of the temple, and couldn’t get behind the giant wooden ankh (what did airport security think??) or spectacled hippie interpreter (I loved John Hawkes in Deadwood, but something about his delivery here rubbed me the wrong way). I’m ready for some multiverse technobabble to get going (a return of Daniel Faraday?) as well as for further mysticism to ensue. The most provocative revelation for me was Not-Locke’s comment to Richard Alpert that it was “good to see [him] out of those chains.” No, not provocative like that. (Okay, a little provocative like that. Nestor Carbonell is a beautiful man with beautiful eyelashes.) Provocative in the sense that it promises a rich narrative to come. The obvious interpretation is that “Ricardus” was a prisoner or slave on board the Black Rock; if so, I’m curious to see his transition to ageless spiritual leader of the Others.

Thematically, I’m interested in the reference to Fear and Trembling– though it seems more apposite to the fifth season, which seemed to take as its central theme the struggle with and ultimate surrender to faith (the faith needed to return to the Island, the faith that propelled the mission to detonate the hydrogen bomb). Fear and Trembling is one of those books that has strongly influenced my thoughts on faith, so I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it as it relates to Lost.

Lastly… I’ve always tended to read Lost through the lens of my own preoccupation with Sehnsucht: an emotional longing for a place to which one has never been. C.S. Lewis wrote about Sehnsucht and explained it as the human longing for heaven, heaven being, to his way of thinking, that world indefinably richer and more real than this world (as, in The Last Battle, he describes Narnia as only “a shadow or a copy of the real Narnia… as different as a real thing is from a shadow.” I’ve always felt that the Island is, in some ways, an incarnation of that unknown place. It’s a land of miracles, inhabited by powerful beings and strange, sort of primal people. But it also has some elusive quality that (having been recently reading Kant on the sublime and the beautiful) I’ve come to partially equate with purposiveness.

I hesitate to say that the Island itself is purposive– at least, not as a physical place. However, as an entity it is purposive. Everything on it and everyone who is touched by it is enfolded into some larger plan. There is a design: the Island chooses who can find it; the Island heals or kills. The people of the Island either live in submission to or struggle against this destiny. They are all imbued with deep meaning (yes, even Frogurt) simply by their interaction with the Island.  This is very different to Real Life, which is chiefly marked by meaninglessness, or at least stochasticity. The difference between Real Life and the Island is the difference between waking life and a dream. I suspect this is why I’m often haunted by the flash forwards/sideways/backwards on Lost that show the castaways and/or Others adrift in the real, waking world. Because: how do you return from the Island? How do you come back from the place you didn’t know you longed for?

Perhaps the whole Jacob/Enemy face-off will diminish this theory, making the Island less mystical. I suspect I’ll still cling to it, though. It dovetails so nicely with my personal obsessions…

I have now watched this twice, and wept through a good bit of the last fifteen or twenty minutes both times, so I am hardly impartial. I loved this episode. From a spectacular, ridiculous mess of Masters, cactus-headed aliens, nonsensical Time Lord machinations (seriously, how can Rassilon throw a diamond into a hologram of Earth and make it magically travel across the universe?) and everything else that could be thrown in the soup pot… emerges a story that is heartbreaking in its simplicity.

I admit I had tears in my eyes when the Master finally– at the last moment– struck back against the Time Lords who had destroyed his life. But obviously the waterworks moment is when the Doctor realizes that after all he’s done– after defeating the Master and the Time Lords and saving the Earth– what’s going to doom him is that he cannot turn his back on someone’s suffering. It is killingly small and beautiful. It is the only perfect exit for the Tenth Doctor.

I should probably note, also, that as a pacifist (the real kind, not the war-isn’t-groovy kind) one of the sources of my intense love for Doctor Who is that it– at least in its modern-ist incarnation– presents a very rare example of a pacifist hero. You could argue over the degree of the Doctor’s pacifism, but it is overall fairly profound: he repeatedly emphasizes his hatred of guns, forgives his enemies, actively tries to save his enemies, and regards the life of every being in the universe to be of value and worth saving. These aren’t just tacked-on morals; they’re a major feature of his character. When he goes against them– as in his comment about “little people” in “The Waters of Mars”– it’s a sign of something seriously wrong. And this pacifism, the kind of pacifism that doesn’t restrict itself to an edict against violence but extends an edict for life as well, is the major theme of “The End of Time.” We have not only the Doctor refusing to kill his enemies even to save his own or other lives… but also the Doctor actively laying down his life for another person. Not only do I find that morally correct and therefore admirable on television– it just touches me profoundly. Rarely when watching television can I genuinely enter into a story. Usually some part of my mind is concerned about the collateral damage or the distressing choices papered over as “what people do.” Here there is none of that distance.

