This is where my fandom, my hopes and dreams die to become nothing more than a sense of time, place and memory."Steven Moffat, who's just the most brilliant writer, told me when I first met him that the interesting thing, the defining thing, about The Doctor is that he never quite knows what's going to come out of his mouth in any given situation."
Matt Smith
Oh dear. Moffat seems to have found a revolver and blown the life from the last vestiges of my fandom.
Now I’ll avoid the bit about Moffat being a brilliant writer (cynical and manipulative, yes – brilliant writer, no) and focus on the main issue I have with this statement. The Doctor is defined by not knowing what he is going to say next.
For me this is at odds with what actually defined the show. The defining thing about The Doctor was not verbal incontinence but a sense of moral purpose. When I say moral I do not mean in the sickening Disney sense of the word but something altogether more elemental. Hartnell described The Doctor as a moral magician and in many ways no one has bettered this statement. The show I grew up watching featured a hero who stood against moral and spiritual corruption; a champion for justice and liberty. He stood against oppression, disarmed mass murders and promoted a little anarchy to ensure victims could shake free the bonds which bound them. This Doctor always knew what he was going to say but did not have to witter on like a lunatic to prove his point. The Doctor stood outside the compromised world of human concerns, able to offer a commentary on the evolution and progress of humanity for all its rights and wrongs.
The Doctor lacked cynicism in his approach to life. He believed life was worth fighting for and his adventures through time and space were, for my growing mind, a search to find a better way of living. The show chided imperialism and xenophobia where other shows did not and lost themselves in a neo-right wing haze (anyone who thinks ST:TNG is liberal really needs to take a long, hard look at their value systems) If anything the cultural ancestry of Doctor Who is rooted in the reforming zeal of Lloyd-Gorge and the Churchillian concept of making a stand against evil.
Above all The Doctor engaged the most exotic and endless resource available, the imagination. Just having monsters and sci-fi plots did not make it imaginative, it was the way the show conveyed all of the above. In many ways the budgetary and technical limitations of the past are what made it. Writers could not indulge in pointless set pieces or SFX designed to distract the attention. Instead the show had to draw from the principles of gothic fiction. The show had to lean towards melodrama and metaphysical concerns.
Now I am aware that the past is not 26 years of perfect television. I have watched The Dominators. Yet the above was the ethos which drove it and some writers understood these underlying ideas more than others. At least it tried even if it was doomed to failure.
However The Doctor is now reduced to a series of catchphrases, gimmicks and tricks to affect a sense of personality rather than an actual character with purpose. There is no concern behind the episodes other than that which is in the plot and the SFX drive and set pieces prove the show is a distraction and little else.
This is best demonstrated by the recent case of Norton’s revenge. I missed the actual incident but saw the wave of fanboy fury because a little cartoon Graham Norton popped up at the end of the episode. So what? When the show was relaunched those involved talked of it as a drama programme. A year or so later they began talking of it as a children’s show. The fact that the BBC had a Saturday indent featuring a cartoon montage of Doctor Who, Total Wipe-out and whatever that piece of Lloyd-Webber trash was (I still have trouble believing he is allowed to use the BBC so he can simply fill his already overflowing wallet, what a @*&$) should be enough indication. Modern Doctor Who is nothing more than a bland and sterile piece of entertainment, it is not meant to engage or provoke on a level more than Total Wipe-out.
Ultimately what Moffat is actually saying when he says The Doctor does not know what he is going to say next is that he himself does not know what he is going to have him say next. This is simply because there is no tapestry of meaning or concern anymore. This is not only wrong but leads to questionable writing practices.
Example 1) Paul Cornell always struck me as the kind of person who believes they are left wing but are only left wing in the same way as somebody who sits in Starbucks sipping a fair-trade coffee and reading Things Fall Apart thinks they are being left wing. His work has a major flaw and it is one which stands at the heart of the present show. If you listen to Seasons of Fear you will hear the Romans worship Mithras which, according to the story, is a mystical bull. No, he was not. Mithras was not a bull but an early Christ like figure (the similarities are almost embarrassing for Christianity) What Cornell actually does is what the white Anglo-Saxon protestants always do; reduce other religions to some form of monstrous barbarism. In his novel Revelation we have The Doctor friends with a sentient church and a reverend. In Father’s Day the only sanctuary is a Church and Human Nature is about white, posh upper class people being terribly brave in the face of nasty aliens/the Hun. It is important to stress this simply because we now have a Doctor who celebrates Christmas and Easter. The Doctor has been reduced to a WASP messiah for middle England. Any idea of characterisation has been sacrificed so we have a Doctor who soothes us rather than judges us. The modern show is intolerant to difference and diversity. Aliens have to be evilly monstrous and the hero has to sacrifice his alienisms to be more like us for acceptance.
