Doctor Who: The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe

“Regard all critics as useless and dangerous"


Especially this. Especially me.

Witness the recent television revolution demonstrated by such innovations as Young James Herriot, young Endeavour Morse, young Merlin, young Robin Hood and an infantile Doctor Who. At this rate I’m beginning to think that The Simpsons gag about Watchmen Babies will be a reality by 2013.
One thing I am prepared to bet money on is that the next Christmas Who offering will be a play on Alice in Wonderland. Think about it, a teenage girl, sexual imagery and a chance for a lead to wave around his sonic phallus. It is almost too good to be true.
There is no point in writing a review of the Christmas special, the trailer says it all – young girl, Doctor grinning and talking about Christmas (you know Christmas, it is the religious festival that all Time Lords and aliens seem to celebrate) and more shots of the Doctor waving various extensions of his masculine sexuality around. Same old, same old.
There is one concern aside from my usual gripes. At what point has the supposed great and good of the intellectual world lost the ability to see what is going on here? I can understand reporters and reviewers from the tabloids not caring. The average tabloid TV review reads more like a gossip column and then Simon found out his wife had cheated on him, he was distraught... However even The Guardian, apparently a bastion of cultural insight, is singularly unable to present a review able to deconstruct the true nature of the present show. This is where I have to concede Chomsky was more or less on the right track, in considering that the intellectuals (horrible word but it is useful in criticizing those who set themselves apart and above the rest of us) commentators and anyone else who is meant to analyse and observe our culture betray the society they live within by avoiding the truth. The fact that Moffat gives us a show with an ithyphallic lead who hangs around pre and post pubescent women and joyously kills anything not remotely human hardly seems to raise eyebrows, let alone thorough analysis. I suppose what it says is that providing you get a journalist pissed on free booze, be they from The Sun or The Guardian, they won’t actually care what kind of amoral bilge your spewing out.
And here we have the beginning of a much greater problem. I do not hate Moffat. I disagree with him, what he does and what he offers to the greater cultural consciousness but I do not care about him for good or ill. Ultimately he is just a manifest symptom of a much wider issue, that of cultural degeneration. For example both Channel 4 and the BBC promote an aspiration to mediocrity that is almost absolute and all pervading. When you watch Channel 4 now, where almost every programme is a variation of Skins or Big Brother reality style contests, remember this is the shipwreck Mark Thompson created. This was the station which gave us A Very British Coup, GBH, a live reading of V by Morrison and actually dared to show foreign language films at peak times and now it is the very worst kind of commercial whore, one that continually underestimates the intellectual capabilities of its audience. The executives at Channel 4 hate their audience because they genuinely believe they are stupid. It is little wonder that we then find the BBC giving us young Robin Hood, young Merlin and a juvenile Doctor all of whom are practically identical.

As I said Moffat is just a symptom. There are bigger problems to deal with than him. Our culture is stuck in a peculiar kind of torpor at a time when people will soon need it.
I believe The Iron Lady will be out soon, the flattering biopic which ignores the fact that the woman and her acolytes wanted to re-create society by outlawing homosexuality, placing women back in the home, censoring writers and their output (witness the outcry over V or The Monocled Mutineer), returning to Victorian ideals of workers’ rights (19th Century trade unionists were imprisoned or shipped to Botany Bay) and making greed the route to power. It was a desperate time for those who believed in liberty but there was a resistance against the odds.
Here I can offer a minor segue... You know how I am always banging on about the amorality/immorality of the modern show, well I may seem like I’m about to contradict myself. Now we all know the story of Remembrance of the Daleks to the point that re-naming it Genocide of the Daleks seems to make sense. Here is the thing; I have no problem with it. Good people do bad things; a hero must become tarnished by the battles he fights. It is not just good drama, it is actually right to show a hero take a road which raises questions about his motivations. The term hero is mired in confusion, a hero is not good beyond all good, nor should they be. Such Christian Puritanism is nothing short of hypocrisy. Look how He-Man spent every episode using brawn and brute force to overcome difficulties only to offer a moral lesson at the end of each episode. Hypocrisy. See how in Die Hard 4, the McClane hero character spends 2 hours proving how right wing paranoia and violent confrontation are justified while maintaining an unnatural interest with his daughters sexuality (the basic gist is that he is the only man worthy enough to fuck his daughter by right of battle). Hypocrisy. Take how Disney promote morality under the auspices of a neo-right Christian concern whilst making stars who can financially exploit an audience whose hormones are at fever pitch. Hypocrisy.
If you want a moral show, without the hypocrisy, you have to look to South Park. It is quite simply the greatest satire of our times, extraordinarily clever and insightful but often misunderstood or simply disregarded. As I said morality should not be confused with Christian puritanism but be considered an honest unerstanding of ourselves as individuals and the world we live within.
When the Doctor destroys the Daleks in Remembrance it is a moral question and one the show and its fictional characters raise. Yet it is also important to remember the political context in 1987. The right was in ascension and the left had no way to stop it (partly self-inflicted due to the delusions of the extreme left wing) It was a desperate time, all bets were off and the future was looking bleak. Against this backdrop it is no wonder the Doctor finishes the Daleks for good, it is merely an expression of frustrated reason and a desperate compassion. In the modern show the Doctor is not actually standing for anything, other than lusting after women (who he probably first met when they were children) or trying to sell (toys, himself, a stagnant value system) When he orders the genocide of The Silence he has no idea who or what they are, he actually seems more interested in flirting with the woman who turned out to be his best friends baby daughter. When the Doctor assembles his army to rescue Amy and her child (his future girlfriend) he abandons the humanitarianism and compassion the show previously stood for by acting as though his actions have a price to be paid by those he helps. The disturbing inference is that the Doctor believes he has a God-like right of power over peoples lives and deaths; in payment of a debt incurred through previous help he expects you to die for him. Instead of investigation, analasys and reason he, like the most regressive of action heroes, resorts to force as his first option. This is why the sonic screwdriver is now an all purpose weapon of mass destruction and sexual metaphor (consider what the gun means to the average action hero - it is an extension of aggression, will and instinct over rivals, an image of physical and sexual dominance) There is no morality here, only hypocrisy and amorality, simply because morality is the ability to question both the self and the actions one undertakes. Morality does not equate with Puritanism, a hero does not have to be blameless but they do have to be honest and self aware because the negation of awareness, compassion and justice is the main expression of evil.
Now, socially speaking, we are back on the brink. The right wing are back, led by an unholy trinity who have no conception or ability to imagine outside of themselves (effectively this negates any feelings of compassion that could have been engendered for others) Politically we have been betrayed and undermined by a decade of Babel styled politicians who sought to obscure truth so only lies could be believed. This time my concern is there is no one to speak out or stop the degeneration. Our writers, our artists and intellectual betters all seem to lack the dynamism seen in their forbears. Our drama is nothing more than soap opera designed to provide a fix to emotion junkies, our art has been turned into mere novelty for the noveau riche by Saatchi, our writers are involved, work for and complicit with advertising (itself a form of financial expoitation which deadens free thought through mediocrity) our novelists seem unable to tell the difference between a novel and film script... I could go on but you get the general idea. The complacency present in modern society and culture was dangerous, will be dangerous and is dangerous. There are more important things going on now and likely to develop over the coming years than some bloke and his head boy lead who have taken a once glorious show and made it regressive, ithyphallic and amoral.

