Doctor Who thoughts
Sep. 23rd, 2011 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
netgirl_y2kI was on the Guardian website earlier this week on my daily lunchtime quest to actually complete the quick crossword without the use of google when I saw this post: Has Doctor Who got too complicated? Which seems to me the wrong question to ask, anyway the answer is no, Ghost Light is complicated, S6 is-- Well, if I were asking the questions I'd ask: Is the current series of Doctor Who convoluted and a bit shoddily written? To which, I suspect, some people would say yes, some would say no, and I would say, um, stop confusing me with your many questions! And then I'd write a long post trying to work out why, although I've found something to adore in just about every episode of Moffat's Who, somehow it doesn't come together as a whole for me.
I've worked out the difference in my feelings about S1-4 and S5-6. During RTD Who there were bits that I thought were stupid and ridiculous (all the series finales post S1) there were bits that I disliked and will cheerfully never watch again (Love & Monsters, Waters of Mars) and there were bits that I disliked so intensely that had I been living alone at the time I would have started chewing the television (Donna... Just... Donna.) But despite all of this I never less than loved Doctor Who, the whole messy, ridiculous all of it.
Moffat Who, I like, I greatly like the vast majority of it, but I don't love it. And I spent a lot of S5 trying to work out why I didn't love it. I wanted to love it. I felt that I should love it. It was obviously cleverly written, it was beautifully made, Eleven fixed a lot of the emo manpain problems I'd had (or fandom had convinced me I should have, another post for another time, me thinks) with Ten, Karen Gillan was sex on legs, and Amy was a fun character. Plus, people whose opinions I trusted were talking about it like it was almost perfect television, why couldn't I see what they saw?
I wondered if it was Matt Smith (it is and it isn't, when he's good he's fantastic, but when he's not I find him terribly jarring), I wondered if it was that I hadn't latched on to Amy and Rory the way I had Rose, Martha and especially Donna (sort of, and I'll come back to this), I wondered if it was Moffat (yes, probably, I think he's a great writer of individual episodes, but I think he has shortcomings as a showrunner, namely in maintaining consistent characterisation and, well, episode quality, but this is purely a matter of personal taste.)
In the end I just wrote it off as S5 being objectively very good but on some lizard brain level not entirely working for me.
And all that was just to give you some idea of how I felt going into S6, which I so desperately wanted to love. And while I've enjoyed the vast majority of it, and while it gave us The Doctor's Wife the finest episode of Doctor Who there's ever been, I also feel it's magnified all the things I didn't like about S5 but couldn't quite articulate. The crack arc hadn't worked for me in S5, but that mattered less because I didn't feel like it took anything away from the series as a whole, the Melody-is-River arc... does.
So, the series opened with the tIA/DotM two parter, and I know a lot of fandom had a problem with the way the Doctor got rid of the Silence, and I didn't really, my personal moment of "Where has the Doctor gone and who is this impostor?" came nearly at the end of the two parter. Like I was saying earlier, when Matt Smith is good he's very good, and when he's at his best is in scenes with children, Night Terrors, The Beast Below, anything with wee!Amelia. This incarnation of the Doctor loves children, it was what defined him for me, then we get:
So, this little girl, it's all about her. Who was she? Or we could just go off and have some adventures. Anyone in the mood for adventures? I am. You only live once.
I'm sorry, what?
Which I think kind of set up a pattern of the arc being shoehorned in whether it made any sense for the characters or not. The next example being TRF/AP two parter, an episode that seemed to only exist to set up the fact that that Amy was a Flesh clone, something that I would have thought could have been accomplished without boring me to tears for a fortnight (um, I have said that this is all my personal opinion, right?)
Which brings me to Amy in AGMGTW, I said earlier that I hadn't latched on to Amy the way I had previous companions, but I can't help but feel she's been very badly treated this series. Scratch that, she has been very badly treated. She's probably had the worst lot of any new series companion.
Some comparisons: Rose was separated from the Doctor, and you can argue whether having your dream life all but gift wrapped for you is all that terrible (not hard to guess my feelings on the subject) but Rose thought it was a sad thing and it was treated as such, Martha was so affected by the year that never was that she couldn't face getting back in the TARDIS, what happened to Donna was dreadful, but both fandom and canon treated it as dreadful, it was acknowledged.
Amy has been kidnapped, lied to about it by her best friend, woken up to find herself giving birth to a baby that she didn't know she was pregnant with, bonded with her daughter, lost her, got her back, had Melody dissolve in her arms, and found out that she's really River Song. And there's absolutely no emotional fallout from that, and you know what, it's fine that Moff and co. didn't want to get into that, but the solution is not to do the stolen baby plot in the first place.
And then there's LKH, which I found a lot of fun the first time I watched it, the trouble with it is that the fact that it's a lot of fun didn't do much to disguise the fact that it's sole purpose was to get Melody from being, well, Melody back to the River Song we know in the shortest time possible, thereby cutting out anything interesting about her being Amy and Rory's daughter. I also don't think LKH was helped by there being the hiatus in the middle of the series. I don't know about anyone else, but after AGMGTW I worked myself up into a near frenzy thinking God, the resolution of this is going to be amazing.
Also, as a brief aside, I really think it was a mistake not to tell the actors about their characters relationship until it was in the script.
I have said before, I really liked Night Terrors, TGWW and The God Complex, I thought they were all amazing episodes massively overshadowed by the Melody plotline being dropped like a hot potato. I will never accept Amy "time can be rewritten" Pond not wanting to search for her stolen baby as anything other than terribly false, and probably the worst offender of the "we are doing this clever plot regardless of whether it makes any sense with this set of characters" thing that's been going on recently.
