Four episodes and three days of storytime in, and I think I’m warming to John From Cincinnati. It remains a low-key, unflashy, methodical affair; although the fantastic events surrounding John are driving the story, they never dominate it, and the style throughout is determinedly naturalistic. Episode four is the day after Shaun Yost got his neck broken by a bad wave, then ended up walking out of hospital a few hours later without a scratch on him. The press, of course, got wind of the story, and staked out the Yost homestead; meanwhile, John told Kai to “see God”, which resulted in a grainy vision sequence that strongly implied that John has a kind of omniscience. Today, the papers are running “Miracle Boy” headlines, Dr. Smith (who treated Shaun) has resigned to save his hospital a wrongful diagnosis lawsuit, but is convinced there’s something more going on, Mitch Yost (sent into a philosophical tailspin by the combined effect of Shaun’s accident and recovery, and his own floating) has shacked up with Cass, Kai is wondering what John did to her, and John himself has been picked up by some Mexican gangsters. They stab him and leave him for dead a few minutes into the episode.

John is in some ways the best thing about John From Cincinnati, despite having almost no identity or agency of his own. He’s not even on-screen that much, but whenever he is there’s a dissonance about his presence, like he’s wandered in from the wrong story. This despite the fact that there’s nothing overtly magical or spiritual about him, and in fact (religious overtones notwithstanding) he acts more like an alien than an angel (although there’s no reason why an angel shouldn’t be treated as an alien). Alternatively, he behaves almost exactly like Alice, or some other algorithm imperfectly imitating humanity. His dialogue consists entirely of (a) phrases he’s heard other people use or variations thereon (“I’ve got my eye on you!”), (b) things he’s been told to say, often imperfectly (“I don’t know Butchie instead”), and (c) cliches and platitudes (“Tomorrow is another day”). He doesn’t appear to have caused any miracles through conscious intent, and it’s not even clear whether he could: he doesn’t seem to be able to heal his own stab wounds, for example, although he can enable other people to heal him.

It’s at times frustrating that none of the characters seem to be trying very hard to find out anything about John. Every so often, someone will ask him what he means, get a typically cryptic answer, and let the issue drop. To be fair, however, this is because they have their own issues to attend to, many of which have been caused directly or indirectly by John’s presence: and, satisfyingly, John is not a show that wastes much time on characters denying or ignoring or panicking about experiencing a miracle. Instead, almost without exception, they trust their senses, and try to integrate what they’ve experienced into their self-image and their understanding of the world. Mitch is wondering what his floating means, Kai is trying to decode her vision, Dr Smith is investigating Shaun, Butchie is getting suspicious about the fact that he’s gone three days without drugs but isn’t going through withdrawal. All those are eventually paths that will lead back to John, if the press don’t get there first, which means the characters will get around to asking the interesting questions, even if I doubt whether they’ll get any clear-cut answers. Or as John might put it: some things we’ll know, and some things we won’t.

The trouble with having a Doctor Who finale that was less than stellar is that then you get pieces like this one in the Telegraph, which assume it represents the show’s best and reacts accordingly.

And indeed the show did transport me to another place. At the critical point, possibly where the Master was attempting to establish a new Gallifrey at the heart of a billion-year inter-galactic empire, or where the Doctor was interrupting the Archangel network’s telepathic signal by aligning his black-hole converter, I drifted off to the land of nod, dozing happily on the sofa as a load of old cosmic screwdrivers washed over me.

No, wait: the trouble is that these pieces extrapolate from one datapoint to a sweeping conclusion. Jim White, author of the article, seems unfamiliar with the concept of “science fiction” (cf Gareth McLean’s Guardian piece last week), and places Who in the same box as fantasy (though you could argue that’s really where it belongs), a box not to his taste:

But then, had Davies been in possession of the annual expenditure of the Ministry of Defence and had his denouement featured a set the size of Torquay and enough pyrotechnics to match the Northern Lights, plus a script written by Tom Stoppard in collaboration with the team behind The Simpsons, I still wouldn’t have been much moved. […] For some people such a confession is the cultural equivalent of heresy. But the fact is, you either get fantasy or you don’t. It either sets your imagination soaring or leaves you earthbound. There is no such thing as someone who quite likes The Lord of the Rings, or thinks His Dark Materials is all right to pass the time of day. With fantasy, you either take it, fully formed and in its entirety, or leave it, and get on with your life unencumbered by Orcs and cosmic dust.