Example 2) Now Chibnall needs to stop. Everything. There really is no point.
Example 3) The thing about Mark Gatiss is he still thinks Nigel Kneale was a good writer. Almost every script indulges in a bit of necrophilia with the Quatermass legacy in some way. For me Doctor Who, as I knew it, has more in common with the works of Charles Chilton than it does Kneale. The Quatermass stories are about threats to the status quo and how to save it whilst Journey into Space is about questioning the present to evolve for the future. Doctor Who questioned. Doctor Who was about progress and change for the better, not the unquestioning maintenance of the present.
Example 4) Obviously the nastiest example of modern Doctor Who is the Matt Jones cataclysm. A story so devoid of any redeeming features it borders on just being cruel. Somehow the whole story takes the essential core meaning of the first 26 years and reverses it. The Ood are an oppressed race and The Doctor does not even question it. Instead we get a ropey political metaphor about possessed masses rising up against their captors deserving to die (in the subtext the possession can be paralleled to political awakening or knowledge) and some guff about the devil, which Phil Collinson thought made it better than Pyramids of Mars. Of course this is the man who also thinks Emmerdale counts as a serious drama programme.
It would be easy to suggest the casting of Matt Smith lacked imagination. I have nothing against him in particular, if anything he is preferable to the celebrity attention seeker who we have just got rid of, but he was a safe choice (the costume an even safer one) The fevered brains of media execs would have baulked at the possibilities of doing something different simply because they are driven by a paranoia fuelled sense of worst case scenario thinking. This type of over wrought imagining leaves those in charge of artistic output paralysed by a multiplicity of possible failures any choice, be it revolutionary or regressive, offers. It is patronising to always think an audience will reject something because contrary to what these people believe there is no such thing as a typical Doctor Who viewer. In fact there is no such thing as a typical viewer for any type of programme. Yet the belief that there is persists and eventually limits the cultural and artistic quality of what is on offer.
As Stephen Fry pointed out television is now a question of perceived demographics. Every programme is parcelled and delivered to a specific audience type which, in my reckoning, probably does not exist. He also points out that Doctor Who is a children’s programme. Again, this is a problem. Doctor Who was a drama programme. When it returned with Christopher Eccleston it was a drama programme but somewhere along the way it was decided to aim at a particular audience group. I disagree with Fry when he says the show is well written. It is not, Chibnall proves that much. Even if it is for a children it should not mean that any sense of being something more than it is should be eradicated. Even a children’s programme should not be childish in its dramatic vocabulary. I have discussed audience chasing before and will re-iterate that it limits and patronises. A genuine piece of drama has no audience in mind simply because it discusses the basic human consciousness we all share, there is no need to target a particular group because it recognises there is no one overall group. It is accessible to all.
If the Stephen Fry interview did not annoy fandom then the restrained comments of Christopher Eccleston surely must have passed the dozing masses by. In an interview with the Radio Times he talks about his reasons for leaving. For me, it was heartbreaking. Let me re-state for the record, Christopher Eccleston was everything The Doctor was, should have and could have been. He realised the character in a manner which released 26 years worth of pent up potential and I will always love him for it. I’m not going to elaborate on the article, mainly out of respect. It is not for me to use the words of Christopher Eccleston to justify my own argument. Read it and draw your own conclusions.
Now I’m arrogant enough to consider myself right on all five of my predictions about The Pandorica Opens but the fan forums practically had to clear their boards of fan-jism as people climaxed over the episode, even though it was nothing more than a Brannon Braga re-write of Doctor Who: The Ultimate Adventure (and that is wrong in at least two very fundamental ways) I have actually begun writing this, I’m thinking of it as my fandom’s suicide note, hours before The Big Bang. I think I may watch it but would not be bothered if I missed it. I am no longer bothered about seeing another episode for many years to come.
I find myself alienated, or perhaps I am alienating myself, from the show. It is no longer a unique and beautiful programme but a process of reduction and distraction. Leaden ideas are given a glitzy make over to compensate for a paucity of content and imagination, all thanks to a tightly knit cabal of writers intent on re-living their childhood fantasies free from the responsibility and desire to progress human consciousness or culture.
There is nothing in Doctor Who for me now.
There will be no more posts.
My fandom dies here.
This is the end.
The final end.
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