The How of Who

There are three compelling reasons to read this post.

1. You don’t know what Doctor Who is and you want to get familiar enough with the show to make the cute nerdy objects of your affection thank the world for your existence.
2. You want to read about plotting, plausibility and writing yourself out of corners, and you love charts.
3. God personally descended into your coffee shop / library or home office by means of a winch and pulley system and ordered you to do so.

This is where I’d encourage you to read on using a Dr. Who catchphrase, but, please love, if you’d just click on, just click that “Read More” button right there, NO NOT THAT ONE! Yesss, right there!! And I’m really suggesting you do it right now if you wouldn’t mind. You’ll spare us all some very slight, slight, inconvenience. Hm? Oh, just the destruction of all existence. Now, click it. Please.

Brilliant! You’re beautiful!

I begged Wrather to let me tackle one of our latest pieces of reader mail. Since I am apparently one of few overthinkers familiar with what it discusses, he obliged:

Overthinkers,

Greetings from the land of 10,000 lakes, more specifically Latitude 45 6’53”, Longitude -93 30′ 4″ (at least that’s what Google Maps says is my Latitude and Longitude).

I recently started watching the current version of Doctor who and I have a few things I would like you to overthink.

1. As a fairly new fan to Doctor Who it seems that the writers on the show rely heavily on some version of a deus ex machina in every episode to get the heroes out of trouble.  Whether it be the all powerful sonic screwdriver or some sci-fi/technobabble that the Doctor remembers at just the right time.  At one point during my viewing I thought that perhaps this is just a running joke of the show and it is something to be embraced, what are your thoughts?
2. Is the use of the deus ex machina in popular culture always a crutch for lazy writing, or do appropriate situations exist in which the use of a deus ex machina is called for?

Keep up the good work.

Thanks,

“The Jim”

 

(Last name withheld in case in a first date of his googlestalks him in three years. You can thank us later.

Although, frankly, if she isn’t cool with you posing intelligent questions about legendary television shows on the Internet, she’s probably not a keeper.)

 

Let’s not assume anything

Overthinking It readers are savvy, intelligent folks with discerning tastes – they are, without exception, tremendously personally and physically attractive, possessed of personal dynamism, professionally and academically successful and great fun at parties. If you weren’t all these things when you first read Overthinking It, first of all, you probably were and it’s just a confidence problem, and second, don’t worry, every page you load will imbue you more deeply with these desirable personal qualities.

But even with all that wonderful stuff, it’s only fair to give you some idea of what I’m talking about before I start going on a series of ridiculous tangents, as is my wont.

Deus Ex Machina — Literally “God From the Machine,” this refers to the ancient theatrical tradition of bringing God, a god or gods onstage at the end of a play to set up the ending, usually by rewarding good people for being good and punishing bad people for being bad. This is traditionally accomplished by something appropriately reverent, like pushing him up through a trap door in the floorboards, lowering him from above the stage with a rope tied around his waist, or wheeling him in on some sort of cart. The Greeks usually used a crane.

In a contemporary stage production, the “Machina” in “Ex Machina” would probably involve a smoke machine or a light show. (By the way, having to evacuate your audience because your smoke machine set off the fire alarms in the theatre is not something you want to do. I’ve been in the audience for that once; it was silly).

Over the years, the term has expanded to refer to any time when something or somebody who has not been a major part of the story so far shows up at the end of a play, movie or TV show more or less at random to dictate how it ends, usually making everything the characters have done up until this point seem irrelevant by comparison.

(It has also taken on an additional meaning, thanks to the John Woo-directed Appleseed anime feature of the same name, referring to ontological questions that involve cyborgs. I’m not going to tackle that here, but I wanted to acknowledge it.)

Take Robin Hood, for example. Robin Hood goes around robbing people, poaching deer, and violating all sorts of zoning ordinances by building his little city in the woods. He eventually gets caught and sentenced to death, so he and his followers stage an escape, find the head magistrate of a major English city, kidnap his fiancé and murder him (by swashbuckling, a.k.a. stabbing).

