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.

[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".

[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.