My relationship with Doctor Who has been like a wife to an abusive husband. It’s painful and horrible, but no matter how bad it gets I always come back for more and expect it to be better. Sadly, this is seldom the case. I was quite a fan of Doctor Who as a child, and thoroughly enjoyed the reboot series as such, but after a while I managed to look at the show a little more critically and see the glaring flaws in it.
The fundamental concept shows so much potential and promise, but it suffers from terrible execution and writers who drive the plot into absurd and stupid directions. I like the idea of a lone time traveller who tries to find meaning in his life in many different kinds of ways, someone who can see further than humanity and challenge conventional thinking, and the show is a great catalyst for such ideas - but unfortunately, in its entire fifty year run, it does little of the sort. In fact, there is a breed of solipsism in the reboot series, where most major conflicts in the entire expansive universe take place somewhere in Great Britain. When the main character is a thousand year old time-traveller who can go anyway in all of space and time, and happens to end up in London every single episode to save the universe, the writers have clearly missed something crucial, and the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief (a key factor in immersive storytelling) can start to slip.
After the abysmal train-wreck of the first half of this season, with the ridiculous Amy/Rory/River story arc, I was dubious about where the show would go with a clean slate. Indeed, I was waiting for those characters to die, and when they did, the show tried (and failed) to evoke empathy using close up shots of tears and sad music. This left me understandably skeptical about the fate of the rest of the series, but the Christmas episode did pleasantly surprise me. One of the problems with the previous story arc (apart from the needlessly convoluted and poorly written plot) was that it began to focus primarily on the Doctor’s companions and the secondary characters, and the Doctor himself became less central to the story. They even started a few episodes with an intro sequence from Amy’s perspective as a child, although that was abandoned fairly quickly. Aside from the secondary characters at the time being completely unlikable, the writers seemed to forget that the Doctor is the most interesting character in the show, and as such the story should focus primarily on him. When the Doctor is alone, the show has to focus on him, and this is where the show can really shine (see surprisingly good episodes such as Midnight and The Waters of Mars), and this is something the first episode, The Snowmen, does quite well.
In fact, this season contains an arrangement of quality episodes rarely seen in Doctor Who. With a few exceptions - The Rings Of Akhaten and The Crimson Horror, for example - this series is overall fairly solid. With the previous characters killed off before Christmas, the Doctor gets some breathing room for his character to be developed a little more, which is more or less the overall theme in this season. I have to say, despite rapidly becoming the hipster Doctor, I am growing quite fond of Matt Smith as the Doctor, and in this series in particular I am liking the direction they have taken the character. He resembles a much younger Jon Pertwee. Unfortunately, however, the series has to fall upon the standard trend of the Doctor choosing yet another young, attractive British woman to travel with him.
The official series starts with The Bells of Saint John, Steven Moffat’s obviously crude attempt at satirizing Wi-Fi and modern technology. The attitude expressed in this episode is rather quaint, and I would say shallow as well, with the demonisation of wireless technology without any real reason to do so. The Doctor returns to present day England (which, for an alien time traveller, should have no meaning) to investigate Clara Oswald, who he met in Asylum of the Daleks (which I never saw, in order to avoid the Power Ranger Daleks) and The Snowmen, curious as to how such a person can exist on several different timeframes. At the same time, The Great Intelligence is capturing people through Wi-Fi, and it is up to the Doctor to stop him. Clara is one of the more interesting companions to the Doctor in the new series, as she has wit, intelligence and assertiveness, and this episode sets up her mystery which is to be resolved over the course of the season.
Going on the standard sightseeing tour the Doctor promises, they end up on the Rings of Akhaten in the eponymous second episode, which suffers immensely from an absurd setup, and as such the resolution in the second half of the episode is just silly. Let me say one thing straight up: if you don’t have the budget to produce decent special effects, don’t rely on them for your storytelling. Knowing your limitations can stimulate the creative process; contrarily, going ahead with terrible CGI not only breaks the immersion, but also shows a lack of creativity. It works better if you minimise the use of bad special effects by working around them. I bring this up, because the “space-motorbike” scene from asteroid to asteroid in this episode really made me cringe. The wind in their hair (space has no air, let alone wind) and the lack of any space protection gear, combined with the cinematic delivery turned this episode from an average Doctor Who episode to a terrible one. I don’t think it’s fair to judge anything on the basis of special effects, but in this case it was unnecessary. The contrived resolution of the plot only exacerbated this, and overall this is probably the worst episode this year.
One thing Doctor Who could definitely do without is the incidental music. Murray Gold makes some wonderful contributions to the show, but they don’t fit with the overall tone. Doctor Who works best with a slightly eerie undertone, but the excessively cinematic orchestral music undermines this by making the show feel like an action-fantasy series. The new series can’t seem to go for two minutes without an epic orchestra complimenting the events on screen, and it completely destroys any kind of atmosphere or consistent tone the episode might have built up to that point. Less is more, in this case.