At the end of the story, you’d think Robin Hood maybe gets away for a while and is basically a homeless gangster until one of the Merry Men gets pinched for illegal dueling and snitches or his little shantytown gets wiped out by typhoid fever, but no — King Richard comes back from the Crusades! All is forgiven! Robin even gets back his father’s lands and gets to marry his high school sweetheart. That’s a Deus Ex Machina.

When King Triton gives Ariel legs at the end of The Little Mermaid, that’s not a Deus Ex Machina. King Triton has been a major character in the story so far, we’ve established that his trident has magical transformative powers, and we’ve already seen the various sorcerers and mystical beings of the ocean have the power to do this specific thing — make homo sapiens sapiens out of homo sapiens seashell-bra.

If King Triton showed up at the end of You’ve Got Mail and sent Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks to a magical island where independent bookstores were commercially viable, that would be a Deus Ex Machina.

The Architect at the end of The Matrix Reloaded is a hit-you-over-the-head-with-stupid literal Deus Ex Machina. See, he’s a god, and he’s in the machine. And he explains to you how everything works and makes most of the plotline up until this point irrelevant. Then he makes a bunch of mysterious judgements. But I don’t want to talk about him anymore. There’s little nuance to it, and it’s depressing.

Machina Ex Machina

Expanding beyond a single, powerful agent making a dramatic entrance, a Deus Ex Machina can take a wide variety of forms. One of the most common these days is nonce science, affectionately known as “technobabble.” The kind of Deus Ex Machina The Jim is talking about in his letter is very common in Star Trek, especially Star Trek: The Next Generation and afterwards.

“Oh, crud, nothing can beat this monster! And the episode is almost over!”

“Captain, I have an idea!”

“Commander Data, where have you been?”

“I was . . . ‘Kicking it up a notch’ (Holodeck-powered guest star Emeril Lagasse smiles and winks over his shoulder).

If we reconfigure the main deflector dish to shoot hyperfiction particles, it should reverse the structural field and convert the entity’s mass into gluons. The star’s nova cycle would decyclify, the colony would survive, and our double-encoded, irreversible self-destruct sequence would automatically deactivate.”

“Make it so!”

(Knowing look from Emeril Lagasse)

“Captain, I believe the correct expression is … ‘Bam!’”

When a movie or show picks up the big red phone labeled “FAKE SCIENCE” at the last minute, that’s a form of Deus Ex Machina. The competent people on this spaceship have had access to the same information all along and have had a lot of time to think already; if using this particle were a reasonable option, they probably would have done it a long time ago. Even if they were distracted by the B-plot, if they had a solid option in their pockets, they would never have considered their plight as hopeless as it seemed just moments ago. It just doesn’t make sense that everything important ever discovered was found in minute 50 on a moving spaceship.

In narrative function, it is as if a god that you weren’t sure were real just showed up and started changing the way existence works. It recontextualizes the agency of the characters, provides a modicum of surprise and lets everybody go home early.

It’s another mark of a technobabble deus ex machina that the unlikely last-minute solution that overcomes an insurmountable problem one week is never attempted again in subsequent weeks. Even when the Enterprise encounters another giant space entity immune to phasers, photon torpedoes or telepathic hourglass figures in unitards, nobody is going to consider whether they ought to try shooting hyperfiction particles at it from the get-go. No, they’ll spend half an hour taking tricorder readings; beaming up, down and sideways; and exchanging slow closed-mouth kisses with the sexy natives, only to come up with whole new kinds of particles just in time to start the theme song to The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.

(An aside, Brisco County was thebetter show, but I just love the theme song to Jack of All Trades. I watched it the other day on YouTube and it made me smile. So, I’ll break up my overthinking to give you that same chance:

The “technobabble cycle” is like missing the last subway home and walking for an hour before remembering that cabs exist and are available immediately via cell phone at a reasonable cost.