Although it is part of the problem, it is not the main problem. Doctor Who was once something more than it is now and, rather sadly, so were many other things.

It is time for the obsession with mundanity to end.

Doctor Who: The Wedding of River Song

Some years ago a group of journalists began spreading a rumour that Umberto Eco did not write his books but constructed them be feeding random bits of information into a computer and allowing a randomised program do the rest[1]

This was obviously nonsense; Eco is nothing short of a genius. Yet I am reminded of the story simply because the accusation could be levelled at Moffat with considerable ease. Each story is constructed using the same plot devices and ends up repeating itself until the show is swallowed by its own anus. Even the latent sexism seems to be stuck in an endless loop of repetition (Churchill “what happened to time?” The Doctor “A woman” and “hell in high heels” etc)

This leaves one obvious problem, any attempt at rational criticism will have to repeat and repeat itself until it is as pointless and derivative as the show itself. In short there is nothing I can say that I have not already said before.

My suggestion, if anyone is reading this or actually cares, is to print out some of the below, cut them up into sentences (apologies, I know some of them are not great but dyslexia is an absolute arse at times) and then re-assemble them into a newly constructed article. I’m sure it will convey my general thoughts on the episode in question.

Perhaps the best thing I can do is quote the eleventh Doctor himself as a way to criticise the show.

“I sell toys. This is what I do now.”

Yes, rather sadly it really, quite literally, is.

---

[1] On a separate note... Almost as if the existence of cosmic karma is trying to prove its existence to me new novels by Christopher Priest, Haruki Murakami and Umberto Eco are being released within a few weeks of each other. This at least seems to balance out my heartbreak over the show and proves there are still writers out there who give a damn.

Doctor Who: Closing Time

When the show returned our first sighting of the Doctor was of him blowing up a shopping centre. Several years on and the Doctor is now working in a similar centre selling toys.

If anything it perhaps highlights the change that has taken place behind the show. It is no longer a drama programme about an anarchistic time traveller but an entertainment brand. The lead actor is not actually playing the Doctor but a peddler selling the brand. Even the fictional companion is shown to be a famous model within the fictional world; the child asking for an autograph a metaphor that the brand is targeted at children, not through drama, but something as shallow and meaningless as advertising or celebrity idolisation.

As such the modern show is nothing more than an entertaining advert for something else. Even the BBC execs, eager to defend a piece of rubbish like Strictly Come Dancing, referred to Saturday night television as entertainment night. According to the exec concerned Strictly was as much a part of the entertainment schedules as Doctor Who; here he betrayed the general view within the organisation – it is not a drama show but an entertainment programme, nothing more and as long as it keeps to the now standard formula nothing can go wrong.

Formula for a new Doctor Who Script

0-30 min: Scooby Doo style monster chasing or time paradox shenanigans.

30-35 min: cloyingly sentimental drivel often confused with drama or characterisation.

35-40 min: annoyingly tacked on scenes pertaining to be part of a story arc but having little to do with story and everything to do with the incomprehensible, cynical and instantly gratifying pursuit of plot over meaning.

40-41 min: trailer for next week – somehow being more coherent than most of the episodes themselves.

42+ min: dreary rendering of theme music that makes everyone glad they run trailers and voice overs in place of closing credits these days.

Doctor Who: Night Terrors

Not actually a television drama programme but an incoherent and rambling love letter to Steven Moffat.

Incidentally, can somebody explain the following to Mark Gatiss

1) Real people do not talk like that. Real people below the middle class do not talk and act like the intellectually deficient ruffians from an Agatha Christie novel.

Try and credit people outside of your own social sphere with being more than walking cliches and stop trying to impress the boss.

Let's Kill the Show! Oh, we've already done it...

I feel sick.

OK, I watched. Half of it, then I just could not take anymore.

Yes, I was wrong about eye patch woman but the sentiment and meaning still apply.

The Guns 'N' Ammo philosophy still in play (woman with gun shooting stuff) Not so much empowering but, when you consider the Silurian female is now a cannibalistic, gun toting warrior, a distorted and demeaning portrait of women. Their power is derived from a makeshift phallus (gun, sword) and always intend harm to the heroes, ergo powerful and strong women are represented as dangerous and mentally deranged.

Episode - usual stuff really - young girl obsessed with Doctor (now unavoidably cosmic grooming, and just for good measure they put her in a school uniform while she is fixated with the Doctor - nothing fetishistic about that at all...) Time travel as ultimate plot device, fake death of lead character etc.

We have a Doctor who can have the following conversation

Amy: Why does she want to kill you

Doctor: ...She is a woman...

Apart from latent misogyny, what is that actually meant to mean?

Yet another duplicate of Karen Gillan. I could point out that these duplicates are really a subliminal device for turning a woman into two-dimensional pornography by making them vacant, easily manipulated dolls (they are not real women with thoughts/feeling or independence but have the attributes of physical womanhood - hence a male reduction of gender to appreciable two-dimensional gratification)

The kiss of death with poisoned lipstick... No comment as I may begin to sound like a Freudian. I cannot claim to be a feminist (I'm male, mostly straight and do find the female form a thing of beauty) but come on, at least think about the messages you're broadcasting into the public consciousness.

More messianic idolisation of the Doctor

Oh, and a polite Hitler played for laughs because, above everything else they came to represent, the Nazis were really comedy gold. Still maybe it does not matter, it is all in the name of inappropriate, amoral hokum aimed at children...

I'm off to throw up.

Doctor Who: Let's Kill Hitler

BBC in crisis after they forget to add lesbian tinge to stereo typical female baddie..

Before we begin, a plea... Please do not read if you are the kind of person who posts “Why, oh why, oh why, do people take it too seriously” on forums. I have no time for wilful ignorance or unquestioning acquiescence, especially from someone who believes these are traits to be promoted.

I genuinely do not intend to watch the series when it returns. The flagrant amorality, a lead who goons around like a sexually frustrated adolescent and story lines which... Well, I have been through this already.

I understand the woman with the eye patch is returning. When we last saw her she was acting without any real motivation, her villainy was almost for the sake of it. Although there is an interesting cultural backdrop to this character which connects to one of my many niggles with the modern show.