It was aggravated by the fact that it wasn't mentioned even when the story was directly about parents and children, or how the Doctor's kind of fucked up Amy's life, where you think it might have been relevant.
In conclusion, why won't you let me love you, Doctor Who? All I want is to love you.
I've worked out the difference in my feelings about S1-4 and S5-6. During RTD Who there were bits that I thought were stupid and ridiculous (all the series finales post S1) there were bits that I disliked and will cheerfully never watch again (Love & Monsters, Waters of Mars) and there were bits that I disliked so intensely that had I been living alone at the time I would have started chewing the television (Donna... Just... Donna.) But despite all of this I never less than loved Doctor Who, the whole messy, ridiculous all of it.
Moffat Who, I like, I greatly like the vast majority of it, but I don't love it. And I spent a lot of S5 trying to work out why I didn't love it. I wanted to love it. I felt that I should love it. It was obviously cleverly written, it was beautifully made, Eleven fixed a lot of the emo manpain problems I'd had (or fandom had convinced me I should have, another post for another time, me thinks) with Ten, Karen Gillan was sex on legs, and Amy was a fun character. Plus, people whose opinions I trusted were talking about it like it was almost perfect television, why couldn't I see what they saw?
I wondered if it was Matt Smith (it is and it isn't, when he's good he's fantastic, but when he's not I find him terribly jarring), I wondered if it was that I hadn't latched on to Amy and Rory the way I had Rose, Martha and especially Donna (sort of, and I'll come back to this), I wondered if it was Moffat (yes, probably, I think he's a great writer of individual episodes, but I think he has shortcomings as a showrunner, namely in maintaining consistent characterisation and, well, episode quality, but this is purely a matter of personal taste.)
In the end I just wrote it off as S5 being objectively very good but on some lizard brain level not entirely working for me.
And all that was just to give you some idea of how I felt going into S6, which I so desperately wanted to love. And while I've enjoyed the vast majority of it, and while it gave us The Doctor's Wife the finest episode of Doctor Who there's ever been, I also feel it's magnified all the things I didn't like about S5 but couldn't quite articulate. The crack arc hadn't worked for me in S5, but that mattered less because I didn't feel like it took anything away from the series as a whole, the Melody-is-River arc... does.
So, the series opened with the tIA/DotM two parter, and I know a lot of fandom had a problem with the way the Doctor got rid of the Silence, and I didn't really, my personal moment of "Where has the Doctor gone and who is this impostor?" came nearly at the end of the two parter. Like I was saying earlier, when Matt Smith is good he's very good, and when he's at his best is in scenes with children, Night Terrors, The Beast Below, anything with wee!Amelia. This incarnation of the Doctor loves children, it was what defined him for me, then we get:
So, this little girl, it's all about her. Who was she? Or we could just go off and have some adventures. Anyone in the mood for adventures? I am. You only live once.
I'm sorry, what?
Which I think kind of set up a pattern of the arc being shoehorned in whether it made any sense for the characters or not. The next example being TRF/AP two parter, an episode that seemed to only exist to set up the fact that that Amy was a Flesh clone, something that I would have thought could have been accomplished without boring me to tears for a fortnight (um, I have said that this is all my personal opinion, right?)
Which brings me to Amy in AGMGTW, I said earlier that I hadn't latched on to Amy the way I had previous companions, but I can't help but feel she's been very badly treated this series. Scratch that, she has been very badly treated. She's probably had the worst lot of any new series companion.
Some comparisons: Rose was separated from the Doctor, and you can argue whether having your dream life all but gift wrapped for you is all that terrible (not hard to guess my feelings on the subject) but Rose thought it was a sad thing and it was treated as such, Martha was so affected by the year that never was that she couldn't face getting back in the TARDIS, what happened to Donna was dreadful, but both fandom and canon treated it as dreadful, it was acknowledged.
Amy has been kidnapped, lied to about it by her best friend, woken up to find herself giving birth to a baby that she didn't know she was pregnant with, bonded with her daughter, lost her, got her back, had Melody dissolve in her arms, and found out that she's really River Song. And there's absolutely no emotional fallout from that, and you know what, it's fine that Moff and co. didn't want to get into that, but the solution is not to do the stolen baby plot in the first place.
And then there's LKH, which I found a lot of fun the first time I watched it, the trouble with it is that the fact that it's a lot of fun didn't do much to disguise the fact that it's sole purpose was to get Melody from being, well, Melody back to the River Song we know in the shortest time possible, thereby cutting out anything interesting about her being Amy and Rory's daughter. I also don't think LKH was helped by there being the hiatus in the middle of the series. I don't know about anyone else, but after AGMGTW I worked myself up into a near frenzy thinking God, the resolution of this is going to be amazing.
Also, as a brief aside, I really think it was a mistake not to tell the actors about their characters relationship until it was in the script.
I have said before, I really liked Night Terrors, TGWW and The God Complex, I thought they were all amazing episodes massively overshadowed by the Melody plotline being dropped like a hot potato. I will never accept Amy "time can be rewritten" Pond not wanting to search for her stolen baby as anything other than terribly false, and probably the worst offender of the "we are doing this clever plot regardless of whether it makes any sense with this set of characters" thing that's been going on recently.
It was aggravated by the fact that it wasn't mentioned even when the story was directly about parents and children, or how the Doctor's kind of fucked up Amy's life, where you think it might have been relevant.
In conclusion, why won't you let me love you, Doctor Who? All I want is to love you.