The Day of the Clown

TARDIS Coordinates: October 6, 2008

It may seem a little weird that a woman who could tell Davros to stuff it would be afraid of clowns. I like ’em, myself, having been taken to a circus at a young age and being more interested in the clowns than, say, the elephants. However, I also know that phobias know no rationality; they’re a physical reaction at their core, a glitch in the natural, instinctive fight-or-flight reflex.

Doctor Who HAS dabbled in evil clowns before; witness “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” and Clara the Clown from “The Celestial Toymaker,” the harlequin in “Black Orchid” and the more recent Torchwood episode “From Out of the Rain.” The idea that there’s something sinister under the motley isn’t new. And as much fun as I have watching clowns at play, they can be said to reside somewhere in the uncanny valley, and that it doesn’t take much of a tweak to put something horrible in the greasepaint and screw up all the signals. The clown is, after all, the mask, half-concealing half-disclosing the intention of whoever is wearing it, and concealment is a tricky thing to play with.

The monster in this, Mr. Spellman/Odd Bob, actually turns out to be the Pied Piper of legend, himself a sort of evil clown who led the children astray. This serial isn’t so much the flipside of “From Out of the Rain” as a funhouse mirror reflection of it, brooding on the nature of the things we create to entertain us, and the idea that phantoms might hide within those entertainments to take advantage of our lowering our guard. (All eyes turn toward “The Wire” from “The Idiot’s Lantern.”) Lots of fantasy television, from “The Twilight Zone” to “Angel,” has questioned the morality of its own medium.

Years ago, I saw my young niece watching the Macy’s Parade in a state of complete rapture – eyes wide, mouth open, muscles slack, and if I had no knowledge of television and someone told me that the magic box was stealing her soul, I would have found a brick on the spot and let the evil spirits out. The warning is implicit: I am television, I am entertaining you, but there’s more to life than being entertained – there’s getting out there and being and doing and thinking for yourself. If you live your life being entertained, it’s not your life.

“Day of the Clown” introduces Rani Chandra, and it’s striking that at no moment does she come across merely as Maria’s replacement. She’s more active and participatory, meaning she’s got the longest, shrewdest nose on Bannerman Road and it takes about a minute and a half for the scales to fall from her eyes and her discovery of what the neighbors are up to. Where Maria just sort of fell into it, Rani sought it out, so the best bet was to make her part of the team and hope she could be trusted.

To be honest, I’m equally intrigued with her father Haresh, especially given his initial introduction and how at-odds it was with the rest of his character. He seems comfortable enough as the school’s resident dictator, laying down the rules like the warden at Shawshank and then coming home and being immediately undercut by his family, much to Clyde’s bemusement. Watching Clyde strip bare Haresh’s preconceived notions about him was telling for someone who billed himself as relentless and inflexible.