Our society favours the girl. Before the Twentieth Century the birth of a boy was the most desirable outcome for any would be parents, be it as an heir, as a potential for income (young boys started work earlier than girls) or simply because overall social conditions favoured the male (a woman’s best hope, for security or general life expectancy, was marriage and there were more women than men in Victorian society which made this a precarious hope at best). Now, according to data recorded by mid-wives, most parents hope for the birth of a girl and our culture is orientated with images of femininity, as overt sexual images (lads mags), tools for selling via their sex (advertising) or media icons (the cult of celebrity)

The consequence of this is far from a feminist society or civilized equality. As the last century drove on the shift towards the cultural preference for the woman became mired in sexual neurosis and exploitation. We supposedly live in a civilized society but, in the centre of London, you can easily buy congress with the flesh of young woman who is, and let’s be honest about this, a slave.

Yet, to be accurate, we do not desire the woman. Our society craves the girl, the innocent and young virgin. Think of the stirs caused by Natalie Portman after Leon or, more recently, Emma Watson and Miley Cirus. As such the images we see and the icons that are created are of younger and younger women. There is a proliferation of images, movies and music all adhering to this. The BBC fire Moira Stewart, even though she is more capable of her job than many others; men will stash away a personal harem of two-dimensional magazine girls and check out Vikki, aged 19, on Page 3; the movie premiere becomes a claim to fame simply by how well would be starlets dress, or undress, their flesh for the eager cameras. I could go on, but you get the general idea.

Doctor Who, to a greater or lesser degree, has been as much a part of this as anything else. Witness the replacement of Liz Shaw by Jo Grant as an example. But the show never sexualised the links between lead and companion. The female companion was a friend, not a consort. The worst excesses of the show were exploitative, Tegan and Peri spring to mind, but it was often an uncomfortable element and eventually dropped away to the more traditional, familial role models.

However...

With the advent of the Tennant era the idea of companions as platonic companions was no longer admissible; instead the Tardis became a harem where young women would look at the Doctor with tears in their eyes and say ‘I luv u Dr.’ It is also worth noticing that the Tennant era becomes a pro-longed re-interpretation of My Fair Lady. The nice, white, middle class man takes away the young ruffian girl and teaches her to be better than her past and be in love with him. Her black boyfriend, left behind by the nice new couple, is left to marry someone of the same skin colour (for some reason the idea of an inter-racial relationship seemed too much for the producers to contend with) Even Sarah Jane became an ex-wife figure, her role relinquished to the new and younger girlfriend.

What Moffat does with the show is even worse. His scripts/stories seem to revolve around a few basic, and continually re-used, plots; the main, and most worrying, being what a tabloid could call cosmic grooming by the hero. The Doctor is not so much an adventurer in time and space but a being using time travel as a means of meeting and forming a bond with young girls who will later throw themselves at him when they reach the age of consent. Even the Tardis has been revealed as a one dimensional harlot lusting after the Doctor.

It is no surprise that the villain of Let’s Kill Hitler will be an older woman, missing an eye, and carrying a hatred for, rather than a sexual need for, the Doctor. Apparently she will be the worst war criminal in history but all she seems to have done is kidnap a member of the Doctor’s harem; until he declared war on her like a frustrated and barbaric king of legend. Now she has stolen the baby daughter of his best friends, one of whom has an infatuation with him and, less we forget, this baby daughter is his on-off girlfriend in the future. Suggestions that it may be inappropriate to describe her as worse than Hitler, based on what we know so far, are probably pointless when considering the skewed morality the show exhibits of late. The eye-patch woman is automatically excluded from the shows notions of good femininity, defined by the Tardis harem of recent years, by virtue of her difference and how, like a wicked stepmother, she constantly deprives the hero of his young, pretty female consorts. Will the episode deal with the magnitude and consequences of her villainy or simply rely on the subliminal notion that a mature, disfigured woman must be evil because she does not confirm to the main cultural theories on desirability. Shame I’ll never know.

I also understand the monsters, and the modern show has to have monsters to emphasise how anything different is fundamentally evil, will be called the Teselectas. Seriously? What a load of testicles.

I would love to see the past couple of years psycho-analysed.

Doctor Who: Let's Kill Hitler - Huge Spoiler!!!

Seriously, you’re searching to try and find spoilers for this?

Wow.

Ok, let me assure you it will probably feature the Pond family, Amy, Rory and their gun obsessed daughter (personally, I blame the parents) trying to find the Doctor. One of them comes up with the idea of killing Hitler as a way to get his attention (damage to the timeline etc) Cue all manner of comic, time paradox shenanigans. Obviously it will all stop for one moment to remind the viewer that the Second World War was actually quite horrifying. Although horrifying it will not be enough to stop TV producers from exploiting it for an hours worth of mundane comic, time paradox shenanigans.
I may actually place a bet that the Doctor and River flirt amongst a pile of dead Nazis.

Sorry, I'll come clean. I could not resist baiting the fanboys with the attention grabbing title.

Doctor Who: A Good Man Goes to War?

The Doctor is never cruel or cowardly.
Terrance Dicks

1) Introduction
'You can imagine how much I hate them. It's only fans who do this, or they call themselves fans. I wish they could go and be fans of something else...I just hope that guy never watched my show again...”
Steven Moffat

Although it is not your show, is it Steven? Doctor Who is a mythology which, over the years, has saturated into the public consciousness and become part of people’s lives. The idea that you own it in any way is as absurd as wanting people to not be a part of the cultural landmark that is, and always was, bigger than you. I doubt it actually matters anyway; after all, you have done as much as possible to wreck the collective mythology.
The old show can be defined be the Terrance Dicks dictum “The Doctor is never cruel or cowardly.” As the show progressed the mythology expanded but the core principle and motivations remained unchanged.
So let me make one thing abundantly clear, what has been going on over the past seven weeks has nothing to do Doctor Who or the mythology it had created. It has the common archetypes we all know but they are merely scenery to a dangerous and devolved interpretation of everything it professes to continue.

