(no subject)
Okay, I can't help it, I need to rant about last weekend's Doctor Who.
Firstly, I've got to say that the first two episodes of the series were pretty good, and I'm hoping it'll carry on that way. The first episode wasn't a masterpiece, but introducing a new Doctor and a new companion at the same time was always going to be hard and it made a good job of it. The second episode was made of win.
But this third one, featuring the Daleks, was disappointingly badly written, and I can't help wanting to pick it apart. It was the first episode in the series not to be written by new head writer Stephen Moffat.
The first thing that annoyed me about it was that Winston Churchill was a complete non-character. He had no character development at all and felt more like a robot than the Daleks, since all he really did was repeat the same thing over and over in different ways. ("I want to use the Daleks to win the war. I want to use the Daleks to win the war. etc.") There was an interview with the writer Mark Gatiss on Doctor Who Confidential where he kept saying something like "not everybody likes Winston Churchill but Doctor Who isn't the place to have that conversation", so I'm guessing that Gatiss has something against Churchill and thus couldn't bring himself to do anything with the character except have him just sort of be there as a piece of period detail.
Well, maybe that could have been acceptable. But then there was the bit with Spitfires going into outer space. Now, at first I thought that was just a harmless bit of silliness, but on reflection it's actually an insultingly idiotic bit of silliness that should have been re-written.
Let's think about it for a second. The air-raid siren has already been called when Amy asks Bracewell to find a way to fly Spitfires into space and defeat the Dalek spaceship (which is causing all the lights to come on over London, attracting the German bombers). I guess at that point there's only a few minutes at most before the enemy arrive. Now, Bracewell is a Dalek-built android with a super-brain, and I can accept that he might have some stuff lying around in his workshop that could be used to make a Gravity Bubble. The Daleks might have allowed him to play around with that sort of thing as a sort of plan B, in case the Doctor didn't show up. And maybe, just maybe, the knowledge that he is a robot has unlocked a Commander Data-like ability to put stuff together really really quickly. So I can accept that Bracewell can built a Gravity Bubble machine in time. But Bracewell's workshop is in an underground bunker in the middle of London, so no matter how quickly he built the devices there's no way he could have got to any Spitfires to install them. Unless he travelled by Gravity Bubble, I guess - maybe you can use them to fly around really fast without putting them in an aircraft, and maybe he constructed one extra so that he could get back to the bunker in time for the next scene. But I mean, come on.
But anyway, that's not even the thing I really wanted to moan about. I'll get to that in a second but first I have to mention that this episode also had the annoying thing at the end where the Doctor tells all the main characters that they're "brilliant", even though they've actually been a bit useless throughout most of the episode. FOR PITY'S SAKE STOP DOING THAT! It's patronising and annoying and I'd really hoped it would leave with Russel T. Davis and the 10th Doctor. If you want me to think the characters are brilliant you have to make them do brilliant things, it just isn't enough to keep saying it over and over again.
ANYWAY, the thing I really wanted to rant about was this scene, the bit where the new Daleks emerge from the Progenitor chamber. Click on the link and watch it - or more to the point, listen to it. This is supposed to be a scary scene, right? I mean, Daleks are scary, right? So why is the score some kind of triumphant piece in a major key? It sounds like the sort of thing they have on Torchwood when they want to emphasise how amazing the Torchwood team is supposed to be. It turns a scene that should have been all like "holy CRAP, SuperDaleks!!1!" into "hey kids, check out our awesome new Dalek team. They're Daleks, but they're a team, and they come in five different colours. We call them Team Dalek." And then one of their first acts is to fail to shoot the Doctor as he runs across the whole room a few metres away from them. So not very scary, then.
To be fair, the whole concept of this scene was probably a mistake on Moffat's part - it would have been much better to have the transformation from old to new Daleks take place off screen. I've got nothing agains the new designs, and maybe the writers have got some good ideas behind the multi colours thing, but the trailers for this episode all promised awesome-looking WWII themed Daleks. It delivered, but only for half the episode, and then it was like, "never mind those Daleks, check out our new awesome Team Dalek Daleks" and I'm like, "well, yeah, but I'm not sure if they're really quite as awesome as the Union Jack ones" and then they kill of the other Daleks and I'm like "oh, so I guess there won't be any more old-school Daleks any more then," and that's the end of that. Which made the big reveal of the new designs into a bit of an anticlimax instead of a cool scary moment like it should have been. It would have been much better to end the episode with the old-style Daleks disappearing off into space, having set it up so that we know they're going to transform into something else but we don't know what, until we finally see them a few episodes later, and then we're all "OMG SuperDaleks!!!1" and have to go and hide behind the sofa.
Right, now I've got that out of my system I can make another attempt at going to sleep. Good night!
(Added later:) Oh yes, I forgot to mention that it also just repeats the major plot points of the previous episode, but does them in a much less interesting way. In both episodes the Doctor has to make a Big Choice, and then Amy saves the day. In Episode 2, the Doctor has to choose between saving humanity and saving the last poor tortured Space Whale. He's about to make a catastrophically wrong decision when Amy intervenes by making the right choice, saving both humanity and the whale. We've never really seen a story like that in Doctor Who before, so it was pretty cool. But in this episode the Doctor gets the choice between saving humanity and killing the Daleks (yawn). He makes the predictable decision to save humanity and let the Daleks live (I guess there wouldn't be much of a show left if he didn't), and then Amy saves the day later on, for an unconnected reason. It's the same, only lame.
