1) Manic Depression.
2) The End of Time: Part One - Review.
3) The RTD era.
4) So long, and thanks for all the ham (more Tennant bashing).
5) The End of Time: Part Two - Preview.
6) The End.
1) Manic Depression
This figure was allegedly seen hanging around set the day Christopher Eccleston left.This is going to be the final post.
After a brief, and rather unsuccessful, foray into the Digital Spy Doctor Who Forum I have been left the notion that there is little bloody point in caring anymore. I posted several essays, very lengthy and constructed arguments, but now see posts along the lines of some people take DW too seriously or why be over analytical; it is a family show and should be enjoyed flaws and all... I’m also being lumped in with the RTD bashing brigade, which is odd as I am pretty much the only person there prepared to argue the sheer brilliance of some of his scripts (Love & Monsters is often viewed, quite immaturely, with dismissive hatred on the site). I have no time for the RTD bashers simply because (a) They usually hide a latent homophobia behind any ill thought out criticism they can muster (b) They are the kind of people who think Moffat writes serious drama and will save the show (c) They do not understand how important RTD has been to television drama (he wrote The Second Coming - one of the greatest drama programmes ever made) (d) They do not get why a story like Gridlocked is better than Blink or anything Holmes/Hinchcliffe managed to conjure up.
The attitude displayed means there is little point in trying to argue for better when most are prepared to compromise and accept. It is the motivation of the age. We can no longer take pictures on the streets of London without a police officer demanding ID because people did not want to pay attention to an increasingly paranoid and authoritarian state. Compromise and acceptance denigrate quality of life and culture. It now affects Doctor Who.
The show has become a mere distraction. It is a cot mobile, hanging before the eyes offering shapes and colours which pacify rather than doing anything more. Yet people defend bad writing and poor production. Let us look at the most common comeback to any point I may have raised.
i) It is a family show... Well no, it is a drama programme. Audience should be irrelevant simply because audience chasing will kill creativity, innovation and quality. Everything will be reduced to the lowest, and most common, denominator for fear of disenfranchising a potential viewer. For proof of this look to Hollywood, where audience is the prime motivator and has created an industry so sterile it can only reproduce a continued impotence of offerings.
ii) Why are people expecting this to be high drama, this would only result in it going over children’s heads... Even in my Digital Spy posts the one thing I continually indicate is that people deserve more than an insultingly bland and contemptuous offering like Planet of the Dead. Forget all the PR nonsense fobbing us of about romps, they knew they had made a turkey and were arrogant enough to justify it. I credit people with the intelligence and ability to comprehend more than the programme makers presently do. The view which suggests good drama is beyond children is not only patronising but insulting. It is usually made by the kind of recidivist who attempts to project their own intellectual and personal limitations onto others, thereby gaining some sense of internal justification for their own failings, insecurities, need for approval, etc...
iii) You’re overlooking the time constraints presented by a 45 minute episode... Rubbish, utter rubbish. A good writer can tell a story in sixty seconds. Intelligence, substance, drama, narrative congruency and anything else of value have nothing to do with time constraints. It is all a question of how much the writer cares.
iv) If you watch DW Confidential it’ll help you understand and appreciate the episode much more... Really, how? Once again good writing does not need to be explained with what we were actually trying to do here was... If this needs to happen then the writer, director and production team have not done their job and shown scant regard for the intelligence of their audience. Nineteen Eighty-Four by Orwell is not sold with an appendix entitled What I was actually saying was totalitarianism is bad.... Good writing treats people with respect, engages them, and prompts them to thought. To actually criticise people for not understanding or liking an episode, and further suggest they are at fault for their opinion, because they do not watch DWC is to be as complacent and stupid as modern media types like to believe their audiences are.
v) Millions of viewers seemed to like it... Well, again why? The simple answer is making the best from a paucity of choice. High ratings do not automatically equate to quality. If life was fair, and great art truly appreciated, then the works of Park Chan-Wook would be more successful than those of Jerry Bruckheimer. Popularity is not a question of quality but one of how the media has manipulated and lessened public expectation to the point where, even now, Doctor Who appears to be an oasis in a dried out wilderness. If anything those involved in the making have a great responsibility which they have taken for granted.
vi) I would never be so arrogant to question the programme makers... For me, this is one of the most disturbing and depressing comments I have ever seen. One of the many problems with modern society is that people rarely question. Our culture and civilisation are in ruins because of a failure to question. New Labour once tried to dismiss people who questioned them as cynical simply because the act of questioning forces the questioned to be just, honourable and authentic in their conduct. Only by questioning can any form of standards in culture or life in general be maintained. We seem to have slipped back to the old Saward motto of just throw something together with monsters in it simply because the production team have arrogantly begun to believe in their own worth without actually questioning their own validity.