2) Ethos
Looking at the title A Good Man Goes to War it is difficult to know who the good man is. It is not the Doctor. The side bar quips, though fanciful, attest to this fact. The Doctor as presently portrayed is not a hero or neither does he have any similarity to the ‘moral magician’ envisaged by Hartnell. Instead he breaks the Terrence Dicks dictum by being both cruel and cowardly.
Recently Moffats Doctor has re-written a mans life to suit his own ends, organised genocide, used the sonic screwdriver to go on a shooting spree with his girlfriend, killed an enemy that was beaten and at his mercy, made a pretence to care about the rights of duplicate life forms just so he can find their weakness and executed one with the knowledge he has acquired (with the now lethal sonic screwdriver) These are not the actions of a good man, or Time Lord, and lack the sense of morality, justice and compassion the Doctor previously stood for. There is little difference between this and the hypocritical liberal and faux morality which sits at the core of the Star Trek franchise. In many senses this new Doctor has more in common with American action heroics than any of his predecessors. Consider 24. This is a show about an anti-terrorist agent who kills and tortures to stop a mass-cataclysm from occurring. It works via an end justifies the means philosophy made plausible by post 9-11 paranoia. Justice and compassion are made redundant by the primitive notion of fear of the unknown. This fear of the unknown be it political, cataclysmic or philosophical is at the very core of right wing ideology. Any chance of change, evolution, progress and liberty become castrated through the right wings belief that maintaining present harmonies, no mater how disharmonious they are to the majority of people, is an end which justifies the means. The idea that the suspension of civil liberties or traditional notions of justice are inevitable in the fight against evil is fundamentally totalitarian.
This is at odds with the Doctor Who I knew and loved. The Doctor was about endless wonder, embracing the unknown and initiating change. The Doctor of old taught us to investigate and question notions of war, death, oppression, political autocracies. Violence was not a solution to a problem but part of it. Yes the Doctor had to fight, but it was not portrayed as heroic and the Doctor himself was always disdainful of violence as a resolution to conflict. This is not some pacifistic mumbo-jumbo, rather an Orwellian principle. If the present series looks to action heroes for its defining ethos, the old show drew from the principles of social justice and freedom that inspired Orwell. Yes, such principles have to be fought for, and the old Doctor did indeed make a stand, but they are hard won and the fight will always carry consequences. In essence any of the criticisms directed at JNT and Saward during the eighties can be multiplied and directed at the new show with relative ease. The problem is the people who made those very criticisms, Gary Russell, Paul Cornell, Chris Chibnall et al are the very people who have paved the way for something not just worse but something which is morally bankrupt.
The new Doctor has resorted to murder not reluctantly but casually, and even with a triumphant sense of glee – violence and the ending of life are shown to be the easiest route to resolving any conflict or problem. The new Doctor is not about change or progress, but a one dimensional reaction to any given situation and resolution through the most primitive of means.
The ethos at the core of the present show is not heroic, nor is it moral or ethical; the new ethos is banal and diseased.

3) The Eleventh Doctor – Goofball Ass
Now the Doctor stopped being the Doctor a long time ago, but only now are the reasons bordering on the perverse. The greatest problem with Tennant was the need for him to be liked and accepted by the media peer group and fellow luvvies. Where this need came from it is hard to say, possibly the man himself, the BBC or even the production team. This resulted in the lead writer turning the show away from Doctor Who and into a romanticised portrayal of David Tennant in space. This is why almost nothing interesting happened in his tenure and the series was mainly coasting it on the charm of the leading man. It is also worth noting that all of Tennant’s major drama roles since Who have continued to be soft sell compromises designed to keep him in the public’s affection. True. I’ll recant the day I see him playing a paedophile struggling to find redemption (although such a drama is unlikely to ever be made, I know – it got rejected last year)
Alarm bells should have begun ringing like the cloister bell back in the Tennant days. The very first time we see the Doctor he is a renegade, a criminal on the run and hiding out in a scrap yard. Subsequently he became a traveller is space and time, exploring infinity, making friends and enemies along the way. He was never part of a group or clique and made a stand for justice and liberty. When Tennant took over something changed. The Doctor was no longer a lone traveller, he was a soldier. He fought in a war. This very notion was an anathema to the Doctor of old. Even the Eccleston Doctor seemed unlikely to be a soldier or have fought in a war, indicating he was the buffer stopping two forces tearing creation apart. By making the Doctor a soldier Tennant and RTD made him a conformist and, at the end, a snivelling coward “I don’t want to go”. These were traits the original character had always struggled against.
Now we have Matt Smith. He seemed like a nice guy and a better option at first, less of an ego getting in the way of the actual programme. Yet I am now at the point where my reaction to seeing him goof around borders on violent anger. I seriously want to smash the television at every forced expression and speech. Matt Smith is not just bad at being the Doctor, he is not the Doctor.
Part of his failure stems from immaturity. An easy accusation to sling considering his age but one proved by his performance and interviews. This is the man who summed up the Doctors reaction to the personified Tardis as “being a little turned on” The comment is as stupid as it is inane. The character of the Doctor is a 900 year old alien yet, according to Smith, he gets a boner as soon as some busty wench starts flirting with him. It is a juvenile take on a pre-established character.
Now it would be tempting to state he plays the character like a hormone crazed adolescent but that only covers part of his failing. His mannerisms border on the goofy and the delivery of many important lines lack brevity, gravitas or any sense of belief (the delivery of lines like “Another Ood I failed to save” are just offhand and lazy) In essence the character he portrays has all the grace and nuance of Scooby-Doo. Each gesture over compensates in cartoonish mannerisms, struggling to convey a forced sense of eccentricity but failing and becoming an exaggerated caricature. There is little difference between the real Matt Smith Doctor and the cartoon shown in the ident before the show.
What I cannot forgive is the way he is complicit in portraying a Doctor who is not only cavalier with the lives of others but prone to play with them as well. The Doctor never, ever played with life or lives, be they of friend or foe. The McCoy Doctor was often accused of such cruelty, which is odd because it was nothing of the sort. The Doctor in season 26 forced Ace to confront her past and become a healthy and emotionally stable adult – such growth is often painful and he stood by her as a true friend. It was only in some of the later fan fiction that the character became intent on wounding people (Nightshade, Love and War and to be honest I stopped reading as a result of those fiascos) Smith allies his Doctor with a casual cruelty only previously seen in the series villains. It does not matter if he is re-writing a mans life or toying with a sentient substitute of his companion before murdering her, the only principle this Doctor is becoming able to express is one of sadistic power at arbitrarily judging or killing those he encounters. These are principles the old show stood against and mean that Smith is not playing the Doctor but some gross perversion of the character bereft of any defining goodness.

