Hmm, this could be the fault of soap operas. Obviously soap operas have a lot of external action but as time went on, more and more characters were given inner turmoil that affected their actions. I'm thinking especially of how this was later used on Dark Shadows and Kolchak: The Night Stalker. I pick these two because they influenced Chris Carter who created The X-Files to be the same way. Mulder and Scully seem halfway normal in the pilot episode but as the series progresses, we find out more previous trauma as well as giving them new trauma. This matters because The X-Files begat Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, Firefly, Lost, etc. and they begat the current version of Doctor Who
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He doesn't have to beed_rexSeptember 9 2016, 05:26:59 UTC
I think you ask a really good question (and I agree with your penultimate paragraph, too; it would be nice to have a hero to look up to again - or at least, who was a catalyst for stories, instead of being the story.
I think Davies revival, including the Doctor as a tortured soul, worked pretty well. Where things went wrong was that he never seems to have recovered from the trauma of the Time War, and to me, that smacks of lazy (or at least, of unimaginative) story-telling.
After all, it's pretty of easy (to riff off of ericadawn16's comment above) to write soap-operatic drama. You don't need to imagine new worlds or new characters, you can just keep on re-visiting old ones and poking around in the wounds.
Granted that some people really do suffer eternal PTSD, and that good stories can even be told about their triumphs and tragedies, but that kind of story isn't really what we sign up for when we see the old blue box spinning through the cosmos, is it?
I think it falls into the same reason as "why doesn't television ever depict healthy, happy marriages"? Because they perceive that people just want drama and angst and are turned off by happy, content people. See example A: "Asylum of the Daleks" where Amy and Rory's marriage was upended for the sake of one episode of drama. Did they have legit issues? Absolutely. But instead of crafting an actual story out of it, we just get hit with the angst that's needed for one episode, then it's never addressed again
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Comments 5
Long answer: when I have more time.
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I think Davies revival, including the Doctor as a tortured soul, worked pretty well. Where things went wrong was that he never seems to have recovered from the trauma of the Time War, and to me, that smacks of lazy (or at least, of unimaginative) story-telling.
After all, it's pretty of easy (to riff off of ericadawn16's comment above) to write soap-operatic drama. You don't need to imagine new worlds or new characters, you can just keep on re-visiting old ones and poking around in the wounds.
Granted that some people really do suffer eternal PTSD, and that good stories can even be told about their triumphs and tragedies, but that kind of story isn't really what we sign up for when we see the old blue box spinning through the cosmos, is it?
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When the show got updated from a learning program for kids to a family drama.
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