Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead, by Dale Smith

The 2009 Hugos were the only year of the seven from 2006 to 2012 where a Doctor Who episode failed to win, comprehensively thrashed by Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, though with Turn Left coming third. (Sorry that the final ballot stats on the right are cramped, but you can click to embiggen.)

When I first write about this TV story in 2009, I said:

Unlike a lot of people I wasn’t overwhelmed by Silence in the Library / Forest of the Dead. On re-watching, I enjoyed it more, but still feel it is weaker than Moffat’s previous New Who stories. Perhaps I am being unfair, and I guess that expecting another Blink is not reasonable. I must admit that as sf, its concept works very well – the intersecting levels of reality, the time-traveller who meets a lover from his own future; and as drama it is pretty effective, with Alex Kingston and Catherine Tate particularly strong, and the utterly horrible creepiness of the ghosting data chips (“Who turned out the lights?”, etc).

My two problems with it are both to do with River Song’s story. To get the easier one out of the way, her ending is not a particularly happy one; she is still dead, and gets to spend an ersatz afterlife in the computer’s memory with her crew rather than with the man she loves. (If you work or have ever worked in a team with other people, just consider for a moment whether you would prefer to spend eternity with them or with your lover.) The script didn’t quite do justice to the tragedy of River’s story for me.

My other problem is that while the story works as sf and (apart from the above niggle) as drama I’m not so sure it works as Doctor Who. Back in 2006 I enjoyed The Girl in the Fireplace, but rated it below School Reunion, because one of my sources of enjoyment in Who is its dealing with its own mythology, and another is the relationship that we as viewers build up with the regular characters, and TGitF did not deliver much on the second and nothing on the first of these. Now, where at least TGitF had a decent start and closure to the Doctor’s love story, with Renette’s death ending their relationship, SitL/FotD cheats us because we are asked to care very deeply about the Doctor/River dynamic, without getting the payoff of it becoming a regular plot theme. (No televised return to explore River’s past relationship with the Doctor seems likely now, and anyway it would hardly get satisfactory treatment in the time we have left.) So while this episode may well get strong support from Hugo voters who are not regular Who watchers, I was and am surprised by the favour it has found among fans.

It’s rare that I come back to a review and admit that I was completely wrong, but as it turned out, I was completely wrong. River Song went on to be a fixture of the Eleventh Doctor’s era, her origins were a major plot line for Series 6, and she has made the occasional appearance since then (plus a well-received set of Big Finish spinoff audio plays). Looked at now, the story is a clever pitch-rolling for the future arc of the show. An important data point is that it was written precisely at the moment that Stephen Moffat was deciding whether or not to be the new show-runner.

And I mentioned it in my first paragraph, but did not give enough credit to the story’s success as drama. The ghosting data chips are truly horrible and awful and compelling, and Donna’s alternative history rather moving (capped with Lee’s inability to get her attention at the last moment). Midnight is still my favourite episode of a good season, but Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead succeeds better than I allowed at the time.

Dale Smith’s Black Archive on the story ranges far and wide across Stephen Moffat’s œuvre, not only in Doctor Who but in Press Gang, Coupling, etc, to explore where the themes of the story come from. The first chapter, “An Irrational Fear of the Dark”, considers Moffat’s vision for Doctor Who as fairy tale, not at all in a negative way.

The second chapter, “Please Tell Me You Know Who I Am”, looks at the origin and subsequent life of River Song, and at Moffat’s attitude to time-travel and continuity.