Also, who exactly do you think the production team work for? It is not the BBC, but every man, woman and child in the country. As such they have a huge responsibility to each and every one of us simply because of their place within the cultural consciousness.
Yes Doctor Who is fiction but that is no excuse for shoddy writing and production standards which treat us like idiots. It is patronising to suggest criticising something which is not at its best is wrong and that we should accept whatever is offered with grateful thanks. The show as it stands is being written by long term fans who should understand the flaws of the past and just what the show is capable of doing. Instead they fall into the same traps as writers who worked on the show when nobody in the BBC cared about it – Chibnall is the prime example of this.
Doctor Who always was a drama programme with no audience agenda in mind. Chasing audiences is both limiting and debilitating to creativity but in the modern, brightly lit, media age of merchandising and promotion the show has been twisted into another beast. It is now primarily a family show with an eye to exploiting the Harry Potter generation. The knock on effect of this is that the show becomes a question of spectacle rather than content. Hence the upper class jewel thief in POTD. This was a repulsive character; a bored little rich girl who deprived the general public of historical art in public museums was made a one dimensional heroine. None of this mattered though because she could do some acrobatics on wires; it looked good on camera if nothing else. The production team have become more concerned with attempts to grab short term attention rather than engage an audience. Why make a drama programme when you can make something which is all surface and no effort.
For the first time in my life I no longer care about Doctor Who. I survived Saward/JNT, Season 24 and the TV movie and still cared but now there is little point. The show has become like every other piece of television these days. All formula, all event and sod all else. Doctor Who was different to everything else, which is why it was so despised by the media bods in the BBC. The show was resurrected only to have its very soul sold for something cheap and tawdry.
On the Digital Spy forum I was accused of being a frustrated writer with high ideals about writing. It is a sad day for civilisation when having high ideals about writing is used as a criticism but yes, obviously it is true. I also happen to be a bi-polar, psoriatic dyslexic. Writing hurts me; this essay is carved with levels of concentration and frustration few could understand. Part of my anger with Chibnall et al is the fact that they have it easy but still manage to produce scripts I consider insulting to peoples intelligence. They lack courage, conviction and insight. Could I do better would be the obvious retort, my answer yes – easily. However it would never happen, I do not do cliques or seek approval of others so my chances are nil. The only alternative is to take all those ideas and use them for myself, create something new and untarnished by the arrogance of modern programme makers. Obviously TV is out of the question so a series of novellas is the best way forward.
Doctor Who is dead to me now.
In short, I’m tired of being the only one who gave a damn.
2) The End of Time: Part One
Modern Doctor Who has been described as being organic in look and feel.The problem here is how I can review something when I did not understand it. The episode bordered on the incomprehensible and relied on a belief in co-incidence so vast one would have to take a boat load of LSD to actually achieve it. From the advance build up I actually began to think I was going to be eating one of my many hats (I own several after waking one day and panicking that I did not own a decent hat, still that is the problem with being bi-polar) instead I ended up chewing on visual turkey.
I’ll begin by highlighting the three things I did like.
Lucy Saxon – probably one of the best characters from the shows recent history. The actress playing Lucy always made me believe the character had a history, a motivation and internal conflicts which led to her decisions and actions. It was a subtle and beautiful portrait of a woman who believed in what she was doing, although morally bankrupt, without actually being evil in the tacky, moralist sense of drama. The End of Time Lucy was no different. Written as a mere cipher, in a scene so exagerrated it could only be shown in the panto season, the actress played it astonishingly well. The change and path to redemption for Lucy was acted exquisitely.
Bernard Cribbins – I think the whole of fandom has taken him into their hearts. It is so obvious as to why that I will not even discuss it.
The Cafe scene – On first watching I liked this. On second viewing, it just lacked concentration. Yet the idea of the Doctor discussing his mortality is fascinating, until David Tennant makes the Doctor cry in a blatant attempt to gain the sympathy vote.