You know, I’m pretty sure (a) there are plenty of people lukewarm about The Lord of the Rings and His Dark Materials, and (b) that liking one fantasy doesn’t oblige you to like all other fantasy. Of course, given White’s parting shot —

There is, though, one easy shorthand for working out where someone stands across the fantasy gap: if she is a woman, she can generally manage without it. Which is maybe what was happening as I snoozed through the Doctor: I was being put in touch with my feminine side.

— it’s hard not to conclude that his generalisations about taste are, shall we say, a load of Torchwood.

1. Martha. Iain credited me with calling Martha’s leaving, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch, since I didn’t guess either the circumstances or the reason, and I’m pretty sure I was wrong about what the follow-up will be, too. Despite that, it worked for me. I particularly liked (a) that it wasn’t due to any one factor — it wasn’t “because I spent four years training to be a doctor”, it wasn’t “because I have to look after my family”, it wasn’t “because I need to get out”, it was all of the above; and (b) that she has enough sense of her own value to be able to tell the Doctor all those reasons, to his face, in so many words. I originally thought that this turn of events would be followed by the Doctor realising what he’s lost, but now I’m not sure that’s the case; I think he does realise what he’s lost, but also on some level realises what he did to Martha and realises that there’s no way he can invite her back permanently. Essentially, Martha’s arc was that she fell down, emotionally, and spent the season getting back up again; in fact my one reservation is that in retrospect, it looks like they decided the Doctor was going to have this kind of rebound, and then came up with a companion who could plausibly leave without collapsing in on herself — who had enough to go back to. Which would explain why the aspects of her character that enabled that choice — her presence of mind, self-awareness, self-reliance — never seemed to be in the foreground; Martha as means to an end, rather than as a character in her own right. Still, I’m sure that phone will ring at some point and that we’ll see her again.

2. … and then there was the rest of the episode. Somewhat bizarrely, I find myself in the position of liking the finale more than almost anyone else I’ve spoken to or seen a writeup from. Martha got to be awesome (I don’t think the Doctor telling her what to do diminishes her awesomenosity; she still had to go out and do it), within the limitations of the budget the dystopian Earth was quite claustrophobic and dark (some good dialogue helped with that), the Toclaphane being the humans from “Utopia” was perfect, and I didn’t even mind Incredibly Aged Doctor. Floating Telepathic Jesus Doctor, on the other hand … well, even in concept it’s ridiculous, not least because two literal gods out of three season finales just looks lazy, and the execution only made things worse. And, of course, the total bollocks overdrive was only just getting going: suddenly, the paradox machine that could blow up the solar system if you tampered with it can be taken out by a machine gun. I could, perhaps, even forgive that reset if it wasn’t for the fact that everyone who remembers what happened has been shuffled off-screen (except the Doctor, of course, but I doubt he’s going to be dwelling on it much).

3. In spite of this, I find myself looking favourably on season three as a whole. For the first time, I’ve found myself watching out of interest and enjoyment, rather than out of some peverse desire to be able to call my Who-loving friends wrongheads from an informed position. “Smith and Jones” was a good start; the next four episodes (“The Shakespeare Code” through “Evolution of the Daleks”) were mediocre to dire; the next two (“The Lazarus Experiment” and “42”) were competent, entertaining runarounds and the run from “Human Nature” to the end of the season was, until the final fumble, either good or very good. Actually, I’m inclined to go so far as to say that “The Last of the Time Lords”, flawed as it is, was the best season finale Who has managed since it came back; if nothing else, it’s moved the Doctor on to a new and interesting place, since I can easily imagine a season 4 without a permanent companion — a few episodes with Martha, a few with Jack, perhaps someone else towards the end of the season, but essentially a season with the Doctor alone, perhaps undergoing some self-examination, perhaps trying to overcompensate for his alone-ness with some vast, hubristic scheme, such as bringing the time lords. And if nothing else, there’ll be another Steven Moffatt two-parter.

Well, TV science fiction, that is. According to the Guardian, that is.

This is science fiction for the 21st century. What’s more, it’s sci-fi about the 21st century. Fans of the genre have long known that quality sci-fi and its sister genre fantasy hold up a mirror to the times in which they were created, but never before have the TV shows involved seemed so resonant or indeed so influential. Science fiction has never been more now, fantasy never more real.

