alexandraerin

It was draggy during the middle, there were some definite Moffat-isms, but overall I liked it. I find his preference that things be "mythic" makes for more appealing stories than RTD's directive that things be "epic".

I'm not going to do a point by point review of it, but I am going to talk about one aspect of it, and include one surmise and my reasoning behind it behind the cut.

( Read more... )

So, my Informal Internet Straw Poll (i.e., me looking at my flists) tells me that a number of people who hated "Let's Kill Hitler" loved "Night Terrors". It's pretty easy to see why. I have more nice things to say about LKH than most people seem to, but its flaws are pretty gaping, and "Night Terrors" is... well, Mark Gatiss can write, but this is a great episode even for him.

I think one of the reasons I have enjoyed the current series of Doctor Who more than many of my peers seem to is because I take it to heart that I am watching a generally shoddy show, made out of fishing wire and duct tape and held together by a sonic screwdriver and wishing really hard.

I see the same basic sentiment being thrown around multiple places: "Just because it's a kids/family show doesn't mean we shouldn't demand some level of narrative coherence/quality from it.", and I don't disagree that an all-ages show can deliver that... I'm just not sure how it's relevant to this show, where the narrative is propped up and patched up using the same sort of spackle that props up the special effects, the science, and the history.

And it's always been like that. It takes a serious level of nostalgia filter to pretend otherwise. There was some great writing in Classic Who (they couldn't help it, they had some great writers) but there is some great writing in the current series. The best description for the overall quality is "wibbly-wobbly", both because it's pretty uneven and because it tends to rely on the same handwavy/don't-question-just-nod stuff that the fake science does.

And this is no astonishing coincidence because the fake science is being written by the same people as the narrative, with the same goals: to move the story forward to a predetermined point, to sound plausible or agreeable enough to keep the audience there, and to look/sound cool.

Nobody's trying to write Shakespeare, folks.

Although I'm not sure why Shakespeare would be the go-to example for narrative coherence, rather than being the example for clever one-liners and witty banter and throwing in cool shit to keep the audience interested... okay, maybe they are writing Shakespeare.

Gareth Roberts certainly did so.

But I digress*. The point is that the most despised episodes have some great writing in them. And the best-loved episodes depend on narrative leaps and willing suspension of disbelief, not so much of the "Let's pretend phone box time travel is real." variety but of the "Let's overlook the plotholes because the Doctor ran and shouted some stuff."

(Classic Who tended to rely more on staid declamation than New Who does, but the principle was the same.)

Maybe some of the complaints about narrative coherence are being made from a standpoint of maturing sensibilities... i.e., people who realize that it's always been this way but who think it could/should be better... but a lot of it reminds me of the phenomenon of Simpsons viewers who only really notice the "where Springfield really is" running jokes for the first time in some later-day episode and then fixate on the point where they noticed it as if it's particularly significant, believing they've unraveled the mystery.

I don't think it's random where people notice the "narrative fail" for the first time. For some people it was tied to the departure of a favored actor. The show only works as long as we're willing to make it work, after all, and if you loved Ten/nant, that's half the job done. For some people it's tied to episodes that disappoint in other ways. It doesn't change my opinion of the show, but I'm certainly more aware of the narrative problems in episodes that are something of a let-down to me.

(Notably "Day of the Moon" and "Let's Kill Hitler"... "Curse of the Black Spot" being a rare example of an episode I otherwise loved where the narrative problems were so prominent that I couldn't help downgrading the episode over them.)

My point here isn't that we shouldn't critique the narrative. I do have a part 2 post of my review of "Let's Kill Hitler" focusing on some of the problems inherent in the character of Mels and her use (term chosen very deliberately) in the narrative. But on some levels, picking apart the narrative of a Doctor Who story is like picking apart the science: sure, you can pull apart a ball of fluff, but all that proves is it was made of fluff. If you want to make a point about the particular type of fluff in this ball compared to that ball, well and good, but if your point is to show that it's not the sort of material you'd build a bridge out of or use to armor-plate a tank I'm not sure why you'd start with fluff.

Even that isn't really my point, though, it's preamble to my point... which is that if we were to round up a list of the most disappointing episodes, the most hated and generally-agreed-to-be-low-quality episodes, we'd probably end up with a lot of season finales on that list. And a lot of the resolutions to "epic two-parters". And comparatively few monster-of-the-week/magical-adventures-in-space episodes.

Not saying there haven't been some stinkers in the latter category. I don't think I've ever encountered anyone who liked "Fear Her", and a lot of people are less conflicted about "Curse of the Black Spot" than I am, with good reason. But how many of the finales have there been that anyone would call an out-of-the-park home run? I'm tempted to say "The Big Bang" because it's my favorite, but I'm afraid that's my bias talking. My suspicion is that if there were a fandom wide survey where everyone picked the worst season-ender, "Parting of the Ways" would end up reigning as the least hated one, but it would probably have a hard time winning any survey phrased as "pick the best". I can't imagine it being anyone's favorites. There's nothing special about it. It didn't try as hard as everything that came after, so it didn't fail as hard.

So here's my Immodest Proposal:

What if it were all magical adventures in space? What if it were all running around and sexy fish vampires? What if it were monsters for breakfast, lunch, and tea?

Would anybody really mind if the myth arcs were relegated to the realm of the occasional references and incidental plot advancements that happen along the way instead of 90% of them being crammed into Event!Episodes that never quite manage to deliver on their promises?