It is with the cafe scene that my first suspicions were tweaked. I have a genuine fear that they will actually kill the Doctor and regenerate someone else in his place. I think this is a possibility since everyone involved now believes themselves to be bigger than the show itself. Hence the idea of David leaving would naturally lead them to the conclusion that they might as well kill the character off as there is no point without him, if this did happen it would so undermine what comes afterwards there would be no point. Everything would have been in vain simply because the show became a vast ego trip for the cast and crew.
The main issue with the episode is that it lacks a story, the curse of many Tennant era episodes (but usually not the RTD ones). As stated before the story is what a writer is trying to communicate to the mass public consciousness, not the plot. However even without a story there seemed to be little in the way of congruent plot development or focus. Things were happening just because they were happening.
The resurrection of The Master made little sense. Lucy stops the resurrection with a magical “death” potion but all that seems to happen is a little bleaching and the acquisition of super powers. Think J K Rowling writes Syler from Heroes in the style of Heath Ledgers Joker and we can all guess what has been added to RTDs DVD collection recently, which is a shame because Doctor Who has more substance than Harry Potter and Heroes, even when they are both added together and multiplied to the power of infinity.
It was near enough impossible to get through several scenes without a prophecy of something bigger is going to happen. The problem with reliance on prophecy is twofold. Firstly, as suggested in another post, the suggestion that destiny is fixed is flawed. It is only because of an absence of destiny that the human race can enjoy liberty. Chance can be cruel, but it also allows change for the better. Secondly it is a lazy plot device and tires incredibly quickly. Over the past four years every prophecy has hyped up audience expectations to the point where they can only be disappointed. Consider how many times we were told the darkness is coming... only to have it waylaid or resurrected when some tension needed generating. For me the mark of lazy or just plain bad writing is that it tells rather than shows. Instead of something bigger actually happening we are told it will be happening and in the end it will probably not be that much to write home about.
The RTD bashing brigade will be rubbing there hands with glee, minus the incomprehensible ability to fire bolts of lightning. The old phrase Deus ex machina will be wheeled out and used like a favourite pair of lucky pants. It is also very hard to argue against them on this. For this epic and emotional episode we have an Immortality Gate. It heals whole planets. Yes, we have already worked out it will be important in the resolution to the second part. I do not care about deus ex machina providing they have a purpose. For instance in Torchwood: Children of Earth it was obvious sending a broadcast back to the aliens, along there own frequency channel, was the resolution to the plot yet it did not matter because the serial had a story. The plot about the aliens was incidental to the story, characters and themes at play. The story achieved a dramatic climax; the plot resolution did not matter. Yet here there is no discernable story which leads me to fear another Journey’s End, where a plot driven episode is resolved by pulling a lever. Again it is generated from a misguided focus on spectacle over engagement.
Random plot elements were being hustled in with crowbar, at such a rate, that hardly any development took place beyond wild leaps in logical progression. Naismith only seems to exist to move The Master from one place to another and present him with a magical, world changing device which just happened to be in place. Co-incidence can be stretched slightly too far.
It is here where I can highlight the things which I did not make sense, even in a fictional context like Doctor Who.
Time Lords can smell each other... over great distances... even when they do not know the other is near they are alerted by a twitch of the nose. Seriously, this has to be a ploy to get the show a plug on Harry Hills TV Burp. Smell is the least interesting of television drama concepts and a dumbing down from the old in many senses we have the same mind explanation of old. In many ways it highlights the recidivistic nature of what the show has become. Why do something complex and fascinating when there is a more mundane and easier path? The answer is twofold, one they have lost the will and secondly they genuinely believe people and children do not have the intelligence to cope with anything more complex.
President Obama and the recession. This was described as a sub-plot but seemed irrelevant, trivial and distracting. It also gave RTD a let them eat cake moment. When speaking about this scene he actually stated "thank god the recession is not over..." Which is one of the most hateful things anyone can ever say. RTD is now one of the most highly paid people in the industry and probably not affected by the recession. Really it highlights just how out of touch with reality he genuinely is to say this. Yes, thank god it is not over and people face losing their jobs, homes and everything else all so a pointless gimmick can be included for no reason.
The Master becomes everybody. It looks good on paper but the journey there was incongruent and required manipulative plotting. Still it gave Murray Gold the chance to trot out his “this is dramatic and epic” piece of music. You know the one, he uses it almost every other episode now. At this early stage I do not understand if the mass Master is just being done because it looks good or if it has a proper context but based on recent form I do not hold out hope. This is a shame because with a little more thought about the execution of the idea, it could have been exceptional. Instead of a meditation on the nature of individual identity in the face of immorality it is just going to be something which happens because everybody thought it would make a great twist.