The third chapter, “Nothing More Than Virtual Reality”, looks at the philosophical and biological basis of identity, and death. Its second paragraph is:

The idea that real life is a simulation is one with a long history, from 1 Corinthians 13:123, via Descartes’ evil demon4, to the more SF idea of the brain in a vat, fed false images of the world it is living in5, like Morbius if Solon had been of a more philosophical bent. It’s an extension of any number of conspiracy theories that provide comfort by putting somebody secretly in charge of the apparently arbitrary randomness and cruelty of real life, only better because it is unprovable: whoever runs the simulation has complete control over our ability to perceive that we are simulations, and so anything that might seem to disprove the idea can simply be re-assimilated as proof of the opposite. It is the perfect teapot in space6, an idea maintained by faith alone and with so little impact on day-to-day life as to be completely useless. But in Silence / Forest, it is uncomplicatedly positive: a chance to cheat death and live for as long as there is a Lux family willing to ensure the real-world hardware doesn’t go down.
3  ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly’, The Bible, King James translation.
4  Descartes, René, ‘Meditations on First Philosophy’.
5  Putnam, Hilary, ‘Reason, Truth and History’.
6  Russell, Bertrand, ‘Is There a God? [1952]’, In Slater, John G. (ed.), The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell, Vol. 11, pp 542-548.

The fourth chapter, “It Can’t Be the Books, Can It?” looks at books and archives, with a diversion into classification systems, and the power of the written word.

The fifth, final, and longest chapter, “Brilliant and Unloved”, looks at how Stephen Moffat writes women, how he writes men’s relationships with women, and how this all adds up to the writing of River Song.

This is an unusual Black Archive in that it ranges far beyond the story in question to look at the work of the story’s writer. But Stephen Moffat is one of the two most significant writers of New Who (I’ll not choose here between him and RTD as to who is #1 and who is #2), and so it’s definitely worth the excursion into the bigger picture. It does mean that the book isn’t as much about the actual story in question as most of the Black Archives are, but there is no harm in variety. You can get it here.

The Black Archives
1st Doctor: The Edge of Destruction (67) | Marco Polo (18) | The Aztecs (71) | The Myth Makers (65) | The Dalek Invasion of Earth (30) | The Romans (32) | The Massacre (2)
2nd Doctor: The Underwater Menace (40) | The Evil of the Daleks (11) | The Mind Robber (7)
3rd Doctor: Doctor Who and the Silurians (39) | The Ambassadors of Death (3) | The Dæmons (26) | Carnival of Monsters (16) | The Time Warrior (24) | Invasion of the Dinosaurs (55)
4th Doctor: Pyramids of Mars (12) | The Hand of Fear (53) | The Deadly Assassin (45) | The Face of Evil (27) | The Robots of Death (43) | Talons of Weng-Chiang (58) | Horror of Fang Rock (33) | Image of the Fendahl (5) | The Sun Makers (60) | The Stones of Blood (47) | Full Circle (15) | Warriors’ Gate (31)
5th Doctor: Kinda (62) | Black Orchid (8) | Earthshock (51) | The Awakening (46)
6th Doctor: Vengeance on Varos (41) | Timelash (35) | The Ultimate Foe (14)
7th Doctor: Paradise Towers (61) | The Happiness Patrol (68) | The Greatest Show in the Galaxy (66) | Battlefield (34) | The Curse of Fenric (23) | Ghost Light (6)
8th Doctor: The Movie (25) | The Night of the Doctor (49)
Other Doctor: Scream of the Shalka (10)
9th Doctor: Rose (1) | Dalek (54)
10th Doctor: The Impossible Planet / The Satan Pit (17) | Love & Monsters (28) | Human Nature / The Family of Blood (13) | The Sound of Drums / Last of the Time Lords (38) | Silence in the Library / The Forest of the Dead (72) | Midnight (69)
11th Doctor: The Eleventh Hour (19) | Vincent and the Doctor (57) | The Pandorica Opens / The Big Bang (44) | The Impossible Astronaut / Day of the Moon (29) | The God Complex (9) | The Rings of Akhaten (42) | Day of the Doctor (50)
12th Doctor: Listen (36) | Kill the Moon (59) | Under the Lake / Before the Flood (73) | The Girl Who Died (64) | Dark Water / Death in Heaven (4) | Face the Raven (20) | Heaven Sent (21) | Hell Bent (22)
13th Doctor: Arachnids in the UK (48) | Kerblam! (37) | The Battle of Ranskoor av Kolos (52) | The Haunting of Villa Diodati (56) | Ascension of the Cybermen / The Timeless Children (70) | Flux (63)