I mean, how many people loved River Song the ongoing enigma, the Special Guest Character whose "plot" advances only by winks and nods but whose real point as a character is the character rather than the story... and also hate River Song The Storyline, as revealed in the current series of Doctor Who? I think this is a fandom that relishes apocrypha more than apocalypse, and the show is certainly better at handling the former than it is the latter.

And that's not at all surprising. The most recent episode( minor spoilers ) aside, the phenomenon of The Very Scary Door (that whatever is behind the door can't possibly be as scary to the general audience as the scary door itself) is hard to get away from. The same principle applies to interesting enigmas, like the Doctor's personal history or the nature of life, the universe, and everything. It's hard to make the answer as intriguing as the question.

I'm not saying ditch the mythology completely. Look at Neil Gaiman's "The Doctor's Wife". Look at how much that one-off episode managed to add to the tapestry of the Whoniverse, to the history and character of the Doctor and his one and only Constant Companion. And that's basically how it went in the old days. Oh, they had myth arcs. They had an entire series that was a single serial. There was the (thankfully) aborted "Cartmel masterplan". But mostly they got by on winks and nods, in-jokes and dangling threads for other writers to pick up.

Things like the bizarre, fanon-like excesses of the Cartmel masterplan, the way the mopiness over Rose colored all of David Tennant's run, and the progression of increasingly over-the-top season finales... they all demonstrate what happens when the show puts an ongoing narrative about the Doctor over the immediacy of telling a good story with the Doctor in it.

Refocusing the show on the monster-of-the-week/magical-adventures-in-space wouldn't turn every episode into "The Doctor's Wife" or "Night Terrors" (if only because not every writer would be Neil Gaiman or Mark Gatiss). It wouldn't fix the issues leading to the egregious misuse of Freema Agyeman and Nina Toussaint-White in roles that are treated as placeholders by the writers. It wouldn't answer the critiques of Moffat's writing of female characters. It wouldn't fix everything that's wrong with the show, and it certainly wouldn't elevate its overall writing above that of a (sometimes brilliant) pulp novel, strip-a-day adventure comic, or film serial.

But it would recontextualize that kind of cracky, wibbly-wobbly, wildly varying writing in a way that would make the ongoing lack of coherence less noticeable and less important.

Couldn't sleep due to air conditioning issues, so I watched Doctor Who again. Noticed a few things the second time about the last act... one thing that I loved, one thing that I didn't.

( If you haven't watched the episode, Dr. Song will glare disapprovingly over the top of her diary. And shoot you. )

I'm currently trying to stay awake a little bit longer so that I don't end up having a melatonin-vs.-caffeine grudge match in my brain tonight, but I'm past the point of being able to do anything productive so I thought I'd take a little bit of time to share some of my thoughts on Doctor Who, following the 2010 Christmas Special.

When I saw the most recent season finale, one of my reactions was "This is the timey-wimiest thing I've seen in a long time." And I heartily approved of that. And then with the Christmas Carol homage, things got even timier and perhaps a bit wimier.

I like this. I like that the TARDIS is no longer just a prop and a vehicle for moving between episodes. If every problem gets solved through time travel, it will be annoying, but it's kind of annoying when no problem ever gets solved through time travel (save insofar as time travel brings the solution to the scene, in the form of the Doctor).

Now, there is a potential conflict with what's been established before (and that's kind of time travel in a nutshell, innit?), as it's both been shown and explicitly stated that once the TARDIS lands in the middle of things, it's part of events and they can't just jump around all willy-nilly. Right? But it's also been shown that it's possible to bend this, and while the results of pushing it too far can be world-shattering... well, it's been shown that the geography (for lack of a better word) of time varies. Some places the rules are stricter than others. Some places they manifest differently. The Doctor can see the lay of the land. He knows what's fixed and what's in flux.

So why is the Doctor suddenly playing faster and looser with the time/space continuum?

There are a couple different ways to make sense of this.

The Tenth Doctor's realization that he's the sole remaining arbiter of these things didn't work out quite as triumphantly as he might have hoped, but his ill-fated attempt to twist a fixed historical event past its breaking point might have reinforced to him the idea that history can take care of itself... that fixed is fixed, no matter what he does... while also opening up to him the possibility that things can be tweaked to a greater extent than he'd realized.

Also, the Eleventh Doctor seems more alien and less in touch with humanity than either of his two immediate predecessors. Might he not be more in tune with the wibbly-wobbliness of it all? If one subscribes to the theory that the regenerations are reactive, this makes a good deal of sense. Rose was in love with Nine, who couldn't (romantically) love her back, so he regenerated into Ten, who ~*just had a lot of feelings*~. These feelings made it difficult for Ten to function, towards the end, and impossible for him to face his death. So we get Eleven, who is somewhat of a throwback... sillier, and stranger, and more Time Lord.

I'm of the opinion that a lot of the most recent season makes more sense if you assume that throughout it, Eleven's mind is operating on a different level than even he is used to. There are times that he's literally ahead of/behind his own thought processes (same thing, from a different perspective.) He is literally thinking fourth dimensionally. It's possible that <=Ten wouldn't have dared to try to stunts that Eleven did in the season finale and the Christmas special because they couldn't see time the way he does.

And if this sort of stunt does depend on the geography of the timey-wimey ball, then we have our answer for why he can't do it all the time. Sometimes it's possible, sometimes it's not. Is it arbitrary? Yes. But so is the rule that says the TARDIS can never be used for on-the-spot mucking about with time and space.

Anyway, that's a lot of fanwank and speculation. I just hope we see more timey-wimey hijinks in the coming season. Given that we're going to be seeing more of the reverse-romance with [Insert Title Here] River Song in it, that seems almost inevitable.