4) Anti-intellectualism
It has to be argued that the series is pursuing an agenda of anti-intellectualism with an almost relentless vigour. If anything it is a reflection of the wider media attitude. There is a movement toward a rather cynical reductionism in television, how else can you explain the offensive cultural wasteland that is BBC3? Part of the problem lay with people like Mark Thomson, the BBC DG. He ruined Channel 4 by turning it into a cynical and creatively inbred shadow of its former self and he is now exercising his talent for reduction at the BBC. His contribution to our culture can only be paralleled by what Napoleon did to Venice.
Doctor Who is no longer separate to the whims of manipulative media execs but a part of their plans. As stated previously, in the days before the BBC realised the show could be a cash cow for exploiting the Harry Potter generation there was a relative freedom. Television, film and even literature is now becoming devoid of diversity. The pressures or need for commercial success mean progress is slowed to the point of stagnation; you have the same idea reproduced over and over simply because it is safer option than the new. Should something different flourish or find popularity it is turned to the ends of conformity. This is why Doctor Who, Robin Hood, Merlin and even Sherlock are indistinguishable from each other. The old series simply got on with doing what it did on its own, sometimes well and at others poorly but it rarely compromised its integrity. We now have a show without integrity.
This can be seen in the casting of Matt Smith and Karen Gillian themselves. Rather than doing something brave they simply got people not too different to the time before but younger. Media execs perceive audiences reject change or something different so, as a result, TV rarely progresses these days. We have a pair of youngsters cast for the fact that they will not alienate an audience; a primarily younger, toy-buying, audience. Yet the ratings are now at a level which saw the BBC describe the show in the eighties as “tired” and “languishing in a backwater”. The resolution to this will be painful and made by media executives with no interest in substance or drama or what has really been happening. As the series slumps various management non-entities will decide it is the show, the format and its archetypes, which are to blame, not the content as it stands. They will look to re-invigorate the series. The obvious answer they will leap to after many, many lunches and meetings will be to cast a female Doctor. Now I used to have a problem with this. I once viewed it not as a question of equality but an act of ideological appropriation. These days a female Doctor does not bother me, if anything Mary Tamm already proved it would work. If done properly, say by casting someone like Miriam Margoles, the show could return to the heights promised by Christopher Eccleston (The Unquiet Dead not included) and beyond. Yet, it will not be done for the right reasons or with the concept of substance in mind. I can see the trailer now. Daleks, Cybermen and Sontarans marching, then they stop and move back slightly. Cut to a plastic faced, celeb wannabe, twenty-something who's acting career consists of a stint in Eastenders. She looks to the camera in a sultry manner and says “Hello boys...”She points the sonic screwdriver/gun at the screen and fires.
The arrival of Moffat was always going to be a problem for concepts such as depth and substance. After all this is the man who took a group of bland stereotypes (the cocky one, the frigid one, the wheeler-dealer etc) and made a name for himself by calling Press Gang a drama. Zombies in gasmasks, clockwork robots, living statues, living shadows/fishes/things that come out of books are all designed to provoke a base emotional response, fear. It is the basest form of writing, lacking substance and integrity. As I have also pointed out before Moffat is the man who wrote a story associating books with flesh eating shadows/fish – a demonstration of anti-intellectualism in itself. The idea that the show has to scare is based on the hype and misunderstanding of a bunch of right-wing puritans who thought they knew better than everyone else. In truth Doctor Who was about dealing with the nature of evil, violence and fear, and never tried to scarify a generation of children. To try and promote fear in an audience, which is what Moffat has been doing since the show returned, is manipulative and dangerous. Now he is in charge.
The mechanics of fear have taken a step back to allow a crazed and incongruent didacticism to run amok in its place. What we see is an insulting disregard for storytelling and emphasis on the nature of spectacle. Day of the Moon is a prime example. There is no thread of story or character relating to the previous episode. Suddenly everyone is on the run, being hunted by the man who was helping them. Then everyone is dead, oh no they’re not he was really helping them. There was no dramatic reason, nor story motivation for this opening – if anything it actually conflicted with everything which preceded it. Instead the writer, arrogantly out to impress and dazzle, believed a casual audience would accept the break in logic and congruency to whoop and holler like idiots on a rollercoaster. However simply telling an audience this is happening right now because a bearded Matt Smith tied to a chair looks dramatic (even though the context had nothing to do with drama) or having an alien species state “you should slaughter us all on site” rather than do anything remotely evil just smacks of complacency. Yes one of the Silence killed one person but considering the suffering and appalling conditions prevalent throughout the world this hardly justifies genocide. It is writing that believes those watching do not have the intelligence to think in anything but the moment, hence incongruent events are dictated to the audience rather than a story being told.
Segue: Yes, one day I would like to get through a whole article without mentioning story vs. plot and narrative congruency.
The rant about spoilers only serves to highlight how Moffat is concerned with style and spectacle over substance. Twists such as the regenerating child, Amy being pregnant, kidnapped or substituted are merely pyrotechnics. They should embellish the drama, not become it. Ultimately it falls back to what can be called the principle of writing for instant gratification. Rather than having a portmanteau like story where the drama and characters unfold gradually and congruently, everything has to be about the very second the viewer is watching. Failing to believe an audience has an intellectual capacity beyond that of a goldfish means there is a constant need to keep making attention grabbing scenes, even if they do not create a unified whole. Adhering to this philosophy can only distort and lessen.

5) The Beast with Eleven Backs
Contrary to the belief of the modern fan sex and sexuality were subjects discussed in the old show but without having to wave flags or resort to Carry On style humour as we see at present. Black Orchid, Kinda, Caves on Androzani and Survival all touched on the issues of sex and sexuality.
Now Caves of Androzani is deceptive. It would be easy to mistake it Sharez Jek’s motivation as lust. It is nothing of the sort. If CoA is about anything it is about the need for intimacy; the scars Jek carries are psychological and prevent him functioning as a human being. Kinda is about rape; Survival has the lesbian thing going on. The subtlest treatment is shown in Black Orchid. What appears to be an Agatha Christie pastiche is actually about sexual repression. For instance Tegan and Nyssa can dance = mature, healthy sexual development but Adric cannot dance = immature and sexually naive. It also discusses the Doctors relationship with Nyssa. The use of the harlequin costume (a nice metaphor in itself for trickster/trickery/duality) and the attack on Nyssa creates a parallel in the dramatic story. The Doctors relationship with Nyssa is based on equality, respect and mature notions of sexual dynamics. The son however is a tragic figure, desperately trying to reclaim the love and life he lost, yet the expression of this manifests itself in unhealthy ways (obsession, physical attack) The beauty behind the writing here is that, like most real people who could be described as psychologically wounded, he is both vulnerable, being in need of help and unpredictably mercurial at the same time.
So, in a small two parter from the eighties you have a dramatic and psychologically aware portrayal of sexuality. The new series cannot claim to reach this level of subtle storytelling or maturity. If anything, the way sexuality has been employed over the past year is regressive and prurient.
Casting our minds back to The Eleventh Hour what we see is a stream of innuendo, sex gags and porn references. This in a show primarily aimed at children. Now, as the above demonstrate, it is possible to discuss such issues without resorting to dressing the companion up in a kinky outfit and having her menaced by a penis monster. Moffat could get away with this immaturity in Coupling because (a) it was a comedy and (b) it was so ridiculous that any notion of maturity or psychological realism was negated from the start. Yet in a drama it is problematic simply because it begins to expose a rather distorted view of sexuality and women.
The greatest flaw in his writing is juxtaposing a girl with her sexually active, older self. Although, be clear that this is not in anyway paedophilic and would be inaccurate to suggest that it is. If anything it is a poorly thought out but re-occuring motif. Yet it is part of the mechanism which shows female characters being defined by their sexual relationships with men. The teenage mother in the zombie gas mask story – she is a single teenage mother and the plot defines her as so; the girl from The Girl in the Fireplace falls in love with the Doctor; Sally Sparrow gets pulled, twice by the end of the episode; River Song and her fixation with the Doctor (STOP PRESS this now turns out to be a relationship with a woman the Doctor knew as a child aka The Girl in the Fireplace); adult Amy Pond is first seen wearing a kinky outfit and working as a kiss-o-gram, gets married, pregnant. The women here are defined as characters by their emotional and sexual relationships with men, not as women or people in their own right. The image of Amy imprisoned in a cell because of her biological function is not so much a plot device but a metaphor for the way Moffats writing presents women.
If anything Moffat is a product of the industry he works within. Phil Collinson once stated it was obvious that the Doctor would fall in love with his companion. Well, no Phil. It was not obvious and it was not necessary. The reason it happened was because the modern conception of drama focuses on relationship issues and bourgeoisie neurosis, neither of which have anything to do with real drama. The idea of a platonic relationship between a man and a woman is not seen as dramatic; without the sexual dimension to the relationship there is no way writers/directors/producers can provoke the emotional response in the viewer. Once again, trying to deliberately manufacture an emotional response in an audience is the basest form of writing. In the modern world of TV drama it would be impossible to make a series like Tenko simply because it did not concern itself with voyeurism or worries about rising mortgage rates.