Firstly, I've got to say that the first two episodes of the series were pretty good, and I'm hoping it'll carry on that way. The first episode wasn't a masterpiece, but introducing a new Doctor and a new companion at the same time was always going to be hard and it made a good job of it. The second episode was made of win.
But this third one, featuring the Daleks, was disappointingly badly written, and I can't help wanting to pick it apart. It was the first episode in the series not to be written by new head writer Stephen Moffat.
The first thing that annoyed me about it was that Winston Churchill was a complete non-character. He had no character development at all and felt more like a robot than the Daleks, since all he really did was repeat the same thing over and over in different ways. ("I want to use the Daleks to win the war. I want to use the Daleks to win the war. etc.") There was an interview with the writer Mark Gatiss on Doctor Who Confidential where he kept saying something like "not everybody likes Winston Churchill but Doctor Who isn't the place to have that conversation", so I'm guessing that Gatiss has something against Churchill and thus couldn't bring himself to do anything with the character except have him just sort of be there as a piece of period detail.
Well, maybe that could have been acceptable. But then there was the bit with Spitfires going into outer space. Now, at first I thought that was just a harmless bit of silliness, but on reflection it's actually an insultingly idiotic bit of silliness that should have been re-written.
Let's think about it for a second. The air-raid siren has already been called when Amy asks Bracewell to find a way to fly Spitfires into space and defeat the Dalek spaceship (which is causing all the lights to come on over London, attracting the German bombers). I guess at that point there's only a few minutes at most before the enemy arrive. Now, Bracewell is a Dalek-built android with a super-brain, and I can accept that he might have some stuff lying around in his workshop that could be used to make a Gravity Bubble. The Daleks might have allowed him to play around with that sort of thing as a sort of plan B, in case the Doctor didn't show up. And maybe, just maybe, the knowledge that he is a robot has unlocked a Commander Data-like ability to put stuff together really really quickly. So I can accept that Bracewell can built a Gravity Bubble machine in time. But Bracewell's workshop is in an underground bunker in the middle of London, so no matter how quickly he built the devices there's no way he could have got to any Spitfires to install them. Unless he travelled by Gravity Bubble, I guess - maybe you can use them to fly around really fast without putting them in an aircraft, and maybe he constructed one extra so that he could get back to the bunker in time for the next scene. But I mean, come on.
But anyway, that's not even the thing I really wanted to moan about. I'll get to that in a second but first I have to mention that this episode also had the annoying thing at the end where the Doctor tells all the main characters that they're "brilliant", even though they've actually been a bit useless throughout most of the episode. FOR PITY'S SAKE STOP DOING THAT! It's patronising and annoying and I'd really hoped it would leave with Russel T. Davis and the 10th Doctor. If you want me to think the characters are brilliant you have to make them do brilliant things, it just isn't enough to keep saying it over and over again.
ANYWAY, the thing I really wanted to rant about was this scene, the bit where the new Daleks emerge from the Progenitor chamber. Click on the link and watch it - or more to the point, listen to it. This is supposed to be a scary scene, right? I mean, Daleks are scary, right? So why is the score some kind of triumphant piece in a major key? It sounds like the sort of thing they have on Torchwood when they want to emphasise how amazing the Torchwood team is supposed to be. It turns a scene that should have been all like "holy CRAP, SuperDaleks!!1!" into "hey kids, check out our awesome new Dalek team. They're Daleks, but they're a team, and they come in five different colours. We call them Team Dalek." And then one of their first acts is to fail to shoot the Doctor as he runs across the whole room a few metres away from them. So not very scary, then.
To be fair, the whole concept of this scene was probably a mistake on Moffat's part - it would have been much better to have the transformation from old to new Daleks take place off screen. I've got nothing agains the new designs, and maybe the writers have got some good ideas behind the multi colours thing, but the trailers for this episode all promised awesome-looking WWII themed Daleks. It delivered, but only for half the episode, and then it was like, "never mind those Daleks, check out our new awesome Team Dalek Daleks" and I'm like, "well, yeah, but I'm not sure if they're really quite as awesome as the Union Jack ones" and then they kill of the other Daleks and I'm like "oh, so I guess there won't be any more old-school Daleks any more then," and that's the end of that. Which made the big reveal of the new designs into a bit of an anticlimax instead of a cool scary moment like it should have been. It would have been much better to end the episode with the old-style Daleks disappearing off into space, having set it up so that we know they're going to transform into something else but we don't know what, until we finally see them a few episodes later, and then we're all "OMG SuperDaleks!!!1" and have to go and hide behind the sofa.
Right, now I've got that out of my system I can make another attempt at going to sleep. Good night!
(Added later:) Oh yes, I forgot to mention that it also just repeats the major plot points of the previous episode, but does them in a much less interesting way. In both episodes the Doctor has to make a Big Choice, and then Amy saves the day. In Episode 2, the Doctor has to choose between saving humanity and saving the last poor tortured Space Whale. He's about to make a catastrophically wrong decision when Amy intervenes by making the right choice, saving both humanity and the whale. We've never really seen a story like that in Doctor Who before, so it was pretty cool. But in this episode the Doctor gets the choice between saving humanity and killing the Daleks (yawn). He makes the predictable decision to save humanity and let the Daleks live (I guess there wouldn't be much of a show left if he didn't), and then Amy saves the day later on, for an unconnected reason. It's the same, only lame.