As I said before, I am liking what the writers are doing with the character of the Doctor in this series. I like the motif of obsession, and there seems to be a darker edge to his character we haven’t yet seen much of. Journey To The Centre of the TARDIS begins to bring this out in a commendable way, and it is one of the highlights of the series. It has a psychological undertone, and has very few support characters, which allows it to stay focussed on the doctor and his obsession with Clara, and does a decent job of bringing out a darker edge to the Doctor’s personality. The thing is, Doctor Who is at that stage where it’s only good for exploring the character and the concept in much greater depths than has done before, lest it run the risk of stagnating and repeating itself, and the current writers have done alright at this task.
That being said, when they try and break new ground, they also have a tendency to make it even worse than if it had just stuck to the original formula. The way the TARDIS is sentient and behaves like another person, for example, is one such decision, and I find the interaction between Clara and it quite difficult to watch. If the Doctor is the most interesting character in everything he’s in, the TARDIS is the least interesting character - personally, I feel it was better off as an inanimate object - little more than a means of transportation, and without a distinct personality. Too often the series has had to fall back on magical and fantastical explanations for its many contrived plot devices, and every time I feel the show has missed its own point. As I mentioned in my Star Trek review, I would like to see more science fiction where the science part is at least somewhat grounded in reality, no matter how far fetched, and it seems like Doctor Who has gotten into the habit of introducing new fantasy elements before figuring out how it would work in the first place. It all reeks of a show which has run out of ideas, and is trying everything in its desperation to remain fresh, and I don’t think it’s working.
I bring this up in relation to the aforementioned sentient TARDIS, which I think has been given more screen time than it deserves, but in general, the series has had this tendency to resolve things in a more magical fashion than makes sense. The conclusion to The Rings of Akhaten is one such example, as is the conclusion to Hide. In fact, I would say most episodes suffer from this syndrome - where the resolution of a conflict is done in a way inconsistent with the logic up to that point. More often than not, it seems the writers feel they can just make up time travel rules as they go, which is not only irritating, but also terrible storytelling.
Neil Gaiman - who I am fairly fond of as a writer - makes his second contribution to the series in the second last episode, Nightmare in Silver. This is probably the most grounded Doctor Who has been in a while, and it’s certainly refreshing to see. Gaiman plays around with the Doctor’s character even more, as he gets infected with an artificial intelligence taking control of his memories.
The writing has generally improved in this half of the season, and it’s nice to see some genuinely decent episodes in a TV series which has been steadily going into decline for quite a few years now. As I said, I like it when the new series changes things to make it more interesting, and taking it into new and dynamic directions. Moffat has certainly been doing this since he took the helm of the show, but he has had a tendency to overdo it to the point where the show becomes silly. I keep coming back to Doctor Who to check if he’s realised the error of his ways and made something good out of the series. He seems to have had trouble with devising coherent plot arcs and establishing good characterisation, but in this series I think we can give him credit for genuinely doing a good job.
I do have to take issue with the finale though. Change is certainly a good thing, but in this particular case they try to do too much and it just falls flat. Moffat tries to rewrite the entire series (that is, the entire fifty years worth of it) by having The Great Intelligence dotted around the Doctors entire history “foiling every one of his victories”, and subsequently having Clara do the same and have been responsible for “saving” him every time. The plot holes are ridiculous, and it seems like the producers came up with the Clara mystery at the start of the season, but failed to figure out how they were going to explain it until the last minute, where they rushed together a mildly-coherent-but-not-really resolution. That aside, it seems stupidly ambitious to attempt to re-write the entire series in the first place, and due to the aforementioned plot hole the whole thing falls down.
Finally, I must draw attention to some appallingly poor judgement. An “alternate Doctor” has been contrived, who is apparently not actually the Doctor, and is played by John Hurt. To me, this seems like an extraordinary waste of talent, as John Hurt would be absolutely magnificent in the role of the next incarnation of the Doctor. But no, I suppose they needed to leave the position vacant for yet another young attractive man to appeal to the teenage girl demographic.
Again, though, the good characterisation makes up for it, and for finale particularly gets away with a silly plot because it is primarily character focussed, and it does the characters well enough for me to let it slide. I’ve found it incredibly disappointing that Doctor Who has developed a massive new cult following of young people since Matt Smith took the role, and how its popularity has seemed to increase in inverse proportion to its actual quality. Because of this, I found the new series to be somewhat of a last hope for Doctor Who, and for the first time in a while I’m actually looking forward to where they take it next. Discounting the 50th Anniversary Special, of course, because that is bound to be woeful.
No comments:
Post a Comment