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.
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