Naismith & daughter. Again, what was the point? I am prepared to wager vast sums of money I do not have that these rather one dimensional plot functionaries will not have any relevance to the second part.
Wilf and Donna. Oh dear, here we go again with the there’s more to you than... This time it is Wilf. It leads me to wonder if the Doctor meets normal people anymore or if everyone he knows is bound up with his destiny and the fate of the universe. No doubt Wilf will become the template for the re-birth of humanity, if I was being really cynical I would suggest they will kill him off simply to provoke a cheap and obvious emotional reaction from the audience. Also Donna is regaining her memory. I’m not actually sure why beyond it providing some mild peril based scenes in part two.
The Time Lords are back. Not since The War Games have The Time Lords looked this majestic and powerful. Timothy Dalton was fantastic. Just one question, why? Again, another random plot element introduced with all the subtle logic of a sledgehammer slamming into the knees.
Overall there was no story and no congruent plot. What happened was a bunch of things that the production team thought should happen just because it would look impressive to a general audience and get the fans all wet.
3) The RTD era
Have you seen this man? Please contact the culture police if sighted. Warning, if seen do not approach. He is liable to promise you things he can no longer deliver.Believe it or not, I used to like RTD and his early writing. I’m just saddened and depressed as he seems to have fallen below his own talent recently. He is, quite probably, the most talented writer in the television industry today and his association with Doctor Who has, at times, been truly sublime.
If I had to pick a favourite Doctor Who writer it would be Malcolm Hulke. This is quite odd because the Pertwee era is not one I particularly enjoy, yet Hulke stands head and shoulders above the limitations of the show at the time. While the production team and cast were making an adventure serial Hulke was writing a drama programme which explored the human world in its best and worst lights. He was a writer who communicated complex stories in an exciting way. The Faceless Ones actually portrayed aliens as complex individuals, like humans. The Silurians dealt with fear, prejudice, and race hate. His portrayal of the Master was not as bombastic as Holmes evil maniac, but an amoral rival to the Doctor. I could go on but you get the idea. Hulke wrote subtle, engaging and entertaining drama which still stands today. Hulke saw the potential of Doctor Who that had previously been ignored by many other writers and used it. There have only been a few others to understand the show Doctor Who can be when someone cares enough – David Whittaker, Peter Ling, Malcolm Hulke (obviously), Graham Williams, Christopher H Bidmead, Christopher Bailey, Colin Baker (sadly never proven by TV), Christopher Eccleston and RTD, in his early years at any rate.
The mention of Malcolm Hulke is no idle fanboy chatter. The early RTD Doctor Who works are, in many respects, the natural successor to Hulke’s work. The first series, with the exception of the Gatiss script (be honest, there is always a snake somewhere in Eden), and Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor are a summation of everything Doctor Who could, should and would have been. The stories mark out the show as a new, innovative drama programme that can be both entertaining and thought provoking. Every episode by RTD in these days had a point. End of the World was a story about cultures (before the show became trapped in its present alien phobia obsession); Aliens of London and WW3 a comment on the political situation of the Blair government; The Long Game a sly dig at the Murdoch empire and how a population can be manipulated. RTD wrote with purpose, for a principle rather than effect. This is a fact missed by many of those who do not understand Love & Monsters or Gridlocked. Instead they prefer the obsessive attempts of Steven Moffat to prove himself a successor to the Holmes/Hinchcliffe years. Moffat does not write with a point. His scripts are about plot and nothing else. The Girl in the Fireplace is about clockwork robots; Blink is about killer statues. Moffat is more interested in effect than principle.
It was with the series two that we see RTD waver and begin to give in to writing for effect. When RTD does epic and emotional he seems to lose the fundamental process which makes him a great writer. He stops writing like William Golding and begins to write like Agatha Christie or to put it in a Doctor Who context, he stops writing like Malcolm Hulke and starts to write like Steven Moffat. In many respects what we see is the corrupting nature of the media industry. It is very easy to believe ones own worth if everybody kisses your ass, even when you are wrong. It is very easy to become swayed from principled writing to demonstrating cheap effect if you rapidly become entangled in the world of celebrity. Perhaps part of the problem is the clique which now makes the programme.
