Doctor Who (The Return of Doctor Mysterio): Movies about Writing

Here’s a short blog on a Doctor Who episode from the Capaldi years. Have I mentioned that I love Capaldi as Doctor Who? He’s so delightfully grumpy.

The Christmas Special entitled “The Return of Doctor Mysterio” is actually about a man who has a computerized gem stone in his stomach that’s been giving him super powers since he was eight years old. Oh, and it was somewhat the Doctor’s fault. The superhero, known as the “Ghost” has the mild mannered day job of being the nanny for Lucy, someone he’s been in love with since elementary school. Oh! And there are invading aliens taking human bodies in full body snatchers style. The Doctor and the Ghost fight the baddies. Yaddy yaddy.

And yes, this is still a Christmas episode. He becomes a superhero at Christmas so it totally counts.

The part I am focusing on here is Lucy’s job as a reporter. She’s an investigative journalist in the standard Lois Lane format to fit with the storyline. Still, her job as a writer adds little touches to her character. There’s the usual “do anything for the story” that comes with being a journalist in television or in films. Yet, the episode includes subtle parts of being a writer such as the taking little notes, using people watching to one’s advantage, and keeping an eye on other news sources. My favorite scene is how she interrogates the Doctor using a squeaky toy, but puts the torture on hold in order to type up some of her story from that night.

And she learns from the Doctor that when sneaking around you should always pack a snack.

Doctor Who (The Haunting of Villa Diodati): Movies about Writing

I’ve covered the night of literary birth before when I wrote a blog about Gothic.

First, the cleanest version of the night Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. Doctor Who can’t have opium dreams and seductions by Lord Byron after all. This one starts with Mary (Lili Miller) as more of a child-bride, excited by flights of fancy and horror stories. Most of the time, she’s depicted at the logical one amongst the party, but in this case the logic comes later.

Because it is Doctor Who, there are aliens. The Doctor (Jodie Whittaker) takes her three companions to the night when the famous ghost story writing challenge is supposed to take place. However, they find the party missing Percy Shelley and busy playing parlor games. This episodes does have a great joke in which one of Doctor Who’s companions, Yaz, commands, “No one snog Byron!”

The strangeness of the episode starts with poltergeist activity and disembodied hands trying to choke people. Percy Shelley has been troubled by visions of a dark figure over the lake and attempts to get to him seem stopped by the villa itself. Dr. Polidori is controlled by an outside force during a bought of sleepwalking which helps the Doctor figure out how the house is tricking them, but also includes another fantastic joke where Byron tries to hide behind Clare when startled.
I also like how the history of the time is added into the episode, how “the year without a summer” played a role in the famous villa holiday and, how it’s effecting the alien presence in the episode. What is “the year without a summer” you may ask? It’s just that. A volcanic errupti0n changed the world’s climate and left most countries in a famine. It’s quite fascinating, yet sad. Look it up.

The alien in question turns out to be an incomplete Cyberman. That’s right. Use the famous Doctor Who villain that is a murdered human body reused by technology in an episode about the author of Frankenstein. Derivative? Probably. But I’ll take it. There is a focus on Percy Shelley’s writing and how the Cyberman has a psychic link to both him and his poetry. And I’ll end the summary of the episode there so you can see the end for yourself.

Being Doctor Who, there is an attempt to give all characters more emotional insight. They of course include the mental health problems of Dr. Polidori and the nasty self-indulgences of Byron. But Claire Clairmont, Mary’s step-sister, is viewed as more of the lost, insecure, and anxious teenager she more than likely was than an instantly mad woman obsessed with Byron.

As for Mary, the episode focuses much more on her relationship to the other character and to her son William than to her writing. Motherhood has made her more mature and determined, more worried about her baby than herself. It’s difficult to watch knowing that William dies as a toddler.

Even though there is little link between Mary’s writing and the night that is is made obvious, the episode includes many visual connections for Frankenstein fans. A great coat like the one the creature wears. A disappearing child in the clutches of a monster. The soul within a horror.

And the doctor has a great speech about how literature effects history. “Words matter.”

Doctor Who (Unicorn & Wasp): Movies about Writing

“There’s a murder, a mystery, and Agatha Christie . . . Isn’t that a bit weird? Agatha Christie didn’t go around surrounded by murder, not really. I mean, that’s like meeting Charles Dickens and he’s surrounded by ghosts at Christmas.”

