Well that was a big pile of fucking terrible. Obviously some of you out there don't agree. You're strange and wrong, of course. What am I talking about? Doctor Who, of course. That little BBC show that was off the air for about fifteen years and was brought back in 2005, to much fan fare and fandom creaming. Really, about nine years down the line the shine's tarnished a bit. And by 'a bit' I mean its now about as shiny as a tennis ball. So it goes without saying I feel the need to go on a spoiler-ridden rant about it.
Seriously. SPOILERS, morons. If you don't want anything given away because you haven't caught up don't read on. Although, I don't think anyone who is interested in Doctor Who will be behind that much. You never can tell.
I'll admit I was one of the many people who got very excited when it was announced Doctor Who was going to return. I watched it as a kid. From what I learned more recently I was the only one in my household who enjoyed it. How's that for making you feel shit? Makes me feel like I was some kind of pre-pubescent dictator of the television. That just sounds hilarious when thrown out into the ether.
So, the excitement in the year or so before Russell T. Davies brought Doctor Who back to the screen was quite palpable*. Christopher Eccleston was a good choice. An actor with gravitas and the ability to play it light. And ears, such magnificent ears. My enthusiasm lasted through that first series. Even then, there were concerns.
I mean the format for Doctor Who was always multi-part stories, told in half-hour chunks. Davies came back and changed the format to stand alone forty-five minute stories. It wasn't too terrible, for a while, but we'll come to that.
Then there was Rose Tyler. In the first of this new series, the preoccupation with the companion was quite refreshing. Rose Tyler wasn't a terrible character, and I was surprised how good an actress Billie Piper is, being more accustomed to her previous incarnation as teeny pop performer. Now I see that's when the rot started to set in. Russell T. Davies ran with this and Steven Moffat's taken that cue and gone further with it. The companion being either a fawning cypher or unreasonably stubborn. Whatever the companion, they shoved in one of my pet hates about modern storytelling: the pathological need to have a romantic subplot. It's not the pinnacle of story, most of the time it's as interesting as overhearing a loud teenager's phone call. Now we're here, on the cusp of the abyss**.
The latest series of Doctor Who has been a dismal affair. It's not just the preoccupation with the companion, in this case the empty vessel that's Clara Oswald, but let's dwell on it a moment. In a show that's ostensibly a fantasy/science fiction premise, it felt like a lot of time was lavished on the life of Clara Oswald. It's happened since Rose Tyler, through What's-Her-Name† and Amy Pond. These last series it's been turned up a couple of notches. To the point it felt like a standard drama with some sci-fi spotted through. Not even interesting drama. The most mundane and boring stuff they could dredge up:
"What's for tea tonight?"
"Chips."
"Oh, okay...Oh look. The Doctor."
Wouldn't have been so bad if the sci-fi stuff counterpointing it was at all interesting, but it was like a shot of beige thrown into a wall of grey.
It doesn't help that Steven Moffat can't seem to write women. This post here details his many crimes against women characters. Clara Oswald was a dull character who was supposed to have strong traits, but never managed to show them. She could have been played by a washcloth on a stick with 'Clara Oswald: Strong Female' stitched on it‡. In the last episode of the latest series The Mistress describes her as a 'control freak'. What? I never got that. You can't just say that without having the character display it. She was deceitful and wilful when she wasn't being a compliant puppet, but control freak? And her wilfulness was always used in the most stupid way, in order to advance a plot that was in danger of plunging down a hole and managed to find another one. Not that plot holes worry Steven Moffat much...
...Because, as Cracked observed, Doctor Who currently lives in a fucking plot hole. And fuck does it. I couldn't even tell you what the last few episodes were about, they were such a mess. I have been chided in the past about my stories lacking internal logic. You know, that thing where, no matter how nonsensical something is in a story, it makes sense in context. Sapphire and Steel was great at it. Most people couldn't follow what the fuck was going on, but there was a sense of some underlying logic that you just didn't understand. Current Doctor Who tosses that out the window BECAUSE SOMETHING FUCKING COOL IS HAPPENING! That only works in small doses, when entire episodes are full of contradictions it gets tiresome. It feels like the writers have been throwing things on a page and hoping they miraculously come together. That only works with stir fries.
