Dr. Huh?
So, this season of Dr. Who is moving right along, and some definite trends are developing -- not all of them positive...
This week's episode, The Sontaran Strategem, was a good example of a couple of very annoying trends developing this season. Previous seasons of Dr. Who have demonstrated a creative staff capable of constructing morally complex stories, with bad guys who often had complicated and ethical motives, but whose sense of priorities were out of whack, thus giving them their malevolent cast (or, alternately, banal eccentricities lending themselves to a disregard of others with much the same results). Fabulous examples of this type of storytelling are found in almost all of the Season one episodes, in most of the Season Two episodes that had a bad guy (a good number of them were more adventure-centered than adversary-centered). The season-separated but linked episodes New Earth and Gridlock were both excellent examples of morally complicated and thought-provoking storytelling.
Unfortunately, at the beginning of Season 3, we got "The Runaway Bride." Aside from the obviously irritating presence of Donna Noble (thankfully since much mellowed), we got one of the dumbest, most obvious and tired plots in history. An evil alien that wants to eat people finds a ready ally in the form of a businessman who somehow thinks that if he has money and everyone else dies, he wins. Using this businessman's selfish notions, the big bad alien builds a great commercial empire to cover its covert activities (which will inevitably result in the death of billions of people). Wrap the plot up in a scientifically ludicrous revelation about the history of the planet earth, and then put a pretty bow on it and stick it under the Christmas Tree, and you've got the show.
Yeah. It kinda sucked. But one episode really sucking after two seasons with only a couple faltering steps and no real lemons is an excellent record.
Season three then stumbled haltingly along the same path. After a couple of excellent, if hokier-than-normal episodes ("Smith & Jones" and "The Shakespeare Code") and one real standout ("Gridlock"), we are subjected to "The Lazarus Experiment." Put gently, "The Lazarus Experiment" seemed like it was rushed through production on a rough draft. It's filled with bad science, paranoia about scientific research and "playing god," and a shallow bad guy interested only in the aquisition of power and money (and very cartoony to boot). All this was bad enough, but the execution - from the 2nd rate visualFX to the gradeschool acting, left it feeling like a throwback to the bad old days of clunky early 80s writing when the show tried far too hard to be socially relevant at the cost of plot, characters, or grappling with issues that actually made people think.
There was enough time between "The Runaway Bride" and "The Lazarus Experiment" that I didn't connect the trend, and again I thought "Well it was a one-off. Anyone can make a mistake."
But the trend continued. The same threads surfaced again in the Manhattan arclet, and finally the monstrously overdone and silly season finale (which was a crying shame after the spectacular and very smart two-episode leadup), and then carried right through to the Christmas special.
In the Season 3 finale, The Master, naturally, wants power over everyone so he can...gloat? Yup, that's about it. He establishes a world empire with dead, insane souls that he consigned to the void at the end of the universe so that he can have the chance to turn The Doctor into Dobby and engage in a yearlong sadomasochistic orgy with Jack as whipping boy and Martha's family as service subs. He doesn't DO anything with his power, and nothing he does actually makes sense according to the internal rules of the Dr. Who universe's rules about how time travel works, let alone anything as closely related to physics as astronomy is to astrology, but we can almost let it pass because of the incredibly well-played death scene (no bullshit, it was a moment of exquisite acting).
So, even at this point, I didn't pick up on the trend.
Season four, unfortunately, isn't giving any room to maneuver. In four of the five episodes so far, we have had identical plots:
1) A great luxury/boon to humanity is presented. In VOTD it was the cruise ship Titanic and The Host which served its passengers. In Partners in Crime it was Adipose weight loss treatment. In Planet of the Ood it was The Ood. In The Sontaran Strategem it was the ubiquitous GPS system ATMOS. Of course, we the audience know from the scary soundtrack and creepy looks on the faces of the people involved that these boons are about to bite the universe on the ass in a big way.
2) The boon turns out, unsurprisingly, to be an alien plot and/or a great danger to humanity that is being perpetuated by a greedy, power-hungry corporation for apparently financial motives. In VOTD, the chairman of the board wanted to get even with his board of directors by destroying the earth. In "Partners in Crime," an alien nanny decided that a megacorp was the perfect cover for illegally using humans to breed a new generation of alien nobility. In "Planet of the Ood," an evil corporate executive enslaves and lobotomizes an entire race of intergalactic whales (well, they DO only want to sing together) because somehow willing slave labor is more financially viable than having robots or appliances that don't require food, housing, shelter, or bathrooms. In "The Sontaran Strategem" a genius young inventor gets his rocks off by destroying the earth because he's bored of being around stupid people.
3) The plot has an important turning point on an absolutely impossible and stupid point of science and/or human nature. The insurance fraud plot in VOTD was the most plausible of the season so far, however the suicidal zeal of the corporate mucky-muck AND his determination that everyone be terrorized in the process (rather than, say, disabling the teleport and escape pods and then just letting gravity take its course) was beyond stupid. I know three year olds who hatch better plans that require less Bond-villian-like effort.