Then, the next week, you miss the last bus home, and you walk for an hour thinking that getting home is impossible, and, in a fit of inspiration, you call a limousine service.

You can see why “The Jim” is derisive of such things. Used anything more than sparingly, they’re hogwash and serve no purpose other than letting the audience move on with their lives.

Let’s talk about one of the times when it does a little bit more than that.

Finally, Doctor Who

One of my goals in writing this was to make sure people who weren’t familiar with Doctor Who knew I was on their side and that I wouldn’t drown them in specifics, so while I apologize for taking this long to get to our main subject, I don’t apologize very hard. Allow me to introduce some of you to “The Doctor.”

Doctor Who is a really old British science fiction show. The BBC has aired it off and on for more than forty years (the Guinness Book of World Records lists it as the longest-running science fiction show in history), it has more than 750 episodes (plus books, and comic books, lunchboxes, Franklin Mint plates, etc. etc.), and they rebooted it three or four years ago into a slick, modern sci-fi show that’s pretty fun to watch. It’s somewhat obscure in America, but it’s doesn’t deserve to be ghettoized in the same cultural purgatory as Stargate: Atlantis. It’s a major cultural property.

The show is basically a cross between Star Trek and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure, except it predates both of them.

The hero has a spaceship/time machine that looks like a phone booth. It’s technically a police box, but you don’t miss much by thinking of it as a phone booth if that’s more familiar. If you’re a youngin who doesn’t know what a phone booth is, just think of it as a really big T-Mobile Sidekick.

Sometimes he goes to other planets, sometimes he goes through history. So, one episode, he’s fighting alien robots, and the next one, he’s hanging out with Shakespeare. In a third, he’s protecting Shakespeare from alien robots. The premise is open-ended enough that they can write most of whatever they want.

The most confusing part of the show is that the hero doesn’t have a normal name. You’d think it would be “Doctor Who,” but no, that would make too much sense. He’s just “The Doctor.”

It’s sort of like how you want to call the monster “Frankenstein,” but Frankenstein is the creator and the guy with the bolts in his neck is “Frankenstein’s Monster.” And you sort of don’t care and call him Frankenstein anyway, and then that jerk corrects you, and you explain you were using a shorthand, but he criticizes you for imprecision, and you say everybody knew what you were talking about and he’s just being a busybody, and he says don’t use that language with him and you don’t know which word he had a problem with and why can’t we all just have Thanksgiving dinner like a normal family?

The second most confusing thing about the show is that they keep changing the actor who plays “The Doctor” (which makes sense; not even our most vigorous, musky, indefatigable performers can play the same role forever), but they do the audience the favor of justifying it with fake science.

I won’t go to the trouble of explaining exactly how, because the third most confusing thing about Doctor Who is that, after a half-century of making things up as it went along, it has a really complicated continuity that is full of holes, errors and inconsistencies. Its fan base gives it massive benefit of the doubt.

But all of that doesn’t matter, because, while it has serious moments (and scary ones), it’s historically been a campy show that hasn’t taken itself too seriously. I recommend it, especially if you like sci-fi action hours. In Britain, it’s a crossover hit and one of the most popular shows on television, and it has tons of spin-offs.

Most of the time, “The Doctor” also has a nonsexual girlfriend whom he hangs out with and who doesn’t believe a lot of the things he says until she sees the aliens. Think of it as The X Files meets The Dick Van Dyke Show.

Or as Stargate SG-1 meets Blackadder meets Scarecrow and Mrs. King.

Or as Firefly meets The Father Dowling Mysteries.

Or as Sliders meets Antiques Roadshow.

Or as Ace of Cakes meets Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow meets Alan Alda Presents Scientific American Frontiers.

Or as Time Trax in tweed instead of leather.

Our Hero

The characteristic of Doctor Who we’re talking about today, though, is how ill-equipped its hero seems to be in confronting actual trouble, but how he still manages to face down impossible problems time after time. (It’s a pretty good metaphor for romanticizing Britain when you think about it.)

