Mark Watches ‘Doctor Who’: S02E10 – Love & Monsters

In the tenth episode of the second series of Doctor Who, we meet the world’s biggest fan of the Doctor, whose life is irrevocably changed when he goes to great lengths to meet him. Intrigued? Then it’s time for Mark to watch Doctor Who.

The first show I ever got the chance to watch in real-time for quite a few years in a row was The X-Files. (I’m hoping this post will bring out some of you X-Philes so we can geek out in the comments below.) I am still unable to understand how I lived in such a ruthless, strict, and frightening household environment, where I had a 7pm bedtime until I was fourteen, but somehow, from the day the show first started in 1993, just over a month shy of my tenth birthday, my mom would let my brother and I stay up late to watch the show. Perhaps the show was reminiscent of the The Twilight Zone, which my mother loved, or perhaps it was her attachment to serials on radio and television when she was a child. But I got to watch that show every week and it felt like my only vision to the outside world.

Sure, the plots were fantastical, but I was already pretty heavily obsessed with horror and science fiction at that point. (I blame that on three things: Alvin Schwartz’s Scary Stores To Tell In the Dark trilogy, Edgar Allan Poe, and H.P. Lovecraft.) Because my mom was so strict, I lived in a veritable bubble of sorts. If it weren’t for my older brother, I wouldn’t have even really know what punk or hardcore or metal was until many years later. I was cut off from the world because my parents wanted to protect me from everything they felt could ruin me: drugs or friends or drinking or rap music or anything weird or dark and the list could seriously keep going. So I started to latch on to that which was precisely what they tried to keep me from. I was enamored with the idea of ghosts, of specters, of UFOs and messages from beyond the grave, of sea monsters and Bigfoot and the terror all these stories filled me with.

They made me feel alive when I otherwise drifted through life and school as if I wasn’t feeling anything at all.

The X-Files managed not only to introduce me to even more urban legends and terrifying myths, but it framed it all in a subversive format that told me, little ten- and eleven-year-old me, that above all else, you should not trust authority. The government is lying to you, the news is lying to you, the magazines on the shelves by the checkout stand are lying to you, your teachers are lying to you (oh, and they’re also part of a satanic pact that’ll be acted out in a war against the greatest substitute teacher of all time), and, most importantly, your parents are most certainly lying to you. That show single-handedly fueled the little rebellion growing deep inside me, the rebellion that was telling me every day that there was something wrong with the way I was treated and the way I felt day-in and day-out when I was at home, that there was an entire world outside my door that couldn’t harm me at all, that actually held the capacity to make me feel wonder, amazement, awe, and intellectual satisfaction, that there was something deeply wrong with being demonized for being smart and wanting to learn, and that if I wanted to make the world change, sometimes I’d have to do it myself.

Implicit with this was the show’s way of also inspiring my sense of creativity. That first season of the show was, for more people than just myself, something we’d never seen before on mainstream television. How could they continue to tap into our collective fears and frighten us week after week? How are they not running out of ideas? How do they manage to tie these all together with a story arc that suggests something greater (and more damning) than the world we’d come to know?

But it was season two that changed my perceptions of television and how the medium could be used to tell a story, when the infamous Darin Morgan wrote a script for an episode called, “Humbug.” Not only was it deeply funny (and it still is to this day), it was the first time I’d seen a television show seem to openly talk about itself, about the absurd nature of the procedure and how people viewed the “evil” characters that popped up each week. I now understand that this was a “meta” episode that explored the concept of The X-Files’ universe itself, but I didn’t know that word back then. To me, it was a bold and fearless thing for a show to do, especially so early into its run.

If you’ve guessed where this is going, watching “Love & Monsters” brought me back to the unexpected and surprising feelings that occurred the first time I watched “Humbug.” There are few things I appreciate more in television than a show willing to break it’s own narrative pattern to tell a new story, even if the execution isn’t perfect. (Good examples: “Brown Betty” on Fringe, “Across The Sea” and “Ab Aeterno” on LOST, and WAIT WHY CAN’T I THINK OF ANYMORE THAT AREN’T EPISODES OF THE X-FILES).

When “Love & Monsters” opened with Elton Pope’s videoblog, I assumed that we’d only stick to this format for the cold open. NOPE. Russell T Davies gets a chance to be much sillier than usual in this episode and, until the end, it was great to watch the whole thing with a smile on my face. I wonder if, beyond needing an episode without as much David Tennant and Billie Piper in it, this episode was also written to include (some) commentary on the ferocity with which some fans approach Doctor Who. I sort of felt this subtext was kind of obvious, but I’m willing to admit that it’s only because I’m so aware of how many Doctor Who fans there are online.

As a whole, I enjoyed this episode, but it was the details that really did it for me. Elton would not have been as endearing had he not been so obsessive about ELO. The secondary characters would not have been as believable had they not been so plain. Victor Kennedy would not have been so compatible as a villain had he not been so slimy and self-absorbed. And there wouldn’t have been such an emotional weight to “Love & Monsters” had it not spent so much time with Jackie, who became an even MORE amazing character than before.

Let’s just move on to the good (and negative) thoughts I had for this episode.

THOUGHTS

• The quick shot of Elton John when Elton is introducing himself is another one of those small details that I loved.
• MOANING MYRTLE!!!! Oh lord, so distracting.
• LINDA is perhaps the silliest acronym of all time. Clearly it makes sense because…fish n’ chips. DUH.
• “What’s the twin planet of Raxacoricofallapatorus?” “Clom.”
• “You upset my mum.” “Right. Big absorbing alien over there, and you’re having a go at me?”
• Abzorbaloff. My god, I love this show.
• ABSORBED INTO HIS BUTT. Gross.
• I cannot express my love for Jackie any more than I already have, but I’ll try. This episode is so fantastic because it shows a mother who deeply loves her daughter, so much so that she wil continue to live alone rather than give up her location. This episode provided a huge character growth for Jackie and at the end, I just wanted to hang out with her so much. And give her a hug. So she could spill wine on my shirt and make me feel uncomfortable.
• Complaint #1: I don’t understand how the absorbed bodies could hold back the Abzorbaloff. That made no sense to me.
• Complaint #2: The ending of this episode is great UNTIL we find out that Ursula has been preserved as a face in a tile square. Possibly one of the most disturbing and fucked up things I’ve ever seen, most especially with the reference to a love life. WHAT THE FUCK, RUSSELL T DAVIES. Just no thank you at all.
• TORCHWOOD FILES AGAIN. Oh god, I’m almost to the end of series two and cannot wait for this show to explode my brain forever.