So that’s where I’m coming from. But being of an existential frame of mind I was also moved and fascinated by the theme of death and our relationship to it that runs not only through ‘The End of Time” but also through “The Waters of Mars.” “I won’t die,” Captain Brooke insists in the latter. In the former we have not only Wilf and the Doctor discussing death (“I’m going to die,” “Well, so am I,” “Don’t you dare,”) but also Rassilon’s insistence that he (and the Time Lords) will not die– not to mention the Doctor railing against the necessity of his death even as he realizes he can’t escape it. I am much amazed by the extent to which this theme is left unresolved. It hangs there, a terrible fact on the horizon: we will die. Death is the most terrible thing. Once death is over, there is no us (though whether there’s an us to speak of before death is something I would and do argue about). But only death gives shape to our lives. It’s unusual to hear any of this aired on television without cliches. Yet I feel like the unbeatable combo of Davies and Tennant manages that. Lines that ought to be common (“the story never ends”) achieve, when they are counterbalanced by a very real sense of grief and loss, a depth that provokes contemplation.

I could nitpick and point out the messiness of the storytelling, or dissect the fairly blatant nonsense that supports most of the plot. But you know what? I don’t spend my time pointing out mistakes in stuff I love. I could do a logic tackle on time travel not only in Doctor Who but in everything, ever. Given some thought-time I could TKO most of sci-fi. Instead I give a pass to those things that make me want to believe. There, I think, something important is being done right. Vide (sort of): Werner Herzog’s comments in Herzog on Herzog on the line between truth and fiction– the difference between “the truth” and “the accountant’s truth.” A thing can be true in a story and not make, in the real world, a whole lot or even a lick of sense. That is the way fiction works, and why fiction is superior to the real world.

Russell T Davies writes in a way that makes me want to believe. I may sigh in exasperation and direct logic punches in his direction from time to time, but for the most part I’ve spent the last four years more than willing to let him tell me a story. I feel a certain loyalty to him. “The End of Time,” I think, vindicates that loyalty. Though it also makes me profoundly sad to see him go.

Yes: it has problems. The Naismiths are appalling characters, sketchy and irritating, who never seem to be successfully integrated into the plot of the episode. The spiky people not only come from nowhere, but feel excessive: that little unwanted lagniappe that Russell T Davies often can’t resist slipping in. And the Master Race is so ludicrous that I actually covered my face while watching, half in horror and half in hilarity.

And yet my love persists. The first half of the episode is, I think, nearly perfect. I’m not completely sold on the whole mystic-ceremony-resurrection, but I give it a pass because this story is structured as a story: a fairy tale being told us by Time Lord Timothy Dalton. I may not like the ceremony, but it is consistent with this half-unreal, feverish, fairy-tale feel. Aside from that there’s not much about the first half hour that I don’t love. As a writer of more or less fairy tales, I can’t argue with a television drama that begins, “It is said that in the final days of planet Earth, everyone had bad dreams.” There is a melancholy and a beauty to this theme of dreaming, of fear and loss and destruction and longing, that I think runs throughout the episode. We see it in the lovely scene in the church with Wilf as he sees the stained glass TARDIS and tells the Mysterious Woman that he wants the Doctor to come back. We see it in the scene in the cafe where the Doctor more-or-less admits that he’s afraid of dying and that he misses Donna and that he’s made a mess of everything. And we see it most of all in the scene between the Doctor and the Master in the wasteland.

This is the scene that made me understand how “The End of Time” was working. I’m talking about the scene midway through when the Doctor sort of inexplicably appears, at night, in the wasteland and the Master knocks him down with electricity before launching into a peculiar, seething, melancholic little digression about Gallifrey. “I had estates,” the Master spits. It’s the last thing you expect him to say. And yet there’s a thematic sense to this conversation: these two people– once powerful and brilliant– now brought to ruin, dirty and exhausted in a bleak industrial desert. There’s something terribly apocalyptic about it. And it feels dream-like– we don’t really know how the Doctor got there or why he chose that particular moment; we don’t know what he thinks he will do with the Master. But none of these things matter very much. All that matters is what’s happening on an intuitive, mythic level between them. And that, I think, is how the episode as a whole operates. A scene in which the Doctor almost weeps in a London cafe is more important than a scene in which there’s a magic gate or whatever that will whatever the spiky people from the gate planet. The fact that people are having bad dreams is more important than the why and how of these dreams. The episode fails when it doesn’t surrender to this and instead tries to be something it’s not: traditional Doctor Who. But for the most part it does embrace this dreaminess, and I think is a great success. Then again: I’m a writer of fairy tales, so what do I know.

Also, I have to note for the record that over the whole span of winter holidays I watched (as part of the process of converting a civilian to Doctor Who) the fourth series of the show and realized that it was not as bad as I had initially thought. “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End” are, I still maintain, technically failures. But as failures they are surprisingly filled with things to love. And “Midnight,” which I merely liked on transmission, is actually quite brilliant and quite surprising. Is the love and forgiveness in my heart related to the amount of love I have for Russell T Davies’ book about writing, which is shockingly clever, enjoyable, and sympathetic? It may well be. I do fear Russell T Davies: he may yet take “The End of Time” a tick too far tomorrow and send the edifice collapsing into a heap of dust. He is capable of it. But fundamentally I think he is an honest writer. It’s a quality I respect.