“The Doctor” is a middle-aged Englishman who runs around in a kind of silly outfit (He’s changed a lot over the years, but he tends to dress like the eccentric uncle everybody thinks is gay but is really just lonely.). He has a “sonic screwdriver” which doesn’t shoot laser beams (most of the time), but can do an impossible variety of technological things. It’s like a lightsaber without the saber that can hack computer systems or remodulate anything that can be modulated. He’s like a less anxious C-3PO with the powers of R2-D2.

Oh, and he’s not really a middle-aged Englishman, he’s a 900 year old time traveling alien who is incredibly smart. He knows almost everything about almost everything in the universe. On TV, that means he gets to make up stuff all the time that turns out to save everybody at the last minute.

He has a time machine, but he rarely uses it for its intended purpose. He doesn’t tend to, for example, go back in time to before the aliens landed and warn everybody that aliens are coming. This is also justified in the show with fake science – his time machine is sort of “Quantum Leapified,” and it tends to jump around at random without him having a great deal of control over it.

And he doesn’t like to kill people (or aliens). He’s not Batman-level against it, but he goes to a lot of trouble to avoid it in situations where it is probably his best option.

Like R2-D2, despite having very few obvious skills or tools and no realistic means of defending himself, he routinely goes to the most dangerous places in the universe.

Like James Bond, you can yell “Just shoot him already!” at the screen as much as you want, but that isn’t going to happen often, and when it does, it rarely has meaningful consequences.

The Doctor’s main skills are

• Talking his way out of being killed
• Sort of flying his kind of broken spaceship
• Running pretty fast for a guy his age
• Making friends
• Improvising with gadgetry
• Spouting fake science and history

Note the absence of “fisticuffs,” “shooting,” “fencing,” “dogfighting,” “demolitions,” “calling for help” or “leading a crew or army.”

So, how do his episodes actually end?

Bring on the charts!

Deus Ex Cel

For this analysis, I went through the latest bunch of episodes of Dr. Who and looked for the climactic events that resolved the problems of the plot. I’m not going to try sorting through forty years of the show, so I decided to try to keep things relatively consistent by only focusing on the run of David Tennant, the latest actor to play the Doctor. He’s the guy who found the heart of the role, breathed new life into it, gave it a new consistency after being in limbo for a while, and bumped it into the mainstream. Plus, I’ve watched these episodes before, so I’m pretty familiar with them.

I went through plot summaries and my memory of the individual episodes and recorded how exactly the Doctor and pals got out of their often insurmountable problems. The results are a little surprising, but still very much in line with what The Jim wrote in about. About half the time, the episode just doesn’t fix the problem and leaves it until later (although the show almost always uses technobabble to get back on track after a cliffhanger).

After that, technobabble was far and away the most common way the problem was solved. There’s a monster attacking the doctor, and, oh, it turns out his DNA can be disrupted by pipe organs! Or, hey, I rewired the alien device to do something totally different from what it is supposed to do! Or, look, that sonic screwdriver doubles as a Slap Chop, so the Celery Empire is history!

Each episode has lots of minor wins and bits of technobabble, but I wasn’t really interested in events that just fill time — I’m looking for the tipping point, the fulcrum on which the show must turn. The interesting part of Dr. Who plotting is how the stakes rise and the Doctor seems less and less capable of solving the problem as the episode progresses, but at some point, because the show isn’t really serialized, the writers hit the corner and have to wriggle him out of the insolvable problem.

This is, by the way, something we’ve seen less and less of as mysterious dramatic serials like The Sopranos, Lost or Battlestar Galactica came to dominate the boutique culture of scripted television. The great thing about these shows is how high the writers can raise the stakes — how much more complex things can get, how much more hopeless or how much more intense. How we can go from thinking we understand the reality to feeling we know nothing and there is a whole new world to learn about. How dark it can get before the dawn.