One of my posts on Digital Spy suggested that most of the writers, excepting RTD, should not be writing for the show. Gatiss, Roberts, Chibnall and others all lack innovation and talent to make Doctor Who mean something more than a vanity project. There are better writers out there. Looking to the audio world of fandom the work of Marc Platt, Steve Lyons and the truly exceptional Robert Shearman parallel the strength of RTD and stand way above works of other writers on the television show. People got very het up about that one but I stand by it. For RTD his fellow writers are friends as well as colleagues, here is the fault. The peer group can not only be influenced but influence, as a consequence a great writer has been tethered and held back by lesser writers. They stopped making a drama programme and began making their personal wet dreams a reality. With a drought of inspiration, honest feedback and over dose of praise it is not surprising that RTD begins to write the show he thinks people will like rather than the one he intended to make.
As Torchwood: Children of Earth proved he can still write proper drama. So he leaves without fully regaining or expanding upon the drive and power of the first year or the stand alone scripts. RTD sold out and abandoned Doctor Who for something unrecognisable. In his place we now get Moffat, a man who will offer the same puerile nonsense as before and people will love him for it. The criticisms I have had about RTD towards the end of his tenure will be nothing compared to my feelings when Moffat takes over. All Moffat will offer are the same cheap frights and shallow pedantry which have become his hallmark.
4) So long, and thanks for all the ham.
Pleeeeeeease, accept me, accept me, accept me... I promise to be good and not upset anyone...One of the more interesting outcomes since the show retuned is the birth of a new arm of fandom - the fan girl. As if the fan boys were not bad enough with all their plot fixated notion of the show and masturbatory fetishes for Ice Warriors and Zygons, a fan girl is someone who can only respond to the show in a manner which betrays how much she wants to funnel David Tennant’s ten inches. Every single thought or reaction is governed by the reproductive organs. Hence on learning of David Tennant’s departure they all began to whimper and hope it would not be too painful or distressing. Some even suggested it should not upset children, which translates as not upset them but using that excuse to justify such a silly reaction to the death of a fictional character. This kind of obsessive, borderline stalking would have been unthinkable before Tennant arrived. The problem is that David Tennant is not a very good Doctor. He is a great actor but as a Doctor he manages to undermine the work of almost everyone before him and what the role actually means.
Comedian Rich Hall has a brilliant and insightful stand up routine on the works of Tom Cruise. It always comes to mind whenever I watch Tennant play The Doctor simply because Tennant is locked into the Tom Cruise style of performance rather than acting. Every Cruise movie has show Tom as masculine, a fighter, a lover, a man in touch with his emotions etc. As such you can predict every scene will show Tom being angry, Tom upset, Tom being attractive ad infinitum. Tennant has become locked in a similar cycle. He does not act but, to steal a phrase from Kenneth Williams, fall back on the tired tricks of personality. He gabbles, he gurns, he looks sad and in almost every script we have to be told how attractive he is. There is no character writing or acting, just a prescription of things which everybody expects.
If Christopher Eccleston made the perfect Doctor, Tennant rapidly undid his work. This is down to how the production team and actor have compromised to the point of making the character worthless. Tennant allowed the tenth Doctor to become morally ambivalent, a homage to something other than Doctor Who. This can plainly be seen in the car crash which was The Impossible Planet & The Satan Pit. To say this was a bad piece of television would be misleading; instead it was nasty, vile and ultimately damaging to the cultural consciousness. My main point of contention is how it not only endorses slavery, but stands against notions of liberty in favour of protecting the status quo. The story intimates a race of servile aliens kept by humans for exploitation. The Doctor arrives, turns a blind eye to this and promptly witters on about the greatness of humanity and starts hugging people just because they are human. No other Doctor would have done this. It is fundamentally against the principle of the programme to start justifying slavery and promoting human conquest. You would never have a past Doctor hugging a cotton plantation owner and ignore the slaves in the fields outside. The very people Tennant’s Doctor schmooze’s with are those which would have been enemies by Ninth Doctor standards. Eventually the slaves rebel, possessed by a force beyond their knowing, and the Doctor very neatly allows them all to die so he can save their slave masters. Obviously the unintended (at least, I hope it was unintended) metaphor here is a political one. If the Ood represent a servile class the message of the story is to tolerate oppression and destroy any attempt to change the status quo - progress of the few justifies ill treatment of others. If I was being really arrogant I would point out that the possession can be likened to education and socialist philosophy which endangers social stability for the elite.
