Doctor Who: series whatever-this-is

[vaznetti]

Look at me, posting about TV I have actually watched. From this you can see that I have A LOT of other work I should be doing. Anyway, my opinions are ...

Doctor Who has always been one of those shows where hating it seems to be a prerequisite for being in the fandom. I haven't got that far -- there are things I really, really love about 13 in particular -- but I guess it had to happen that eventually there woulkd be s showrunner whose work I just don't like, and I think Chris Chibnall is it. I was really lucky to have had such a long run with Moffat, whose character- and plot-work aligned almost perfectly with my own desires for the show. But I feel like last week's episode (Orphan 55) was everything I don't like about this & last season.

What do I like: I love when 13 is solving problems and building things. Even this episode had the great "I could build you with half a can of spam" line! The sequence last season where she built her own sonic screwdriver was one of my all-time favorites. (Also, if there is ever another run of x_ship I will have to nominate 13 & Tony Stark (definitely not /, though) because they owuld be a blast. Possibly a dangerous blast.) I also love how she is much more obviously 300% done with dumb stuff people do: this comes out very clearly whenever she encounters sexism, but also for example last week when the Master told her to kneel. The way she kind of rolled her eyes at him was delightful.

Also delightful, that he knelt down immediately to face her.

But otherwise I feel like there isn't a lot holding everything together. The companions are OK, but I don't really love any of them, either singly or as a group. I think it's because (now that Graham and Ryan have reconciled) they don't actually have issues or problems of their own which can motivate a story. Maybe they are all just a bit too well-adjusted, now! The plots are not very well-constructed, and tend to drag a bit, and at the start of them the Doctor often seems a bit dumb (I didn't really care for the first half of the first episode this season, for example, because the Doctor seemed both confused and not very interested in whatever was going on). The moral messages are really really overdone -- this was a bit of an issue last season but Orphan 55 took it really over the top. To be fair, there is a history of that kind of lecture in Doctor Who, but I don't have to like it. I felt like there wasn't enough plot to fill the full show-time, so they just stuck in a five minute lecture on global warming at the end to make up the space. Whereas I think there was enough plot, if only the writers had bothered to follow through with anything they dumped in to the episode.

I will keep watching this season in hope that having an overarching plot problem will help with the sense that the episode plots are too random and the characters lack motivation. I am 100% here for Time Lord chickens coming home to roost, and for the Doctor and the Master to have to work together to undo whatever happened there. But I hope after this one there will be some kind of change -- new companions, maybe? Or at least a rebalancing between "message" and "story", since I think for me that's where a lot of the problem lies. Obviously Chris Chibnall wants to have fun with time travel (we spend so much time visiting the past, and now the future, of Earth!) but for whatever reason his fun with time travel is not my fun with time travel.

Comments

[aceofkittens]

I agree 100%. I felt really annoyed by this two-parter, especially since Chibnall seems to think it's enough to say "because reasons!" when he introduces things like the Master in a totally new body.

[vaznetti]

Don't even bother watching the third episode of this season, it's unbelievably bad.

I actually liked the Master showing up in the opening story, because at least there was some life to it at that point -- before then it had just been really boring to me.

[muridae]

I never really got the hating-it bit, but there were some episodes that were so eye-rollingly awful that it was best for your sanity just to come to mock. From Classic Who (much of which wasn’t) The Horns of Nimon (latish Tom Baker, where he was basically just phoning it in) and The Twin Dilemma (the worst of the many woeful scripts that poor Colin Baker had to struggle with) spring immediately to mind. I don’t think there’s ever been a bad Doctor, though some have definitely been better than others. But the worst periods are primarily let down by bad ideas and bad scripts.

I loved little details like the building of the new sonic screwdriver. I loved getting away from the Doctor and single opposite sex companion setup that had become very stale over the past few years as each companion became the most special human ever. But several of the actual episodes have been so mundane and uninspired that they’ve bored me to tears.

(Whisper it quietly: I still have three episodes of last season sitting on my cable box waiting for me to get around to viewing them. Because there’s always something shinier that I’d rather watch instead. And I completely forgot the show was on on New Year’s Day. That’s kind of sad, considering that I was obsessed with the show throughout my growing up years and - after a cautious start - very happy when it was revived.)

I’d hoped that we’d get a Chibnall of Broadchurch season 1 standard, especially when the handover got so delayed. Alas, we seem to have got the Chibnall of Broadchurch season 2 and the worst bits of Torchwood. At best.

[vaznetti]

I am joking a little when I say that all true Who fans hate the show. But only a little. New Who does seem to be a very argumentative fandom, at least from the outside, epsecially when it comes to criticism of the showrunners and the companions, and I'm aware that I'm doing a bit of both here. Ironically I didn't have much of an opinion about Chibnall before he started, because Broadchurch hit my dead child DNW (I hear it was great! I just couldn't watch it.)

I agree about the great details, and breaking up the Doctor-companion format (or the "heir and spare" format when there were two people travelling with the Doctor, which I also got tired of). But I also agree about the problems with the actual execution of the potentially good ideas. The episodes never feel really high stakes to me, and splitting the focus between three compnaions doesn't work to engage me with any one of them.

[muridae]

You’re not entirely wrong though. If you think modern Who bitching about the showrunners is bad, you should have seen it during the John Nathan-Turner years (apart from the very start, where he was seen as a breath of fresh air). New viewers clearly learned from the grizzled veterans. :-)

Curiously, JNT’s was the last era to try the three companion setup, for all of Peter Davison’s run apart from the final couple of stories, as the cast turnover took place. It didn’t work any better then. At least one of the companions always seemed to get left out, and there was one blatant attempt to cope where they concocted an illness for Nyssa at the start of episode 1 and left her to sleep it off for the next three and a half episodes. It can work - it did for the first two years of the show - but that was often done by separating the characters into pairs - mostly Ian+Barbara and Doctor+granddaughter/granddaughter-substitute. Plus in those days the show filmed and aired all year round, so the four person cast gave them the opportunity to write someone out for a couple of weeks for a holiday or if they were sick. When the show dropped down to a less punishing yearly episode count, the cast dropped from 4 to 3. For me that’s probably the optimum number, if done right.