Time of the Doctor
Dec. 30th, 2013 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
llywelaSo, as mentioned, I watched the Doctor Who Christmas special and really didn't like it. And I'm sorry about that because I wanted to like it, and there were some lovely little scenes and moments, but overall…it was just everything that I dislike most about Steven Moffat's showrunning style, which apparently I am never going to be reconciled to.
I wasn't going to post this, but my dissatisfaction has been building up for a long time now and this episode was kinda the straw that broke the camel's back and I need to get the rant off my chest, so let me apologise up front to everyone who enjoyed this episode and who really loves the current Moffat era of the show and say that I'm glad you're getting what you need from it. I'm not, though, and I want to talk a bit about why. So if you enjoyed Time of the Doctor and have loved the Eleventh Doctor era, don't bother to read on!
It's entirely subjective, I know, but to me the show has felt terribly shallow and superficial throughout the Moffat era, and that's getting worse instead of better – we seem to skim over the surface of vast swathes of time and huge events, without any of it ever seeming to mean very much in the long run. It's all gimmicks and contrived comedy and excess in place of meaningful characterisation and universe building – entertaining enough while you watch, to be sure, but ultimately insubstantial and unsatisfying, like candyfloss. It feels like an allegory, rather than a real, tangible universe in which real people live – and I've seen a bunch of interviews with people claiming that Doctor Who has always been a 'fairy story', but, you know, I've seen about 75% and counting of the classic show and it really, really wasn't a fairy story. It was a drama; fantastical and far-fetched and a bit silly at times, sure, but still a drama, about people and the universe in which they lived. It doesn't have that any more, not for me, at any rate. And as much as I know Moffat loves the show and is a lifelong fan and as much as I love the little references and parallels he sneaks in all over the place, his storytelling style does not always feel respectful of the history of the show – it feels more as if he is constantly trying to one-up the history of the show in order to assert his own place in it. Anything you can do, I can do better, I can do anything better than you.
Okay, so let's start with a rundown of the basic plot of the episode, to establish what actually happened. The Doctor detects a mysterious message coming from an unidentified planet, so he goes to investigate only to find the planet sealed off behind a forcefield and surrounded by hundreds of spaceships containing just about every enemy he's ever had, all curious to know what's going on (the message is apparently being beamed through all of space and time, but only the people in this particular time-zone have bothered to respond, which is strike one against the hyperbolic but ultimately nonsensical narrative language used here to sound epic without actually being meaningful). On investigation, the Doctor finds a residual crack in space-time through which the Time Lords are calling from another universe – so it's just as well he didn't find the crack until after he learned that the Time Lords might not be dead after all, then. Through the crack they are asking the question 'Doctor who?' apparently so that when the Doctor hears and replies (and they somehow managed to find a crack in a place that just happens to have a truth field in place, for no apparent reason) they'll know its okay to bust back through into this universe. Except that this will apparently set off the Time War all over again, because of all the trigger-happy aliens besieging the planet…which turns out to be Trenzalore, where the Doctor knows he will die because he's been there in the future and seen his own grave. So he decides to stay and guard the town instead – and let us notice how the whole planet apparently consists of just this one town, called Christmas. He stays there for centuries, we are told, centuries during which a better plan never occurs to him and no one else does a damn thing to change the status quo, the only thing that changes is him as he slowly ages to death. Then, just as he is about to die, Clara thinks to ask the Time Lords to help him, through the crack, and just like that they totally give up on returning to this universe and instead close the crack, but not before sending through a whole new regeneration cycle for the Doctor. Because why not, apparently. The regeneration is so violent that it kills all the Daleks, because that's totally how regeneration works, and then the Doctor eventually changes.
Well, it sort of makes sense, if you squint, except that it doesn't really because at every turn you run into contrivances that don't stand up to even the slightest scrutiny – it's incredibly messy, too much relies on no one questioning anything at all, there's so much plot that there's no room for character, and it all just falls completely flat. For me, anyway.
So I'm going to get it all off my chest by ranting about it at length.
Let's start at the beginning. We open in media res, as the Doctor is off adventuring without Clara, who is instead busy cooking Christmas dinner for her family and phones him in the middle of his life-or-death struggle to ask him to a) pretend to be her boyfriend and b) use his time machine to help her cook dinner. Now, comedy is entirely subjective, I know, but these opening scenes are not my idea of comedy at all. I like my Doctor Who best when it plays as a drama – a light-hearted and humorous drama, perhaps, but still a drama. This feels more like a bad sitcom.
And what about Clara's family, previously known to us as a father and the mother she lost at age 16. Here we meet her dad (played by a different actor than previously seen), her gran, and someone called Linda, whose relationship to the rest of the family is never actually explained. Is she an unpleasant aunt? Is she an unpleasant stepmother? We aren't told, because the family isn't there to further our understanding of Clara or to be meaningful characters in their own right, they are simply set-dressing for a 'comedic' set-piece (I suspect there is also meant to be something meaningful about the Doctor's centuries on Trenzalore lasting no longer than a Christmas dinner for Clara, but that doesn't really come across). Christmas dinner is taking place in a block of flats – filmed at one of the locations previously used for the Powell Estate where Rose lived. But whose flat is it? Is it Clara's? I suspect so, since she's the one cooking dinner, but we aren't actually told, and the last time we saw Clara at home she was a live-in nanny with a room in someone else's house, so there's a disconnect there, just like there was a disconnect between Clara being a nanny through series 7b and then suddenly being a schoolteacher in Day of the Doctor (and between Amy's abrupt off-screen career changes, also). It could equally be her gran's flat, or her dad's, or Linda's, but as we aren't told, who can tell? It looks more like a council tenement than the kind of place you'd expect Clara or her family to live – the council estate background worked for Rose, it was a fundamental building block of the character, but Clara has always seemed more middle class, so it doesn't quite sit right.