But it is because of traditional shows like Doctor Who (not that it is exemplary, just that it shares this trait and it happens to be the show we’re talking about; I could just as easily name-check I Love Lucy, The A-Team or Everybody Loves Raymond) that the audience expects the problems to be resolved at all, which makes the delayed gratification of a serial more satisfying. It is also why these serials so often risk losing the interest in their audience if they stop making believable progress toward audience illumination — delayed gratification is fun, denied gratification is not. If you figure out your little brother has taken the prize, it is no longer an enjoyable activity to dig through a box of cereal.

So, The Doctor can’t just get more hopeless as the episode continues. At some point, he has to win, usually after the show has firmly established that he cannot. The moment where this shifts — where the show goes, “Okay, this is how The Doctor is going to win” is what I’m interested in, because that’s where Deus Ex Machina happens.

The next most common way The Doctor wins is by revealing he has superpowers or immunities that you probably weren’t aware of — that for some reason the alien’s mind control device just doesn’t work on him, or that his severed hand has the power to grant superintelligence, or that he can draw strength from people’s belief in him like Tinkerbelle (I love how these aren’t really spoilers, because they’re so arbitrary that it’s unlikely you’ll guess which ending corresponds to which episode).

This is pretty much the same as technobabble, except the Doctor’s body is the machine. It’s even a little worse, because if the Doctor has all these superpowers, there is very little reason for him not to use them more frequently or earlier in the episode. He doesn’t even have to scrounge around for batteries or pipe cleaners or whatever else he needs to reverse the polarity on something.

After that comes the more surprising one — in the reboot of Doctor Who, people kill themselves a lot — especially random featured characters. This isn’t as problematic a plot device as the constant technobabble Deux Ex Machinas (Machinae?) — I love a good “Needs of the many / needs of the few or the one” as much as the next guy. But when you do it a lot, it raises the question of whether you are writing yourself into the same corner over and over again.

“Somebody needs to die, somebody needs to die, how will they escape?

Yay, the somebody who needs to die is somebody you don’t care about! Victory!”

It seems a little hollow.

There are spare few episodes that end in a way that doesn’t either kill someone off or introduce new information at the last minute.

And the episode that ends with the realization that Harry Potter’s magic is real is pretty hilarious. But I won’t tell you more about it, because that one would be a spoiler.

Deus. Me Say Day Me Say Day Me Say Day Me Say Day Me Say Deeeeus

To go back to The Jim’s question, I don’t think the Deus Ex Machina is a crutch for lazy writing. Using it often is definitely a crutch for lazy writing. It’s a tool that has certain uses for which it is perfectly suited and many uses for which it will work, but is awkward, forced, unsatisfying or just lazy.

Deus Ex Machinae work when you are trying to reinforce that the world the characters live in has rules and scope beyond their immediate experience — that a character’s individual will is not as significant as the character thinks it is, or is perhaps as insignificant as the character thinks it is. So, in classic morality tales or even Greek tragedies, it’s not that bad.

In space exploration shows, it is sometimes okay, because you want there to be an element of surprise and discovery — that’s what the characters are up to, after all. But explorer characters are often strong-willed people who have big personalities and want to leave their stamps on the world. If those characters are too often involved in Deus Ex Machinae, it can get disappointing. You don’t want to see Captain Kirk get in a fightfight and have it be interrupted by a computer that fixes everything more than once or twice – it gets lame quickly.

And if the reason your story exist has nothing specifically important to do with the relative importance of individual will and expectation in the larger universe, then a Deus Ex Machina is almost always a bad idea. Thankfully, most comedies and tragedies fit this bill, but there are always matters of degree — but it also reinforces why the Deus Ex Machina with the Architect in the Matrix Reloaded is just so unbearably awful. Yes, it is poorly executed, but it is also a big refutation of the importance of individual will in a power fantasy about reclaiming individual will in modern civilization. It works against everything good or interesting that has already been established in the movie.