6) The Death of Imagination
The award for the most patronizing and ignorant comment made about the present show goes to a poster on Digital Spy who indicated that a general audience may get lost by the complex science fiction ideas in the new show. Well done that person for incorrectly assuming that a general audience is stupid, that the new show is complex and that it has anything remotely to do with science fiction.
New Doctor Who does not represent modern science fiction. Read Olaf Stapledon, Christopher Priest, Iain M. Banks, M. John Harrison or even Ian McDonald and you will see the genre is not so much an end in itself but an opportunity to explore what it means to be human. There is a limitless drive to question, explore and discuss – much like Doctor Who used to.
In his Cosmic Trilogy C S Lewis, a man I probably differ with on many issues, used the concept of scientific romance to portray his faith as universal. Now, this is unfashionable in the modern secular climate but Lewis did something interesting. In his first novel Out of the Silent Planet he makes a point of showing us that our fears of alien monsters are a projection of our own inadequacies as a species. The real aliens are more civilized than the human characters. Charles Chiltern did the same in Journey into Space. In essence they link the curiosity of wonder with goodness, intelligence and progress.
What the new show gives us is something quite different. Rather than inspiring the imagination it becomes limited by the weight of our fears. The unknown is portrayed as dangerous and that different to us is almost always hostile. The present obsession with plot twists, shocks and cliff-hangers does not suggest we look outside of ourselves with wonder but forces us to live in an insular and momentary present.
This is not in the tradition of science fiction or designed to make us think about the wonders of the universe. At the age of five I remember being exhilarated by Warriors Gate and Castrovalva. Even to the point that, after part three of Castrovalva, I ran around the house for two days pretending I was caught in a space-time trap. The complex notions in these stories were easily absorbed thanks to fantastic storytelling, they fuelled my imagination. Even the popular fan whipping horse known as Time Flight fascinated me when I realised people perceived two levels of reality.
Yet timey-wimey paradoxes are not exhilarating simply because they exist for the sake of existing and justifying a didactic plotline. There is a definite lack of romance or imagination in the new show. What the production team do is create ideas but in themselves ideas are both common and meaningless. For example...
Idea for a story - Doctor Who: Angels in the Endless Dark
A motley group of ships have made a pilgrimage to a newly discovered planet. Some believe it proves the existence of God, others the Devil. The planet is a violent red gas giant. On its surface the gasses form contorted and screaming faces, each marked by bulbous teeth and eyes. Some claim they hear voices from the planet. One in particular, a religious leader, decides to move his ship into the gravitational pull of the planet. As the ship is sucked down reality begins to warp and characters begin to experience aspects from their past, some welcome and others not. The religious leader becomes a possessed marionette, held up by his tendons and used as a mouthpiece by some unknown force. The Doctor is given a chance to move the ship out of orbit or face the consequences. He succeeds but many of those aboard are psychologically scarred and reduced to madness.
Now, it would probably take an hour or two to turn this into a script. It is a basic John Wyndham rip-off where some ancient, Lovecraftian power has stirred in its eternal slumber. Yet, beyond the basic level of horror fetishism there is very little, if anything, there.
The show as we now see it is not only an anathema to what went before but stands against the developments in science fiction. Merely re-writing a story line from Beauty & the Beast with a shock tactic plot or set-piece pyrotechnics is not complex. It is not about concepts, curiosity, wonder, imagination or what it means to be human. It is a sequence of moments designed to engage the attention and nothing else. As I said, ideas are common. Substance is the defining factor and there is no substance in Doctor Who anymore.

7) Radio Times 4-10 June 2011 – Deconstruction of an Interview.

“The only clue to Moffats genius...”
“...does that make Moffat a sort of everyman?”
In an institution like the BBC there seems little ability to intelligently and objectively assess. The above comments made by the interviewer demonstrate a schism between honest journalism and misleading gossip. It is pathetic and pandering to describe Moffat as genius. The interview is not an article but an advert designed to inflate the ego of the man himself and persuade the audience to agree, even though there is no qualification of the claims made. Moffat is no genius, even in an age when the term is over used its use here is just plain sycophantic.

‘“...it has to be the level of horror that a man with ridiculous hair and a bow tie can deal with.”' As a philosophy this proves just how lacking the modern show is in morality or substance. For a start the show was not obsessed with horror but the Freudian concept of the uncanny. This was used as a means of motivating a drama which sought to demonstrate that, with courage, obstacles can be overcome. The obsession with horror in the Moffat era is no different to the aims of the Hollywood splatter factories – use base notions of fear to generate shocks for the emotionally stunted and nothing else.
What is more disturbing is the reference to the Doctor. He is now defined by his hair and a bow tie. Forget the notions of character or the figure the old mythology created, the Doctor as perceived by Moffat, and portrayed by Smith, are a superficial figment based on what the Doctor should appear to be like rather than how he should act.

‘“Matt Smith is signed up forever.” ‘
My first reaction was horror and then profound depression. Then I realised Smith is not signed up forever. The series is pretty much dead already and for the first time in my life I would not be sorry to see it gone and you know what, this institution the BBC believe they have will be forgotten by the audiences they are targeting.

“There have been a few grumbles of late about the plotlines and their perceived complexity.”
It is patronising to describe a complaint as grumbles and questions the intelligence of anyone who voiced the opinion to use the word perceived. The interviewer is again so busy fawning on behalf of the BBC publicity machine that she acquiesces to dismiss such complaints without representing them. It is not an issue of complexity but congruency and respect for the basic notions of writing and storytelling. As I have previously said Moffat is not writing drama but factious exercises in instant gratification which lack story, character and sense.

‘”And what a great role model for children...”’
Really? I suppose the message is that as long as you’re goofy, smile and waffle on like a twat then the odd bit of murder and cruelty doesn’t matter. As I have been trying to explain for several pages this new Doctor Who made by Moffat, this new Doctor portrayed by Smith, is no role model.

‘”And the Silence. You can’t remember them, so that’s good.”’
The Silence are an enemy designed to scare rather than be interesting or an exploration of immorality. They represent something quite nasty, essentially their evil stems from living on earth and nudging human evolution every now and again. The actual fear the Silence represent is the blind prejudice against immigration. If anyone had actually thought, just for one second, about substance rather than provoking fear in the audience this could have been avoided.