Welcome back to another Doctor Who meets an author episode. I love a good Agatha Christie story. Can’t help it. Even if she was too “British” and imperialist in reality, I can separate her from the books. And in this episode we don’t need worry about that as Christie is presented as no-nonsense and disillusioned with the world as it takes place right after her first husband leaves her (look it up, totally happened). What did not happen was Agatha going to a garden party where a man named Professor Plum is killed in a library by an alien being. That’s right - alien! It is Doctor Who after all!

So - remember to grab your sand shoes and brainy specs for David Tenant romp with the Time Lord and silly companion Donna Noble (Catherine Tate). Let’s round up the suspects!

The cast includes Fenella Wollgar as Christie and Felicity Kendal, Christopher Benjamin, Tom Goodman-Hill, and Oscar nominee Felicity Jones as the list of shady characters who were already on edge because of the rumors of a famed jewel thief known as the Unicorn. While the Doctor and Agatha interview everyone, Donna is very excited to explore the house for clues. Instead, she finds a giant alien wasp.

As more deaths occur, the high class suspects turn to Christie as if her writer’s mind should be able to make all of this just go away. “What would Poirot do?” they ask, insisting that she has to help them. Agatha responds, “I’m just a writer.”

Despite her complete lack of confidence in herself, Christie still find clues and analyzes the people around her with bravery and complete curiosity. She’s depressed due to her crumbling marriage and will not let herself belief she is anything more than a hack writer. I believe this depression to also be true of Christie’s real life counterpart which was why she famously vanished in the midst of her reputation being harmed by her husband’s actions.

She and Donna find a tool kit and realize that the jewel thief the Unicorn is also somewhere in the house, leaving them to wonder the thief and the giant wasp are connected. As any good mystery writer, Christie shows she knows a lot about poisons, 1920s forensics, and the environment around her. The Doctor tells her that the murders mimic one of her books and she knows people so she much become one of her beloved detectives.

I’m not going to give away the end of the mystery, but I will tell you that at the end Agatha Christie is left with no memory of the events at a hotel. And that is where she was when she disappeared for a few days. Right? Right.

Doctor Who (Unquiet Dead): Movies about Writing

What? A Doctor Who episode about Charles Dickens! Okay, twist my arm.

For those you are clearly not friends with me, Doctor Who is the longest running science fiction show about a time traveling alien who can regenerate and collects companions for the many adventures. Oh. I just made it sound creepy. Well. . . it is British therefore the budget on some of the special effects are creepy in their cheapness.

“The Unquiet Dead” is an early episode from show’s revival the mid-2000s. The Doctor (played for a single season by Christopher Eccelston, remember him) and his new companion Rose (Billie Piper before I found she had been a pop star) arrive in Victorian England during the holiday season in time to see Charles Dickens do a reading of his classic A Christmas Carol. Dickens is played by Simon Callow, a Dickens aficionado who has played the role before on the lives stage.

Dickens, by the way, really did travel the country doing live readings throughout his life. He loved the theater and believed that drama helped sell his books. However, this particular reading is interrupted by the figure of a blue-face old woman who is revealed to be a walking corpse.

As this is Doctor Who, the dead woman is not a zombie, but a body inhabited by a gaseous alien in search of a host. The alien race has taken residence in the gas lamps of a funeral parlor, the owner and maid of which are at a complete loss as to how to cover up the incident. The maid, played by Eve Myles (which is a another Doctor Who tangent I could go off on), has a connection to the aliens (the Gelth) through her sixth sense abilities.

Dickens insists on helping with the mystery, at first declaring it all illusion. Dear old Boz may have written about ghosts, but didn’t really believe in them. He questions whether his lifetime of work was truly the change he wanted it to be if the world was so much bigger. He tries to stick to his sense of reality as he points out his objections to spiritualists of the era. Authors and celebrities were often against the popular mediums of the day using tricks to make people believe they could speak to the dead. These performers were seen by many as taking advantage of the grieving.

The episode focuses a lot on the connection between the maid and the Gelth. Still, the writers made sure to repeatedly show the intelligence of Charles Dickens. Once he does accept the reality of the Gelth, he understands the concept of beings from another world pretty quickly. The Doctor repeatedly praises Dickens’s brilliance, but he does take a moment to criticize the “America” scene from Martin Chuzzlewit (which really is fair - Dickens writes about 1800s USA as if it’s a third world country). Dickens takes offense to the single criticism which is less than fair.

Instead of going into more and spoiling the whole episode, one last note on Charles Dickens depicted in this television show. The show does like so many time traveling shows do and expression Dickens’s desire to use the adventure as inspiration for his latest novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. But the most significant is the quote when thinking like a writer in the below image.