All entries for Sunday 05 June 2005

Last night's Doctor Who…

… was a steaming pile of crap. For those reading this in the future who can't automatically equate a date with its Who episode, this is the one where an alien from earlier in the series reappears and tries to blow up Cardiff. For people who care about such things and haven't seen it yet, I will be spoiling the hell out of the episode with reckless abandon.

I could just spend the week ranting at my friends about this, but I thought I'd try and get it all out in one burst. It is niggling at me, especially after last week's episode which I really enjoyed, to see that this one had practically no redeeming features. Here is the list:

• Nothing happened. Well, some stuff did, but nowhere near enough to justify forty five minutes of television. It appears they had an episode to fill and a post-it note with a couple of vague ideas on it and just cracked the script out in ten minutes. There was a fifteen or twenty minute stretch in the middle which I could have slept through and missed nothing.
• How many times must we have the villains point out the Doctor's character flaws? Yes, the first time it was nice, but by now I'm bored. I really really have trouble feeling the Doctor's pain when he's getting lectured on ethics by a sodding dalek.
• In a related point, we've been told in these little rambles that the Doctor is "dangerous" and "cowardly" and whatever, and yet on screen he's mostly pretty inoffensive, with the possible exception of the time he tried to kill the dalek. Important TV law, kids: Show, don't tell.
• The "poor little alien" thing. The dalek episode was enough, I don't need to see an enormous creature made of snot crying in a toilet cubicle because it misses its mummy.
• If Mickey is never on screen again, I will be ecstatically happy. I quite liked the resolution to his bit, where he saved the world from the Slitheen and turned down the Doctor's offer of sidekick-hood, but here he was just taking up space. His time is up.
• Whoever was responsible for the incidental music in this episode should be thrown out of a window. The blaring notes to signpost for stupid people that THIS IS AN EMOTIONAL SCENE were absolutely farcical.
• This point was actually made by one of my housemates, and I don't agree with it, but when criticising at this length, it seems wasteful to leave it out: The explanation for the Slitheen's survival after getting hit by a missile was pretty thin. I personally do firmly believe that spending ten minutes explaining such a thing would have been utterly futile and its best to just get it out of the way and move on, but at least it would have been another thing the episode actually does, I suppose.
• The technobabble at the end. After suffering for 40 minutes, the resolution to the story is… bollocks. The villain's speech explaining her evil plan in particular, which appeared to require that I change my degree to Advanced Lengthy Science Fiction Words just to understand it. Crucial TV lesson #2: You should not have to decipher lengthy tracts of gibberish to understand major plot points. On the rare occasions that the West Wing fails, it does so because it lets the story be driven by in-depth political waffling.
• Also, from what little I could understand (and no, I will not watch it again to further my understanding), she had a plan entirely reliant on the Doctor picking up a particular piece of machinery? What?
• The whole "I've changed, I'm not evil anymore" spiel. Obviously, it was a lie, which may explain the glaring contradiction in claiming this after you've been caught murdering dozens of people and attempting to blow up Cardiff, but twist endings do not justify boring middles, and it was a crap twist anyway. Speaking of twist endings, is it me or did the trailer for next week's instalment seem to give the game away rather?
• There is a valid argument to be made that this series isn't aimed at me, it's aimed at ten year olds, and subjecting it to vicious writing critique is ludicrous. But I find it hard to believe that ten year olds wouldn't have got bored and switched off during the torturous fifteen minute whine about the rights and wrongs of the death penalty, interspersed with the soap opera bleatings of Rose and Mickey.

Well, nothing else is occuring to me. In a vague attempt to have this entry contain some positivity, Christopher Eccleston was good as ever and gave it all he had despite the script. Billie Piper also acted well, and I even liked the new sidekick, Captain Jack, although I'm not completely certain whether I liked him in this particular episode or he just reminded me of the earlier, better ones he debuted in. I like the idea of pairing up the Doctor, who's a slightly unconventional awkward hero who likes to sit down and chat to the alien if possible, with a square-jawed Buzz Lightyear type who likes to find the biggest laser gun he can and blast the alien into flesh-chunks. I have no idea if they'll actually take this angle with Jack, but you never know. For now, they seem far more interested in playing up his comedy bisexuality.

Okay, I'm gonna go and practise being a positive happy person now. I realise this post cements my place in the nerd hall of fame, but like I say, I hope this will now stop me repeating this all week in conversation.

: 05 Jun 2005 22:03 |  Comments (8) |  Close comments |  Report a problem