It’s as if, at the end of an Indiana Jones movie, there were a half hour of him just hanging out in a library, because it turns out that going out and doing things in the world on your own isn’t important or valuable as traditional academic research. It’s a betrayal, pure and simple.

Bottom line: It’s important to be aware of the themes that a Deus Ex Machina will always bring out, and keep them in mind before you turn to this plot device. Form and function are always connected — certain poetical meters are better suited for telling certain kinds of stories, and certain stock plot devices are better suited for communicating certain kinds of ideas.

What this means in Doctor Who

The core of Dr. Who is the relationship between The Doctor and his Companion (his Scully, his non-sexual girlfriend). That’s what makes this show special — that this fanciful time traveler goes all over the place with a normal, regular person in tow, and that they have a compassionate, personal friendship that is set against the exotic madness in the rest of the universe.

The Companion character is meant to bring the perspective of the audience into events — the Doctor can’t really be the one saying “Wow” when he sees an alien spaceship; he’s seen thousands, if not millions, of them. There is a huge gap between what the Doctor knows and thinks about and what the Companion knows and thinks about — that’s the “game “ the show plays more than any other.

This isn’t like Wing Commander or Alien, where the fantasy is about being somebody in a future world who has the competency to face bizarre, futuristic, deadly perils. In Doctor Who, the fantasy is about being taken out of the world as you currently are and facing all this stuff from your own perspective. From the individual’s perspective, all this stuff that is far from home is so far from expectation that it makes sense a lot of it is wacky and funny and outlandish.

It’s very similar to a stock British perception of the rest of the Globe — they have their happy, content little island where people do sensible things, stand in queues and have lunch breaks during sporting events, and then the rest of the world is just balls crazy. You can stay home and be scared of it, or you can adopt that trademark British sense of humor, get a bit of a stiff upper lip about it, and run out there and see what you can find. The “Cheerio, Can Do” self-sacrifice mythology is also pretty characteristically British, reminiscent of the mentality of the Somme and other famous modern British battles, where the good Briton is the first one up over the top into no man’s land should do it with spirit, and mustn’t complain.

With this sort of thematic content, it makes sense that the show has a lot of Deus Ex Machinas — because the main point of it is how much bigger and wilder and stranger the universe is than normal people expect it to be. The Doctor is more guide than hero, staying mysterious because the show isn’t really about him, it’s about the people who go with him or get caught up in the crazy stuff that he tends to run into. He facilitates the audience’s reach beyond its own limited perspective and vision — he puts a human face on how alienating the universe can seem sometimes.

The best Deus Ex Machinae in Dr. Who are funny ones — where you can sit back and chuckle, “Of course it works like that! Why not, right?” It’s the wacky side of there being “More things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.”

The worst ones are the serious ones, because if the Doctor gets too human during a Deus Ex Machina, or suffers too much personally, then the lack of agency that the individual seems to have in relation to the universe becomes less about exploration and broadening perspective and more about existential angst and depression. That’s a fine thing to explore from time to time, but it’s not why the show has been successful, and it’s not what the show is really about.

So, “The Jim:”

Is it a running joke? Yes, definitely, complete with running! It’s part of the show’s charm and perspective on things.

Is it something to be embraced? Not uncritically. The show doesn’t have quite a good enough thematic track record for me to believe that they are making the right choice most of the time with their liberal application of technobabble. But when you see a good one, give it a little hug.

Is the use of the deus ex machina in popular culture always a crutch for lazy writing, or do appropriate situations exist in which the use of a deus ex machina is called for?

The latter, but they are not as common as people think.

Just like the Doctor Who universe (or, as the kids call it, the Whoniverse), the world is too varied and strange for the same plot device to cover this much of it. There is more homogeneity in the explanation than there ought to be. But, all in all, they do a pretty good job, and I hope you like the show!

Do you like Dr. Who? Have you Thought it even Overer? Questions/comments on this? Have you seen the older ones (I haven’t). Sound off in the comments!