In English, Brainiac

At about this time last year, I wrote a mini-essay on the imminent death of Doctor Who. And, aberrations such as Steven Moffatt's "Blink" aside, the series seems content to wander in time and mediocrity. So far this year, we've had a plot about weight loss pills that was anorexic, a so-so Pompeiian runabout, a rather better but thematically hackneyed slaves in space affair (although some rather nice direction did a lot to raise it above the competent), and last week, Doctor Who and the Narrative Autopilot. Just thinking about it is tedious, so I won't.

Instead, let's consider television for grown-ups. Ah, a new series of House is here. I say new – I’ve actually already seen three episodes as part of the in-flight entertainment on the Continental flight I mentioned a few weeks ago. Without wishing to reinforce lazy gender stereotypes (although clearly here, I do), why do Continental’s film choices have to be so obviously, well, gendered? On the flight out, the choices were Bookclub Romantic Comedy Slush and Childcare Romantic Comedy Slush, while on the way back the options were Boom Boom Smashy Bang and Witless Sports Knockabout. Do they think the US is gradually filling up with the ladies (in Houston?), while antler-locking males are hotfootin’ it to Gatwick? At least someone had the sense to rack up a few episodes of what is one of the few dramas worth watching at the moment, and which also makes it truly laughable that Torchwood is supposed to be for adults. True, the plots are often silly (she had a koala mite in her ear all the time!), but the scripts should make Russell T. Davies weep with sheer inadequacy. After all, you need to be more than competent to make the cantankerous genius model of narrative work nowadays, but House does it.

Channel Five have their mitts on it at the moment, having shaken their sharks and Nazis phase (tonite – when shazis attack), and at the beginning of the year were promoting it with Numbers (sorry, Numb3rs. You know, like Se7en or all ‘Genuine Vi4gra’) as ‘clever television.’ The idea is that both centre around intellectual heroes (and remember, in the world of television the monarch of public intellectuals is Carol Vorderman), but that’s really as far as the similarities go. A telling distinction is that while House refuses to feature a regular character whose function is to scratch his (always his) head and say “In English, brainiac,” Numb3rs is crammed full of expositionary dialogue in which the Byronic genius outlines a vaguely relevant mathematical theory, before using it as an excuse to draw a circle right in the middle of the map the FBI types were all looking at. Of course, genuinely mathematics related-crimes are few and far between, leading the writers to rely on two annoying tropes. The first is the opening sequence's banal speech that "We use math every day..." Maybe, but only in the same sense that we use physics, linguistics, biochemistry, cultural studies - in fact, pretty much anything you like - every day, and they don't get their own glossy cop show. The second is the amazingly flexible definition of mathematics, primarily in the fact that one week our hero will be working with imaginary numbers, the next with turbulent flow, which makes as much sense as J. Hillis Miller, P. I being about Dickens one week and Piers Plowman the next.

There are also consequences for narrative. It seems that mathematics and detective fiction should naturally go together; there are tempting connections to be made between investigative paradigms, the solving of problems. In practice, however, the marriage is often a misjudgement of Liza Minelli proportions. The mathematician narrator of John Dickson Carr's The Hollow Man never really shows us his analytic stuff; Guillermo Martinez's The Oxford Murders is fairly dire (and, christ on a pedalo, they've made it into a film), offering us a supposed mathematical genius who is stumped by a child's puzzle and, bizarrely, no real reason for why this mayhem should be happening in Oxford and not, say, Nuneaton. The good news is that the novel is full of ciphers; the bad news, they're the main characters. Ultimately, this all comes down to the fact that while maths and detection look good together, behind closed doors they have marital arguments of, well, Liza Minelli proportions. Modern crime fiction insists on focusing on the psychology of crime, its individuality. Critics of the genre are rapidly growing tired of all the Foucauldian disciplinary pessimism and returning to the genre's embrace of the romanticist troubled soul as the root of criminal mystery. This isn't to reinstate some tired argument that science doesn't capture the mysteries of human consciousness, just to say that crime fiction and determinism don't get along, because if criminals turn out to be so predictable, then pursuing them is simply dull. And this is where Numb3rs is behind the game; whenever Charlie suddenly realises that the criminal's movements can be determined and - the real kicker - predicted, as if the psycho were a variable rather than an actual person, then it's time to turn off. Who needs psychology or depth of character when you have graph paper?