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Warning: this post's all over the bloody place.
Bed Head>
I think it comes back to being a problem with the current format, more than anything else. If it were 45 minutes of one-note (and I don't agree that it was one-note at all, but I'll get back to that) within a 2 hour storyline, you'd hardly notice.
Because they've limited themselves to relatively short stories, though, it makes it almost inevitable that they're going to mis out on the levels of light and shade that more time would offer. I didn't even notice that my "two of six" thing could be broken down into a "downbeat vs jolly" thing, but yeah, you're right. The issue for me is that those other four have been pantomime. When he's not putting on the grin in them, Eccleston's simply going into his telephoned-in, cliched Angry Mode, which I find equally difficult to believe. At least in the two non-RTD episodes there's been a bit more depth to his performance.
One-note? I don't agree at all. Certainly not one-note grumpy. He was shit scared here, not miserable. Could the story have done with more variety? For sure, but again, the writere's only been given 45 minutes to get across just how fucking evil the Daleks are, why they're a menace, what role they play in the backstory and why there's never going to be any redemption for them. It's also the only story so far where we've been given any indication that the Doctor's capable of fear for himself. This is the introduction to the big bad that we're presumably going to be faced with in the end-of-series two-parter. Get that across in 45 minutes and still have him do his special grin? That's got to be a near-impossible task.
You didn't find this series' first real display of anger interesting? Dude, that *was* the "moving in unexpected directions."
Again, series structure. It seems that the plan was to have various elements of the character's personality reveal themselves over the course of the series, rather than give us a bit of everything in every single epsiode. Also, this one appeared to play out in real time - have you never spent forty-five minutes in one mood? Even in the most light-hearted of his storylines Baker would sometimes be asked to do that. None of them has always been appealing - bar two of his personalities, the Doctor's always had a healthy sense of self-preservation bordering on cowardice.
In a way this links back to what Whisky and I were saying about the type of humour in the show earlier on. They just don't have a grip on it. We are tending to get one of two things - a stupid Doctor (who is actually stupid) and a not-stupid Doctor. The best of the previous incarnations - Troughton, Baker T. and Davidson - gave us a Doctor who plainly wasn't stupid but would act a bit daft to try and throw his opponents off. Even if they hardly ever fell for it. "He's not as stupid as he looks." Often, though, Eccleston's *is* as stupid as he looks. Somebody on another board made the observation that in the RTD-scripted episodes he's basically just an older, alien version of The Fast Show's Brilliant Kid.
I have absolutely no problem with Doctor Who giving me the funnies. I'm just not finding the current type of funnies funny, so the epsiodes that don't make pained attempts at laffs are much more appealing.
In giving each individual tale such a short amount of time to play out they're limiting themselves to one tone each week. In doing that, they're ensuring that no one episode is ever going to appeal to the entire audience. As such, I think there's a good chance we could have this sort of discussion after each episode.
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?
Maybe, but I wouldn't call myself a fan of any one type of Who story over any other. As it goes, I've got great love for a lot of the dafter Baker stories - City of Death and that one with the drug smugglers and the crashed interstellar passenger liner - and don't get along particularly well with the more portentous McCoy stuff or the continuity-obsessed Davidson stories. The thing that the writers in a lot of the Tom Baker series were so good at was balancing the two elements. Now we're getting one or the other, but never both together. |
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