Contains some slight spoilers about Season 2, so beware.
Well, I’ve gotten to the end of the ‘second’ season of Doctor Who, and my enthusiasm has slacked off just a bit. Many of the comments you guys made on my last post on this subject proved prophetic. I had noted that I liked David Tennant more than Christopher Eccleston, but as some had noted, he did wear on me a bit over the entire season.* The Doctor should be eccentric, to be sure. However, I really don’t need him to be so overwhelmingly wacky all the time. Tone it down a notch, would you?
[Admittedly, this was probably aggravated by me watching the episodes in clusters over a short time period, rather than one a week as they were televised. However, this is the age of the DVD, and producers are going to have to be aware of that.]
I think part of the problem is that the two strongest episodes by far (School Reunion and The Girl in the Fireplace), by my estimation, ran back to back in the first half of the season. They were followed by a pretty good two-parter (Rise of the Cybermen and Age of Steel), an outrightly lame episode (Idiot’s Lantern), an ‘eh’ two-parter (Impossible Planet / Satan Pit), a sadly misfired comedy episode (Love and Monsters), a truly bad episode (Fear Her), and finally a pretty good climatic two-parter (Army of Ghosts / Doomsday) that featured a fanboy fantasy plot idea (although too good, really), including a BIG SURPRISE that was sabotaged by the print art on the actual DVD disc. [!!] Thanks! Thank goodness I wasn’t actually able to enjoy the surprise!
In other words, there was definitely a sense of diminishing returns after my two favorite episodes early one. And things that didn’t really bother me, or slightly bothered me, grew increasingly irksome. Again, the unceasingly wackiness of Tennant’s Doctor was one of them. Another was the whole relationship with Rose, something that frankly threatened to take over the show. I was pretty glad to see the back of her following the season ender, frankly, and hopefully the emo Doctor (streaming tears—ack!!!) is a thing of the past in the third season.
The Doctor’s companion is an important character, but this isn’t Love Story, for heaven’s sake. A little more, or a lot more, reserve would be greatly appreciated. And please, lay off the pop culture stuff. Do you realize how badly that’s going to date these shows in the years ahead? A lot more than the primitive special effects of the older shows, I’ll tell you that.
More interesting than Rose, frankly, was the growth of Mickey as a character. I loved the (again, minor spoiler) where he shows up in the final two-parter, waving mischievously at Rose when she hadn’t even noticed him. By this time Mickey has gotten to the point where he’d be a much more enjoyable companion for the Doctor than Rose grew to be.
And frankly, enough with Jackie, too. And Rose’s Dad, dead and alive. And Torchwood. Again, more than the fact that the season was fairly Earth-bound (as noted before, my favorite era of Doctor Who saw Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker basically repelling invasions of Earth for UNIT), what created a sense of narrative claustrophobia for the show was the attempt to create an inter-connection mythology and recurring cast for the show. The constant background references to Torchwood and Bad Wolf just became too clever by half, in my estimation. Let it go. There were some real good things to come out of this approach, undoubtedly, but I found them overwhelmed by the bad as things progressed.
And another problem with attempting this newer, more modernist type of continuity is that it ignores the many former versions of the Doctor. Suddenly, because of special effects advances, the Daleks can fly. OK, makes sense. However, how is it that every Dalek the Doctor now meets is a flying Dalek? He travels in time, doesn’t he? Why doesn’t he occasionally come across the old, non-flying Daleks? More pertinently, why didn’t the older Doctors ever come across the flying ones?
Maybe there’s a convoluted explanation in that particular case, involving the Time War, but this issue applies in other areas. We see all these people on the Internet researching the various appearances in history of the Doctor (makes sense), but all the images they have accumulated show one of the two newer Doctors (doesn’t make sense). Good grief, Pertwee and Baker’s Doctors were more or less stationed on Earth for years, and all over the place. So somebody will find pictures of the Eccleston or Tennant Doctor from a hundred years ago, but no pictures of Baker from thirty years ago?
As for Love and Monsters, it was an episode I really wanted to like. Guest star Marc Wallace I knew and liked from the fun conman show Hustle. (Check it out.) However…it just didn’t work. A little background.
Back in the ’90s, some popular sci-fi shows, especially The X-Files and Star Trek: The Next Generation, took a real artistic flier by doing the occasional humor show. This sort of playing around with a show’s essential tone was actually pretty nervy at the time, and there were fears that the hard-core fans wouldn’t approve. Instead, they loved them. As long as a show didn’t ‘break character’ for comedic effect, fans simply adored these episodes. When a much irritated Worf complained , after Q put the Next Generation cast in a Robin Hood reality, that “I am not a Merry Man!”, it was completely in character and hilarious.
The thing is, though, that those shows were essentially quite serious, and the humor lied in seeing normally reserved and essentially dour characters, like Fox Muldar and Captain Picard, in funny situations. However, since the Doctor is (especially now) so often wacky to start with, Love and Monsters doesn’t really present enough of a tonal shift to really catch fire. There are laughs here, of course, but the show has to be *too* wacky to be wackier than the show normally can be anyway. Stargate: SG1 can still profit from that sort of episode. I’m not sure Doctor Who can, at least given the show’s current tone.
What does work is the way the Doctor and Rose are kept off-camera for the great majority of the show. We see the effect that Doctor has on ordinary people, and it’s very interesting. This is the sort of experimentation with form I’d really like to see more of. Some of the best Star Trek: the Next Generation episodes went outside the box: Seeing the cast from the viewpoint of junior officers, actually initiating First Contact with a planet unaware of other civilizations in space, Picard learning to speak with an alien Captain with an initially incomprehensible language while trapped on a planet.
In fact, I always thought Next Generation really missed a bet by not trusting the fans. I always thought as the years went along, and they had established some credit with us, that they should have tried new things. Especially, I’d have liked to have seen the occasional episode where *gasp* there was no danger element. Spend an hour with the character interacting over a poker game, or exploring a new planet. In fact, why not only have five or six danger episodes a year, so that the situations had more impact? Next Generation might have pulled that off, I think, but nobody was willing to roll those dice.
Anyway, I’m generally enjoying the new Doctor Whos, don’t get me wrong. There’s a lot of good stuff there, and only the occasional real clunker of an episode, which is nearly inevitable. Still and all, a bit more of that British Reserve and Stiff Upper Lip, please.