Ditto for "Partners in Crime" and the bad guys' strange determination to kill anyone who learned anything just for the sheer hell of it (not just the alien, but her human security guards operating in greater London in the 21st century who would have to deal with disposing of the bodies and talking to the police).
"Planet of the Ood," aside from relying on some pretty silly notions of faster-than-light telepathy, some laughably moronic notions of economics, and the dorkiest neuroscience I've ever seen, had that thing about a man's coffee boy poisoning him until he turned into an Ood. Riiiiight.
And then there's "The Sontaran Strategem," where the bad aliens disable guns by making the copper in the bullets expand and plug the barell. Let's ignore for the moment that bullets are made of lead, not copper (except for a few-microns-thick copper jacketing), the writers were evidently too stupid and/or ignorant to realize that when a gun is fired under such conditions, the result isn't "click." The result is the gun blowing up in the shooter's face. The primer and powder are still in the cartridge, and they're still going to ignite when the hammer falls. That ignition is still going to cause an explosion, and if that explosion can't drive the bullet forward, it will blow the breach open and probably blind the shooter or worse. These basic facts of chemistry and physics are apparently lost on the writers who once were brilliant. So, let's move on to the other central premise in this idiot plot: we have bad guys determined to destroy the human race by putting poisoned gas into their cars - evidently the writers forgot that there are entire continents with fewer than one car per fifty people (no worries - white middle class television writers suffering prosperity guilt generally don't remember that people in the third world are perfectly capable of wiping their own asses when they're not in the midst of laboring under the yolk of brutal dictatorships, dying from diseases that they can't buy insecticide to stop, or working away on farmland that could be seized from them at any moment).
Needless to say, I'm not impressed. The current season of Dr. Who, despite some heartbreakingly wonderful moments and some genuinely witty and funny stuff, is shaping up to be almost as bad an exercise in audience-insulting as the last season of Torchwood was. Added on top of that is an unhealthy dose of white imperialist guilt, antiscience moralizing, and utter ignorance of the basic facts of the world, and it's just not funny. If the rest of the season keeps on this path, then the big finale where Rose comes back is going to wind up being a huge let down, and that would be a travesty. The Doctor and Rose have evolved into one of the best-told and adult love stories that television has seen in quite a while, and Russel's team is dancing perilously close to pissing all over something truly, wonderfully special.
Fingers crossed that they don't keep blowing it. Though, based on Torchwood last year, I'm not going to hold my breath.
This week's episode, The Sontaran Strategem, was a good example of a couple of very annoying trends developing this season. Previous seasons of Dr. Who have demonstrated a creative staff capable of constructing morally complex stories, with bad guys who often had complicated and ethical motives, but whose sense of priorities were out of whack, thus giving them their malevolent cast (or, alternately, banal eccentricities lending themselves to a disregard of others with much the same results). Fabulous examples of this type of storytelling are found in almost all of the Season one episodes, in most of the Season Two episodes that had a bad guy (a good number of them were more adventure-centered than adversary-centered). The season-separated but linked episodes New Earth and Gridlock were both excellent examples of morally complicated and thought-provoking storytelling.
Unfortunately, at the beginning of Season 3, we got "The Runaway Bride." Aside from the obviously irritating presence of Donna Noble (thankfully since much mellowed), we got one of the dumbest, most obvious and tired plots in history. An evil alien that wants to eat people finds a ready ally in the form of a businessman who somehow thinks that if he has money and everyone else dies, he wins. Using this businessman's selfish notions, the big bad alien builds a great commercial empire to cover its covert activities (which will inevitably result in the death of billions of people). Wrap the plot up in a scientifically ludicrous revelation about the history of the planet earth, and then put a pretty bow on it and stick it under the Christmas Tree, and you've got the show.
Yeah. It kinda sucked. But one episode really sucking after two seasons with only a couple faltering steps and no real lemons is an excellent record.
Season three then stumbled haltingly along the same path. After a couple of excellent, if hokier-than-normal episodes ("Smith & Jones" and "The Shakespeare Code") and one real standout ("Gridlock"), we are subjected to "The Lazarus Experiment." Put gently, "The Lazarus Experiment" seemed like it was rushed through production on a rough draft. It's filled with bad science, paranoia about scientific research and "playing god," and a shallow bad guy interested only in the aquisition of power and money (and very cartoony to boot). All this was bad enough, but the execution - from the 2nd rate visualFX to the gradeschool acting, left it feeling like a throwback to the bad old days of clunky early 80s writing when the show tried far too hard to be socially relevant at the cost of plot, characters, or grappling with issues that actually made people think.
There was enough time between "The Runaway Bride" and "The Lazarus Experiment" that I didn't connect the trend, and again I thought "Well it was a one-off. Anyone can make a mistake."
