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Aiee. Well, I’ve been thinking through my objections to this episode. Rather a lot. Mainly because I was so very dismayed by how little I enjoyed it, considering how ready I was to love it.
Okay, so: it’s nothing to do with the techy bits, actually - I kinda think that, if I can accept the whole time travel thing, it’d be a bit picky to suddenly find fault with handprint-DNA regenerating thingummys. It’s all magic, isn’t it? How doesn't really matter to me. And I liked the sneaky nasty dalek, the way it ramped up the ‘pity me’ stuff so that Rose would huggle it, and then I loved that it was silent for most of the time - staring down the doctor in the closed-circuit monitor, silently and unfussily setting off the sprinklers and killing everyone without saying a word, without hurrying or ranting or anything. It looked hard as nails, and it didn’t once go into panicky-stupid dalek mode, like daleks occasionally used to. Proper, killing machine stuff, and then the sunbeam bit at the end looked so pretty, and the slimy blob with an eyeball was icky-yet-sympathetic, which can’t exactly be easy to pull off. That's all good. Of course it is.
No, my problem was with the Doctor in this - like, where was he? Because that’s kinda what Dr Who is all about for me. The Doctor. Monsters are always evil and serious and dull, then the Doctor turns up, grins using all his teeth, says ‘fantastic,’ and makes defeating aliens seem like fun. This episode seemed pretty much entirely free of frothy nonsense, it was just deadly serious all the way through. Compare: the most 'Doctorish' moment in WW3 came when, having ramped up the tension and accepted that they're about to fire a missile at Number 10 in order to save the world, he then looks across at Rose... and grins. I'm sorry to all the fans of grim and serious heroes, but I rather like a smiley doctor - it's the way the character can suddenly, unexpectedly flip from Huge Terror to toothy smile that makes him seem alien in a very appealing way. This episode, every time I was waiting for Eccles to do something unexpected, to do something that those other sci-fi heroes wouldn’t have done, he just scowled again and grumped. All the way through. Not a single interesting line. It’s a jolly good job the dalek was almost groovy enough for two.
I dunno. It’s a writerly choice that’s been made, and to judge from this thread, no-one else really minded this stuff. But, for me, having a Doctor that's as grim as his dalek isn't enough, you can't sustain that *one* note for the entire 45 minutes, and it left a massive hole in the middle of this episode where I wanted to be enjoying myself. I kinda think that the doctor should always, always be a)heroic, and b) fun to be around, and he was neither this time. The tone was set straight away with his “I’m getting old...” line, and it stayed pretty much on a level from there. I felt the writer was going all out to make it all significant and portentous, but the “we-are-both-alone-dok-tor” stuff would have worked much better for me if it had been balanced with a Doctor who was capable of moving in unexpected directions. Unexpected, appealing directions, I mean. Torturing a dalek doesn’t count.
Anyway. All of which is, y’know, fair enough. And if you dig around in Who for 5 seconds, you’ll be able to find precedent, it’s probably just my fault that I’m so hung up on Season 16-17 vintage Who. The Tom Baker doctor was far more serious before that particular period, and then he spent most of Season 18 brooding on mortality in a pretty tedious fashion, and the early JNT years could be as po-faced as anything. So serious Dr Who is nothing new.
Having said all that...
This is the way I'm beginning to look at this series: that this is a show produced and written by and featuring long-term fans, long-term contributors to fan culture (RTD, Gatiss, Shearman, Pegg, and doesn’t Paul Cornell write an episode at some point?), all of a certain age, and so possibly all inclined to draw on and try to emulate the vibe of a certain period of the show. ie the Tom Baker, 1970s version.
If you accept that as a premise, I think it’s interesting, the tension in the new series, between the silly-ish episodes and the serious-ish episodes. I mean, 2 out of 6? That could be, like, a mirror of one of the oldest divisions in Dr Who fandom, between fans of Phillip Hinchcliffe-Robert Holmes stuff, and the ones that prefer the Graham Williams-Anthony Read/Douglas Adams stuff, could it not? While it’s true that in this thread the younger posters are finding continuity with McCoy episodes, of which memories may be fresher, I’d still suggest that the Hinchcliffe and the Williams years are *most likely* the two sources that this set of writers is drawing on for their tone, trying to emulate their own formative experiences, and these are the two interpretations of the character that RTD is actually managing to successfully reconcile into the one series. Now, seeing as I rate Destiny Of The Daleks over Genesis.., this week’s ultra-serious episode isn’t really likely be my thing. But - Aliens Of London/WW3 rocked my socks off. So, I guess everyone’s happy, overall.
Sure, I’m stretching. But I don’t think I’m stretching too much to say the writers are trying to update what they think was once good about Dr Who. To then take into account a historical division, that different people want *very* different things from their Dr Who, and rather than saying Talons Of Weng-Chiang (say) is definitely better than Nightmare Of Eden (say), to actually manage to produce something kinda like both, and successfully sit them next to each other, .... well, that’s a rather clever solution.
So, this week's episode left me pretty bored. But I’m glad it’s just me, and that you all *mostly* loved it, and I hope I’ll get something else on my wavelength next or soonish or whenever. In fact, I'm confident of it. Is what I'm saying. |
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