I could even forgive the twisted mess the stories have been if they had been interesting, but they have completely lacked any kind of excitement. You can see they want to be, like the kid who's wearing the glasses and drawn-on scar, really wants to be Harry Potter, but doesn't quite do it. Russell T. Davies wasn't great at this kind of narrative excitement, but he did manage it, possibly by pure chance, in all the arm-flailing and scurrying around. These recent episodes have been plodding affairs desperately pointing at the screen and shouting, "See! Excitement!" while pointing at a tree. The stakes never felt that high.
The stakes should have felt high, since the reboot, the series has been running on series-wide arcs. These in themselves aren't a problem, but it's the need for a new story every week that's ground down the poor show. It's the same problem that dogs American television, with its obsession for twenty-two and -four episode series. It gets tired. There's only so much that can be mined out of a premise. Before for Doctor Who, that took almost thirty years, with the previous longer-form, multi-part stories, but it's been accelerated this time with so many stories being thrown at us in a series.
And the cardinal problem, for me, is that in a show called Doctor Who, we haven't seen that much of the Doctor. Whether that's actually the case, I don't know, I'm sure some pedant will show me a spreadsheet showing, empirically, the Doctor was in the show the most. The problem is, stories don't run on empirical evidence, they run on feelings and if you leave viewers feeling like the eponymous character hasn't been seen enough, you've done something tragically wrong. Yes, they pulled it off in Blake's Seven, but there was actually a valid narrative reason: Blake was dead. What's Doctor Who's excuse? Steven Moffat wants to concentrate on Clara and Danny going down to Asda? We really need to know how many times a week they see each other? Come on, that's not drama, that's a desperate bid to make people turn off the television.
For me, after discussing it with my wife, it comes down to a basic problem: Doctor Who is a pure nostalgia-fest. People who watched the original run, like yours truly, and loved it. We are hoping for a snippet of that feeling, but for me at least, it's not coming. I've tuned in week after week only to be disappointed and bored again. Yes, there have been good things, but they're bogged down and buried by the utter shit. Don't trot out that tired, "it's a kid's show" bit, because that's no excuse for shitty writing. Doctor Who is tired now and I suspect a proportion of people tune in hoping it improves, only to be disappointed, their little forty-five minutes of sadness on a Saturday night for a few weeks. This could be the only thing keeping it afloat.
After the Christmas episode, I'm out, and I'll probably cringe my way through that. I can't handle the disappointment any more. I can't handle the fucking terrible stories, either. The final episode of the recent series was an exercise in not creating tension. It was remarkable that scenes with a plane besieged by Cybermen could be so boring. It was so bad I can't even come up with an amusing simile that encapsulates tedium. But Michelle Gomez was fucking amazing.
There are some things that can be done to improve it: for a start, give us the Doctor, doing things, being mad, solving problems like a fucking beast. He's smart and he's resourceful, but that hasn't come across well recently, because he's been mostly absent. Ditch the cult of the companion, it's the worst while giving us an interesting companion, even go so far as a non-human or non-contemporary human. Think through what's happening in the story more, dude. Pulpish madness only works when there's a baseline somewhere, without that, doesn't matter how mental that baseline is, the viewers are floating around with a nothing plot. I'd even plump for longer story arcs, two or three episodes to tell a story and let it breath more – the, "woo! thrown into the plot" thing makes me weary.
None of the above will happen, mind you. Too many people are vocal in their love of Doctor Who, but for me it's lost its appeal. It's a bit sad, but I'll be off watching things that are fun, instead of hoping for another episode of Doctor Who to end.
* I may have jumped up and down clapping at one point. It's out there, deal with it.
** Hyperbolic? Me? I resent your unspoken implication and challenge you to a duel. That I won't turn up to and call you a prick for going.
† Yeah, I skipped the series with Catherine Tate, because I found her comedy vapid and unfunny, I couldn't imagine watching her as a companion. I might have been wrong in my assessment, but that's where we are.
‡ Before anyone starts shouting at me for some misogynistic slight, Danny Pink could have been played by another washcloth on a stick with 'Danny Pink: Man'.
Will
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