‘”When the Doctor is standing at Stonehenge speaking to all the spaceships, that was good.”’
My, you are modest Steven but no, it seriously was not good. It was arrogant and fatuous. It simply represents the idea that the Doctor can become the object of almost messianic idolisation without having to do anything. It is only since Tennant arrived that the Doctor needs to constantly remind the audience that he is clever or dangerous or capable of destroying entire fleets of spaceships. It is just another example of didacticism, tell the audience and hope they do not notice that the opposite is actually the case.

‘”Or when the spitfires go into space to attack the Dalek spaceship”’
If anything it is the perfect example of spectacle over substance.

8) A Good Man Goes to War or A Bad Man Enjoys Death and Mayhem?
So the tag line Dreading the moment River turns to Amy and says “You’re my mother” I had below the title last week turned out to be right. Wow, you cannot underestimate just how bored it makes me. What was the point? Seriously, what was the point?
Really it was nothing more than the episode of Beauty & the Beast where Linda Hamilton dies crossed with a Star Trek style time paradox, only not as good. I’m pretty sure he also just wound up re-writing whole sections of Jekyll.
Incidentally just inserting a few lines about the warrior Doctor to try and explain away recent events does not work. Raising an army, destroying whole cyber fleets and having rules of engagement is used to satisfy the attentions of the audience but then Moffat attempts to distance himself from the moral catastrophe he now presides over. He has been happy to have the lead character being cruel or cowardly for entertainment. It just makes him cynical and manipulative to exploit such actions and then try to justify them.
Perhaps worst of all it takes the messianic idolisation associated with this Doctor to whole new levels – he is no longer a Time Lord. He is now a god able to influence the conception of a child.
The nature between content and the desire to constantly engage the attention on only one level has created a schizophrenic schism at the heart of the show.

As for Let’s Kill Hitler, give me a break.

9) Conclusion
What’s the bloody point? The show I loved is dead and its mythology lies in ruins.

Degeneration 101 (old stories re-imagined in the spirit of the new series) Part 21: Survival

Run. Run for your life. They can always hurt you if you bleed. The Doctor and River have no mercy.





OK, it was either that or a picture of River and a gag about Mrs Slocombes pussy having teeth.

As we all know Survival is beautiful. It has a story, depth, layers, characterisation, an alien race who are not evil but simply adhere to a different morality, a re-invention of The Master which actually works and a subtle lesbian subtext. In short, a talented writer intelligently exploring complicated ideas and what it means to be human without prejudice or being morally judgemental.

However if the new programme makers got their hands on it and gave it to one of their loyal hacks to re-write here is how the trailer would run...

Scene 1: Doctor stands facing Cheetah people in all their snarling ferocity.
Doctor: Oh. Ah, I think I see some puddy cats. Err, good pussy...
Scene 2: Cheetah people surround Rory and try to attack him.
Scene 3: Doctors dialogue played over assorted shots of humans being menaced by Cheetah people.
Doctor: This is not an invasion, it’s survival of the fittest. The human race has to fight and prove its fit enough to survive in the universe.
Scene 4: Wounded Cheetah person crawling to a lake edge. Amy jumps on it and punches it in the face.
Amy: Don’t mess with my husband you bitch
Scene 5: Doctor on horseback, River standing beside him. A flash and jeeps carrying big game hunters materialise and head towards the Cheetah people firing.
Doctor: Ah, as always the cavalry arrive just in the nick of time.
River swings onto horse behind Doctor and cocks laser rifle...
Doctor: Giddy up Mr. ED
River: Now the hunters become the hunted.
As they ride towards the battle River begins firing into the backs of the fleeing Cheetah people.

Next Time – Kinda: where the Doctor helps a lone officer in the space colonial service destroy a savage tribe who violently resist the progress humanity offers them.

Harry Potter and The Impossible Astronaut

One of the many visual puns for the phrase totally pointless...







I have never been able to understand magic eye pictures. They were all the rage at university, usually on the opposite side of the room to the Dali poster. Their owners would show them off to admiring crowds who would see dolphins, flowers or the meaning of life but all I ever saw was an image resembling vomit made by a rainbow after a Smarties bender. Well that and the headache, nausea and, on one occasion, blackout. I would blame dyslexia but other dyslexics seemed to get them. Eventually a medical student told me some people are not able to visually process them, usually the intellectually sub-normal ones. Great, thanks for that.

The reason I tell you this is it may help put what I am about to say in to perspective. I did not get it, any of it, on any level at all. Yes I watched The Impossible Astronaut & Day of the Moon; call it a sado-masochistic impulse without a happy ending.

My sidebar review was going to read as follows...

A factious exercise in instant gratification that lacked story, character and sense.

However I should probably explain the thought process behind this assessment (please excuse the flagrant immodesty of quoting myself)

1) “factious exercise”

It is not hard to see that Moffat has a few ideas which he simply cuts up and re-uses.

• Time paradoxes and time travel as a get the writer out of a hole mechanism.
• Children – especially young girls. This obviously leads to the juxtaposition of a young girl and her sexualised older self.
• Temporary/fake death of main characters.
• Monsters designed to be what someone imagines will scare rather than having any thought behind them.
• Sex. Handled in a way that makes Doctor Who seem like an episode from Coupling.

Using the above the BBC may as well publish a Make your own Steven Moffat Doctor Who adventure book. Here is a sketch of my attempt


One of The New Day Rising because, according to Moffat and the BBC, a few adult sex references in a childrens show never hurt anyone.










Pre-credit sequence: in the interior of Tardis characters goon around and talk about Earth. Tardis stops, Doctor checks monitor
Doctor: Oh, that’s not cool.
Amy: We’re not on Earth are we?
Doctor: Well, yes. Well, no. Well, the Tardis isn’t sure which one we were meant to be going to.
Cut to exterior. The Tardis is in space surrounded by seven identical Earths.

What ensues is various mincing around as the Tardis crew land, meet The Six, all different versions of child Amy from the alternative Earths (to fulfil the juxtaposition with older, sexually active self just have the six discuss who they would prefer to marry when they are older – The Doctor or Rory), get chased by the main villains of the piece – gimp suit wearing The New Day Rising (imagine temporal Cenobites and you'll have the right idea) and die.

Basic plot: The New Day Rising has engineered several Earths in an attempt to ensure their evolutionary timeline, abandoned by our Earth and timeline, can come to fruition. Episode one can end with the Doctor materialising the Tardis around the six Earths he believes to be fake as they are due to be eradicated in a way which will release enough energy to sterilise the remaining Earth. As he does so The New Day Rising reveal to Amy/Rory/Winsome Song that the Earth he has left is one of their engineered models and The Doctor has served their purpose. Inside the Tardis the Earths begin to explode, tearing the ship apart and causing the Doctor to fall into the fiery maelstrom the Tardis has now become.

