Further Disappointed Whinging About Doctor Who

[danieldwilliam]

I’m not enjoying the current series of Doctor Who at all.  I’m getting pretty close to giving up watching it. The two most recent episodes have not helped.
 
Let’s Kill Hitler was rushed and a bit jumbled and involved the death of a major character (again) who was revived with a magic trick we’ve seen before.
 
Night Terrors also felt rushed. Plenty of time spent establishing the premise and the characters and then problem solved in a minute by
 

1. The Doctor’s huge charisma and empathy creating a profound emotional link which encourages a small scared boy to trust the Doctor, his own father and himself
2. A stranger who has pushed his way into a small scared boy’s bedroom in the middle of the night shouting platitudes at said boy from inside a wardrobe.

 

I think the main plot is moving far too quickly. I think it would be better done over two or three seasons. This would also allow more room for better, better paced episodes.
 
The whole thing feels a little incoherent.
 
I also think the main plot is being done in a way that treats me as if I were an idiot. I don’t need to be constantly reminded that the Doctor dies in some mysterious way. It was the first thing I was shown. The references to the Doctor’s date of death (replacing the references to Amy’s state of pregnancy) don’t help. The Doctor is a time traveller and the date of a particular event seen from my point of view is pretty irrelevant to a bunch of time travellers. This is particularly the case when the characters are engaged in a story where one is travelling through their relationship in a different direction from the other.
 
Underpinning all of this is my unease about lazy solutions to problems and lazy story telling. There are some many deus ex machine kicking about that they are beginning to look like Russian dolls
 
 
I’ll watch the rest of the current series but I can see myself not bothering with the next one.

Comments

[andrewducker]

I could really have done with the whole "he's not your son" thing coming out fifteen minutes earlier in the episode, so that the emotional fallout could have had some space to breathe, and then be decently dealt with, rather than The Doctor basically pushing the father into an emotional realisation that felt entirely unearned.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Rushed I thought. I think it would have worked better as a two parter. More time for the haunted house mystery to bubble away and more time for the relationships between father and son to mature.

I am not sure how I would react if I was told that the Captain was really an alien.

Probably I would respond with a sarcastic "really, you don't say, who'd have thunk it."

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

The "cuckoo" thing had been done in Sandman, so I picked up on it fairly early. I don't know, I'm pretty forgiving of most of the stuff you mention, but then I'm used to TV SF being so bad that this still looks good. When even the characters say: "I know what this is. We're dead. Again." you get the feeling that there is some self-awareness going on.
Stuff I don't like right now is mostly round the Rory/Amy/River/Doctor relationship. There is no depth of feeling anywere in that configuration, and nothing that seems real. If I can't empathise, I don't care. And, for most of this season, I haven't cared. Loved the quick-carpet though. Reminded me of my favourite ever PK Dick line: "I trusted that rug implicitly".

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

True, most TV SF is pretty bad which is one reason why I get so het up about Doctor Who.

I want it to be brilliant.

There. I've said it. I'm vulnerable. BBC please don't let Steven Moffat hurt my beautiful story.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

I honestly think that comic books have made me more philosophical about the handling over beloved characters over time. I've been reading about the X-Men since the early seventies,and they've been in the hands of geniuses and hacks (sometimes at the same time) but I always retain a core affection for the characters.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

I may just have to learn to live through the hacks or with them.

Hey ho.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Stuff I don't like right now is mostly round the Rory/Amy/River/Doctor relationship. There is no depth of feeling anywere in that configuration, and nothing that seems real. If I can't empathise, I don't care

Yes, this also.

I find them a little unconvincing. Amy and Rory seem to swing from mild hysteria about their missing child to being pretty casual about things. I know that it's difficult for the series to spend time on emotional transitions but I think I'd like more about Amy and River's reactions to losing and then finding each other.*

It seems a little like plot driven emotion to me. When the writers need a driver for action queue grief striken angst. When grief striken angst gets in the way of running around then there is a great calmness.

If anyone stole Bluebird I would hunt them down and that would probably be about the only thing I would do until I'd failed. (If someone stole the Captain I'd buy them a bottle of Scotch - they are going to need it).


Fits in with my gripe about a lack of meaningful death. If dying doesn't mean being dead why should I care?

*also Rory's reaction to his daughter dating Amy's best mate.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

It's worse than that for Rory - he gets to be jealous of the Doctor for both his wife and daughter...

Yes. An arc involving hunting down River's kidnappers makes for a good series. Doing it in one episode, then putting her in a box, doesn't work for me.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

*nod* I've begun to have the same thoughts about not bothering to watch it. Only really in the sense that the idea occurred to me, which normally I wouldn't expect it to do - I am very unlikely to stop in reality, as I am taking a completist approach to televised Doctor Who. Having already watched the whole of Six's oeuvre, I reckon I can hang on through Eleven's. But I agree that this current season has been pretty disappointing.

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

With my (totally justified) righteous indignation cooling a little I think I'm unlikely to stop watching in the near future.

However, I'm sad that the thought has even occured to me.

I'm more sad that I don't think that this thing that I treasured as a boy and, more recently, as a father, is worth shaping my family's Saturday afternoon around so that we all sit down together and watch it.