Discuss. My thoughts:

1. I always considered the ’90s to be something of a golden age, personally — Babylon 5, Twin Peaks, The X-Files, Deep Space Nine, Buffy, Angel, Farscape, plenty of others — and have felt we’ve been in the doldrums somewhat for the past five years.

2. Still, it’s true that Lost and Doctor Who have spawned a new wave of US and UK sf shows. Unfortunately, to date most of them have been rubbish. We’ll see if this autumn’s crop is any different.

3. I would object to the assertion that “the event that has made sci-fi and fantasy palatable, and indeed positively appealing, to a mainstream audience is 9/11”, except that I have this horrible feeling it’s a little bit true, at least for the types of sf the article focuses on.

4. The article concludes, “Why gaze at navels when you can gaze at the stars?” But is there really anything that goes after that sense of wonder? Doctor Who may aspire to it occasionally, but the current incarnation is primarily Earthbound. The end of time was notably uninspiring. Meanwhile, Battlestar Galactica is arguably a perfect example of a show set among the stars that chooses to gaze at its navel. The new shows seem to be following the same paths. There’s nothing as expansive as Farscape, or even the best of Trek.

5. And of course, as MKS points out, it is a discussion utterly divorced from written sf. But that’s pretty much par for the course.

6. That said, ITV is planning “Lost in Austen, in which a woman finds a gateway to the Regency era in her bathroom.” Cheap attempt at crossover cash-in, or inspired concept based on knowing full well that Jane Austen is incredibly popular among sf fans? You decide!

(Again, the Doctor Who episode.)

Three thoughts:

1. I still can’t decide how much I like John Simm’s Master. On the one hand, he’s often very funny (the double-thumbs up during the gassing, “Ooh, you public menace!”, “Oh all right — it’s me!”), on the other hand he’s utterly unthreatening. Someone, in a comment I now can’t place, said that they thought we were meant to view the Master’s insanity as on some level tragic. That makes a lot of sense, not least because in principle it makes the Doctor’s conviction that he’s going to save the Master, not kill him, more powerful. But as acted in the episode, there’s nobody there for the Doctor to save; Simm is just an evil cartoon. I think part of the problem is that Simm’s Master is so clearly Evil Tennant, with all the flightiness that implies; I think one character needed some weight to ground the serious exchanges the characters have, like that telephone call. (Can you imagine what Christopher Eccleston and Derek Jacobi would have done with that exchange?)

2. I’m finding Doctor Who‘s treatment of its present-day timeline increasingly fascinating — specifically, the fact that it is now so radically different to our own timeline. It’s still set now, but it’s got alien invasions and giant flying airbases and all sorts, and the extravagance doesn’t quite seem to square with the show’s reticence to go to other planets. One of my favourite scenes from the new show’s run is the end of “The End of the World”, when the Doctor and Rose step from the death of the sun to the utter normality of a crowded London street. I don’t think that scene would work any more, because there is no normal for the show to return to. I mean, as of “The Sound of Drums”, Earth has just had a tenth of its population massacred, and unless “paradox machine” is code for “big reset button” (which I’m not ruling out; when Martha teleported at the end of the episode, I was actually surprised that she was still in the present, rather than having jumped back to a point at which she could change events), that’s got to have serious knock-on consequences for future episodes.

3. Last week I hazarded a guess that Martha was being set up to do something that would force the Doctor to notice her, setting up a more equal partnership for season 4. I still think that’s more-or-less where they’re going, although Martha has been forced into a situation where she has to act, rather than (as I would have preferred) seizing a moment. But now I’m wondering what the set-up for the Christmas special is going to be. The previous two specials have been transitional: the first dealt with the Doctor’s regeneration, the second with his post-Rose trauma. But we’re not expecting either Tennant or Agyeman to leave the series in the next episode, which suggests a more straightforward standalone episode. However: assuming they don’t do a big reset on the timeline, what if, given (a) the evident devastation on Earth and (b) Martha’s gradual facing-up to the fact that the Doctor has absolutely no interest in her — what if Martha decides to stay behind and help out, rather than continue travelling? Thus setting up a Christmas episode in which the Doctor, realising what he’s lost, has to win back her friendship? I think I’d like that.