Resolution: As the new Earth and timeline begin to reset (World landmarks and people begin to disappear in time with Big Ben chiming – itself fading before the final chime) The six search the vanishing streets finding the Tardis console and a burnt skeleton (just to add to the ridiculous the fire can have burned all the flesh away but left the Doctor’s jacket scorched as a clue to the corpses identity) The regulars are phased out of existence but the six child versions of Amy use the Tardis console and pilot it into the Earths core. Here they are able to re-write everything in a haze of blue light (probably using the residual temporal energy from the changeover in reality is a way to explain away the improbability of this) Cue The Doctor and co in front of the Tardis and a muddled explanation of how the Tardis remembered the Earth and its original timeline back into being (you can even have a line like “Hey nonny nonny, my gal remembered it bonny”)

You see, it is that easy. Don’t deny it. If this was written by Moffat the forums would be quivering with a servile acquiescence to his genius.

However it means nothing. It is a cut and shunt job. If it were a car it would fail the MOT. This is what I mean by factious exercise. It is a programme being written by joining dots rather then any desire to create a congruent story. Like the Harry Potter franchise it has no meaning outside of its own fictional context and merely lowers the expectations of a generation by presenting a level of facile banality. As I have said many, many times there is and always will be a difference between story (what a writer intends to say and drives the events, characters and themes) and the plot (what happens) By joining dots like this there will only ever be one plot, re-presented time and time again in a variety of guises and lacking any story to drive it.

2) “instant gratification”

The main problem with these episodes and others written by Moffat is that they exist to serve the moment. Every scene, every dot and moment is purely for itself.
Already I hear the hordes screaming about the series arc; the temporal pregnancy, the regenerating child and Winsome. These are not linear or congruent aspects of plot or story. Consider the two episodes just passed and ask the following questions. Who were The Silence? Why were they evil? Simply living on the Earth at the same time as us and nudging our history every now and then does not necessarily make them bad. The very cells to our own bodies carry symbiotic organisms which live in harmony with us. How were they linked to the destruction of the Tardis? Why was every creature in creation scared of them? Try to answer them based on what has happened rather than using what we think has happened to fill in the gaps. The answers are pretty sparse. According to the Radio Times The Silence blew up the Tardis. How? Why? The actual answer is that it does not matter. The events happened to serve the moment of television which was being viewed. Think chewing gum without the added bonus of fresh breath. It is a momentary attempt to engage a viewer on an arbitrary level.
This is how modern drama pans out these days. It is easy to write like this. TV people these days use emotions in the same way a drug dealer uses smack; make people experience some form of emotion in excess to the relative experience and they believe people will be hooked. It may not be true but it promotes two unintended results. The first is bad writing. Emotions are a thing of the moment. An emotion can only exist in the present context and is not tethered by reason or rationality. As such drama has stagnated by the obsession with the emotional here and now. Every drama has to continually raise the stakes to keep the emotional provocation working, hence why Eastenders is just downright nasty and malicious. Secondly it can de-sensitise an audience to real experience and sends the message that an emphasis on exaggerated emotions is good. It is not. Have you ever met an emotion junkie? A person who needs to be stressed/angry/happy etc to function? They let the chemicals flow through their bloodstream because it gives them that fix and makes them immune to logic and reason and rationality. Exaggerated emotions are dangerous things, trust me. I’m bi-polar and have experienced enough of them for myself and seen the results in others.
The result is that people who make television programmes do not aspire to an artistic vision or making great drama simply because they rather patronisingly believe that an audience is not interested in such things. There view of the public is so low that they assume people can only function or perceive at the given moment in time on an instinctive, emotional reaction.

3) “lacked story, character and sense”

Some reviewers will credit the episodes as being complicated, this is wrong. They are not complicated just badly written. Congruency was sacrificed for cheap, attention grabbing moments. The reason it appeared complicated is because it was written by someone trying show how clever they are rather than actually being clever.
Look at the fiasco which was the Christmas special. Did anyone in the production team point out the moral implications of what The Doctor does in this story? Essentially changing history and re-writing one mans past to suit his needs is totalitarian. Think what happens to Winston Smith in Room 101. His identity is changed to serve the purpose of a corrupt state. It does not matter if the man was good, evil or misunderstood. In a just democracy even the evil (and lets be honest that word is used to describe almost anyone the right wing press dislikes these days) are entitled to a fair trial. The Doctor abandons any notion of justice or liberty to re-write reality in a way that suits. He wins by cheating rather than doing anything brave or noble. This new Doctor executes The Silence without giving an exact reason as to why they deserve to die other than the fact that these aliens have been living on the Earth and they are different to us. The rather uncomfortable and right wing parallel to immigration here goes against everything the show stood for in the first 26 years.
The fact is the modern show appeals to the middle class right not because the production team are right wing, probably far from it but because of the lazy undercurrent of bourgeoisie humanism. This bourgeoisie humanism is dangerous not because of the good it seeks to do but the arrogance which it promotes. A belief in bourgeoisie humanism is no different to believing in the age old religious notion of human supremacy. Instead of being special because we are chosen by God we become the centre by our own evolutionary prowess. As such any notion that the individual or our species are a transient moment in a greater journey is lost. There is no responsibility inherent in the actions taken because our own transience is ignored for the precious here and now.
In The Brain of Morbius The Doctor states “Death is the price of progress” Moffat reverses this to fall in line with the ideas of human-centric thinking. Death in Doctor Who is no longer real, the lead characters die but come back unharmed. Russian Cosmonists like Federov and his ilk believed it was possible to reverse death and even resurrect the dead. They pictured a glorious and undying race who would reign like Gods. In truth immortality would be hideous. It is the obsession of the unimaginative, decadent and corrupt. Death is the only thing given to us at birth, not just as a leveller but as a motivation. Without death any concept of evolution and the progress which follows wither and stagnate. Moffat is obsessed by faking/cheating death simply because it is the moment, forever and unchanging, and our place at its centre is assured. The Doctor now represents the middle class, human ideal. He does whatever is required to maintain the status quo and prevent progress.
This is what happens when plot is placed over story. You get a series of events that make little sense and promote an agenda which, hopefully, was unintended. Any idea of sense becomes drowned amidst a wave of moves designed to distract the attention rather than engage.
The character of The Doctor is no longer that which I grew up with. He is now a set of mannerisms and tricks of personality that evoke an artifice of moral unaccountability.

Anyway I’ve probably said all of this before. In fact I swore I would never say any of it again.

Look at Transition by Iain Banks (I would actually recommend the unabridged audio version simply because the narration and voice acting is superbly executed.) It is clever, complicated and discusses ideas and concepts through a story not just a plot. It is also about morality and how we must fight to preserve it (left wing in the proper sense of being left wing, not the modern BBC idea of it) It is everything Moffat pretends to be but fails to become.

Sod it, this time I genuinely will read Olaf Stapledon instead.