Unlike Eccleston, Tennant allows moral compromise in his stories and performance. One of the growing agendas on the show is that of liberal humanism. Immediately people will see this as a good thing, but it is not. Liberal humanism is no different from the horrors of the selfish right. What we see is a demonstration that the human race is, unquestionably, justified in whatever it does. There is no questioning of human values or actions but an endorsement at whatever cost. Liberal humanism does not like hard questions or believe that freedom, liberty and justice are concepts to be fought for and won. Every social change for the better be it the abolition of slavery, the suffragette movement or undoing levels of Victorian poverty in the early Twentieth Century have been made by sacrifice and political motivation. Liberal humanism believes in acceptance, compromise and blindness to the damaging actions of ones own behaviour – humanity is good because it is, and this is the rule by which it operates. The Tenth Doctor hugs a slave master because of this. It is also why the Tenth Doctor fights for cosy, middle class lifestyles rather than anything else. He fights for mobile phone reception, sat-navs, cruise holidays and all the other meaningless distractions which our society is obsessed by. One telling give away of the compromise made by this philosophy is the need to apologise. Tennant has his Doctor apologise for something almost every episode. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry has become a catchphrase, it is meant to demonstrate his "humane" qualities but only serves to prove how morally ineffective he actually is. We live in a society where Bono can lecture about the evils of poverty whilst wearing clothes which cost more than some peoples annual salary. The apology is a get out clause, a way of eradicating guilt and soothing the conscience in place of any actual action. We can feel outraged, much like the Tennant Doctor, about poverty, corruption, totalitarianism, mass murder etc but never go to the effort of disrupting our cosy little lifestyles, the apology is a moral compromise and one Tennant, unlike his predecessors, makes all to easily.
The reason that almost every alien in the show is now destined to pose a threat to humanity grows from this philosophy. Anything which is different or outside a middle-class, liberal humanist concept is wrong and liable to pose us harm and, by following this line, the show becomes no different to other right wing sci-fi shows which think portraying foreigners as aliens is acceptable (yes, I’m having a go at Star Trek... all of them). Doctor Who has rarely been xenophobic or deliberate in an attempt to breed fear of difference. If anything the show always stood against such things (see anything by Malcolm Hulke for proof). The ultimate result of these simplistic aliens are bad plots is a paralell to the fear building in regards terrorism. Fear is dangerous, it allows us to be exploited and drives irrational hatred. Remember the Yoda speech - Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate and hate leads to suffering. Lucas applauds difference and advises the dangers of opposing it but, for the first time in Doctor Who history, we have a show which continually re-inforces fear of the different, the alien or not known. The aliens are now like terrorists, trying to destroy us via acts like ploughing a nuclear cruise liner into London. As stated before the show uses the Freudian concept of the uncanny to explore the human condition and nature of moral corruption, Tennant and his era have sidelined this to create fear of the outsider - for Tennant the Doctor is not the moral magician Hartnell sought to create but the champion of conformity.
The Tennant Doctor therefore becomes someone who supports the present condition and fights against change. Other Doctors all fought for change, siding with the few to effect change against injustice, moral corruption and oppresive regimes. In many senses Tennant and his Doctor are approval seekers. They seek to fit in, not change or upset, but cuddle up to notions which may be comfortable but wrong. Hence why we have to see Tennant in a tuxedo every series, he attempts to fit in and acts in ways which other Doctors do not. He is the Doctor who does not want to be an alien outsider.
Really this is the story behind the present cast and crew. They have sought and found mass acceptance in the media at large, even though they have lost the fire and power of what was intended. The show is now so insular that the team cannot bear to highlight David Tennant in a bad light by having his Doctor do something challenging. His off screen celebrity both depends upon and feeds the show. As such neither can be allowed to damage the other and the Doctor becomes a bland shadow of his former self. When personal celebrity interferes with programme making there can only be one way forward, take the least offensive route possible. With this route the Doctor must be portrayed as a romantic hero, saving humanity from menaces which are different to itself. The alien outsider thus becomes an insider, turning a blind eye to immorality and injustice in exchange for acceptance.
The cost of this approval seeking is what Lizo, a man so patronising that he talks to everybody like they are mentally deficient daffodils, describes as the most popular Doctor ever. Well no, if we are honest it was, is and always will be Tom Baker (the viewing figures were higher back then). What we actually have is a Doctor that the Murdoch press can like. He does not ask any awkward questions, does not like change and never does anything remotely left wing. In short Doctor Who has become so dull and pedantic about its own appeal that it is unlikely to upset anyone or make a stand for anything outside of its own fictional narrative. Tennant and the Doctor are now synonymous because they are bland aspects of the celebrity culture which now permeates our lives.