But the trend continued. The same threads surfaced again in the Manhattan arclet, and finally the monstrously overdone and silly season finale (which was a crying shame after the spectacular and very smart two-episode leadup), and then carried right through to the Christmas special.
In the Season 3 finale, The Master, naturally, wants power over everyone so he can...gloat? Yup, that's about it. He establishes a world empire with dead, insane souls that he consigned to the void at the end of the universe so that he can have the chance to turn The Doctor into Dobby and engage in a yearlong sadomasochistic orgy with Jack as whipping boy and Martha's family as service subs. He doesn't DO anything with his power, and nothing he does actually makes sense according to the internal rules of the Dr. Who universe's rules about how time travel works, let alone anything as closely related to physics as astronomy is to astrology, but we can almost let it pass because of the incredibly well-played death scene (no bullshit, it was a moment of exquisite acting).
So, even at this point, I didn't pick up on the trend.
Season four, unfortunately, isn't giving any room to maneuver. In four of the five episodes so far, we have had identical plots:
1) A great luxury/boon to humanity is presented. In VOTD it was the cruise ship Titanic and The Host which served its passengers. In Partners in Crime it was Adipose weight loss treatment. In Planet of the Ood it was The Ood. In The Sontaran Strategem it was the ubiquitous GPS system ATMOS. Of course, we the audience know from the scary soundtrack and creepy looks on the faces of the people involved that these boons are about to bite the universe on the ass in a big way.
2) The boon turns out, unsurprisingly, to be an alien plot and/or a great danger to humanity that is being perpetuated by a greedy, power-hungry corporation for apparently financial motives. In VOTD, the chairman of the board wanted to get even with his board of directors by destroying the earth. In "Partners in Crime," an alien nanny decided that a megacorp was the perfect cover for illegally using humans to breed a new generation of alien nobility. In "Planet of the Ood," an evil corporate executive enslaves and lobotomizes an entire race of intergalactic whales (well, they DO only want to sing together) because somehow willing slave labor is more financially viable than having robots or appliances that don't require food, housing, shelter, or bathrooms. In "The Sontaran Strategem" a genius young inventor gets his rocks off by destroying the earth because he's bored of being around stupid people.
3) The plot has an important turning point on an absolutely impossible and stupid point of science and/or human nature. The insurance fraud plot in VOTD was the most plausible of the season so far, however the suicidal zeal of the corporate mucky-muck AND his determination that everyone be terrorized in the process (rather than, say, disabling the teleport and escape pods and then just letting gravity take its course) was beyond stupid. I know three year olds who hatch better plans that require less Bond-villian-like effort.
Ditto for "Partners in Crime" and the bad guys' strange determination to kill anyone who learned anything just for the sheer hell of it (not just the alien, but her human security guards operating in greater London in the 21st century who would have to deal with disposing of the bodies and talking to the police).
"Planet of the Ood," aside from relying on some pretty silly notions of faster-than-light telepathy, some laughably moronic notions of economics, and the dorkiest neuroscience I've ever seen, had that thing about a man's coffee boy poisoning him until he turned into an Ood. Riiiiight.
And then there's "The Sontaran Strategem," where the bad aliens disable guns by making the copper in the bullets expand and plug the barell. Let's ignore for the moment that bullets are made of lead, not copper (except for a few-microns-thick copper jacketing), the writers were evidently too stupid and/or ignorant to realize that when a gun is fired under such conditions, the result isn't "click." The result is the gun blowing up in the shooter's face. The primer and powder are still in the cartridge, and they're still going to ignite when the hammer falls. That ignition is still going to cause an explosion, and if that explosion can't drive the bullet forward, it will blow the breach open and probably blind the shooter or worse. These basic facts of chemistry and physics are apparently lost on the writers who once were brilliant. So, let's move on to the other central premise in this idiot plot: we have bad guys determined to destroy the human race by putting poisoned gas into their cars - evidently the writers forgot that there are entire continents with fewer than one car per fifty people (no worries - white middle class television writers suffering prosperity guilt generally don't remember that people in the third world are perfectly capable of wiping their own asses when they're not in the midst of laboring under the yolk of brutal dictatorships, dying from diseases that they can't buy insecticide to stop, or working away on farmland that could be seized from them at any moment).
Needless to say, I'm not impressed. The current season of Dr. Who, despite some heartbreakingly wonderful moments and some genuinely witty and funny stuff, is shaping up to be almost as bad an exercise in audience-insulting as the last season of Torchwood was. Added on top of that is an unhealthy dose of white imperialist guilt, antiscience moralizing, and utter ignorance of the basic facts of the world, and it's just not funny. If the rest of the season keeps on this path, then the big finale where Rose comes back is going to wind up being a huge let down, and that would be a travesty. The Doctor and Rose have evolved into one of the best-told and adult love stories that television has seen in quite a while, and Russel's team is dancing perilously close to pissing all over something truly, wonderfully special.
Fingers crossed that they don't keep blowing it. Though, based on Torchwood last year, I'm not going to hold my breath.