The one actor who really had complicated, not to mention controversial, ideas on the character of the Doctor is the one who never got to fulfil them. Colin Baker is fascinating when explaining his thoughts on the subject. Colin once described the Doctor as a man who could stride over bodies in a battlefield and then eulogise on the flight of a butterfly. For Baker the Doctor was an alien with a set of values distinct from humanity, an outsider with the ability to perceive and condemn that which was lost on others – he should not act human because he is not one and is ultimately what makes the character unique. For Tennant this is not the case. His Doctor is no different to Data from the rancid and nasty Star Trek: The Next Generation. Making the Doctor human-esque, having him celebrate Easter, Christmas, don a tux, fall in love is simply what modern drama expects. The outsider is humanised and becomes part of the accepted, present day, norm. He is no longer critical of human flaws but here to pacify our fears and justify our failings. This move paralells the backward approach of the TV movie giving the Doctor parents. Any difference or suggestion that the Doctor is a hero apart from human norms and values, even biologically, is trampled to make him one of us. This way he can stand for a moral agenda linked to the immeadiate fears of humanity, no matter how misguided or short termist they are. It also reduces the show to being like every other programme, sci-fi, fantasy or otherwise, made these days.
Tennant has made the Doctor a cheap effect, a gimmick of personality and exaggerated facial expressions which distract from the absence of anything more interesting. If David Tennant is one of the key elements in the shows success, he is also instrumental in betraying every ideal it had previously stood for.
5) The End of Time: Part Two Preview
Be honest, after the level of care and attention shown in Part One it can only get worse...BBC website exclusive trailer for Part Two.
The Time Lords, the oldest, most logical, technologically advanced and powerful race in the history of the Universe have their own equivalent to Mystic Meg. In otherwords, expect more superstition and prophecy rubbish instead of any actual story, plot, characterisation, drama...
Timothy Dalton also seems to have stolen the metal glove worn by the baddie in Inspector Gadget.
The End of Time: Part Two. A cat will be just about the only thing not in it. 6) The End
Ikea to issue health warnings after Tenth Doctor dies in cupboard.In their own words...
(1)
huge and epic, but also intimate - RTD
Drama and spectacle are not the same thing.
(2)
I knew I'd write David's last episode one day, so I've had this tucked away. You do think: 'How can the stakes get bigger?' And they do. They really do. I don't mean just in terms of spectacle, but in terms of how personal it gets for him. RTD
By personal I assume we are talking about the prophecy thing again, he believed he was going to die because someone buying chops told him he was going to die.
Incidently RTD, we need to have a chat about the difference between drama and spectacle - you've been hanging around the wrong crowd for far too long.
(3)
Julie Gardner
And as we know, David, he really does knock four times.
Tennant
Yeah, absolutely, and if you think you've figured out what that means, you're wrong!
Gardner
But when you do figure it out, it's a sad day.
Basically somebody gets trapped in a cupboard in the most convoluted, contrived and cynical way a script can possibly manage.
(4)
It's not quite as easy to guess what's happening as you think - there's nightmare sequences, and layers of fantasy, because the Doctor's coming to the end of his time. It's quite interesting to watch things being filmed, and think: 'Oh, I can see what that would look like... RTD
Which story was he talking about? I want to see that one... Oh, bugger.
The End of Time: Part Two - As credible and dramatic as Flash Gordon but not quite as entertaining.The problem is there is no way I can keep writing this stuff without sounding like the comic book guy from The Simpsons or one of those fans that live in the past almost as a masturbatory fetish.
In all honesty there is not really much more I can add without repeating the criticisms above. I can talk about absence of story & drama, focus on spectacle over quality, how past scripts seem to have been cut up and re-used just for the sake of it; incongruent plotting and lazy writing (we were always being told something what was happening rather than anything sinister/bad/dangerous actually happening) and idolising you’re leading man to the point of obsession. I was ready to whine about how the Doctor died a coward, bitching about the unfairness of existence and how he did not want to die... but honestly what would be the point.
I sat down to watch with apprehension and more or less got what I expected.
Time to move on.
Makako en Konvenig
December 2009
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