It also doesn't feel right to see Clara calling the Doctor in the middle of a crisis just because she wants a) her family to think she's got a boyfriend (why?) and b) help cooking Christmas dinner – it turns into a whole huge joke about her apparently regularly asking him to use the TARDIS to help with everything from dinner reservations to watching TV shows she's missed, but I just can't find the joke funny. I would appreciate the character continuity of Clara being rubbish with technology except isn't she a computer genius now? Shouldn't she be able to figure out iPlayer? But mostly, seeing her taking the Doctor and the TARDIS for granted and using them like that just feels so wrong. It cheapens something that should be amazing. Doctor Who works best when it's a show about the Doctor travelling and adventuring with his companion(s). The companion should be fully involved; s/he shouldn't feel like a distraction or an afterthought.
I'm just not sure what we're meant to make of Clara as a character. She's really cute, but there's no substance to the character at all, behind the glib quips and banter. For example, if she is no longer being nanny for Angie and Artie, why isn't she travelling with the Doctor full time? We were originally told that she'd always wanted to travel and her commitment to those kids was the only thing holding her back, but that commitment is now ended and she still isn't travelling – flat out admits here that she's only actually interested in the Doctor because she fancies him, which is depressing beyond belief – so what's the point of her? What are we supposed to make of her? She's supposed to have always longed to travel, and now she's met this alien and he's ancient and enigmatic and charismatic and he's got a time machine and he can take her anywhere in the universe, and in the past (classic and new Who) we've seen characters wrestle with the tension between taking that opportunity and holding onto their own lives, because they had to make a choice, one or the other, that was how it worked, because the Doctor doesn't settle and he doesn't stay still…but with Clara there's no tension at all. Instead of taking the opportunity to fulfil her life's dream of travelling, she's just getting on with her life on Earth and only goes off for occasional jaunts with the Doctor, when it suits her, while completely taking for granted that she can phone him and have him come running whenever she wants, without even earning that privilege. She's completely blasé about having him at her beck and call, even though it is something that no other companion has ever had before in 50 years of the show, everyone else had to make a choice, stay or go, and then live with that choice, and the show was stronger for it. Clara's attitude, playing the relationship in this way…it robs the show, takes something special and unique and makes it seem mundane. And it needn't be like that, if only it were played differently, if only a bit more time was taken to develop the characters and their relationship instead of wasting valuable screen time on contrived gags and unnecessarily convoluted plots. Because, you know, I do kinda like the idea that Clara's life is moving forward (new job and new flat in the last two episodes, apparently) as well as being the Doctor's friend…or I would like it if that development was allowed to be in any way meaningful, if those changes in her life were actually discussed instead of being tacked onto the character without comment. I might also like it if the show played a bit more overtly on the idea of the Doctor trying something new in his relationship with Clara, taking forward a pattern he first attempted with Amy and Rory, a deliberate change in his approach to friendship with humans, but there was very little exploration of that shift with Amy and Rory and there's been none whatsoever with Clara. So as it is, the set-up just feels trivial and cartoonish – it feels like children's television rather than family entertainment, which is a subtle distinction, but an important one (although, you know, the Sarah Jane Adventures was a children's show and still did better with the characters than this). And it doesn't feel like Doctor Who.
Part-time adventuring alongside every day life worked back in the UNIT era because at the time the Doctor's own lifestyle was structured around his exile on Earth, but it isn't working with Clara because her lifestyle just doesn't jibe with his – it's out of character for him not to have drifted away from her in between adventures and found someone else to travel with, in fact. How can we feel attached to Clara as a companion if she isn't actually the Doctor's companion? We need to see them spending quality time together in order for their friendship to feel real, but instead they were strangers one minute and BFFs the next, with no natural flow to that development at all – the bonding seemed to take place off-screen, because why waste time developing the characters organically when you can simply tell us that they've now bonded and use the screen-time instead on a flashy plot that looks clever until you poke at it? As a result, the relationship feels horribly disjointed and I simply can't engage with it. Clara keeps being given big emotional scenes but they always feel hollow to me because I don't feel I know her as a person and her friendship with the Doctor doesn't ring true to me, and it's such a shame because I've always loved the Doctors' relationships with their companions. It makes me sad that I couldn't like the Eleventh Doctor with Clara, but I just don't feel that she's earned her place in these momentous events at all. She feels like a placeholder for the 'companion card', rather than an actual person. She just does and says whatever the plot requires, with no consistency of character whatsoever, and the sitcom requirements of this particular plot were particularly damaging to her.
You know, there was a time when this show was about adventure. It was about ordinary people caught up in something bigger than themselves and learning from it, learning what they were capable of and how extraordinary they could be. It was about ideas and ideals, and about friendship in all its forms, rich and varied and meaningful. How did we end up with this self-absorbed 'companion' who isn't really a companion and has all the depth of a puddle? How did we end up with such a long string of companions whose primary relationship with the Doctor is defined, on-screen and out loud, repeatedly, by whether or not they fancy each other? Is that really all the writers believe a modern audience cares about? Are we really that shallow? I don't believe we are – I just wish the writing had more faith in us.
Wow, that was a long rant, and I've barely even started on the events of the episode! So here are some things that I did like about it, before I go on. I liked the Doctor calling Gallifrey home. It's his homeworld, and his feelings toward it were complex long before the Time War was dreamed up in order to 'remove baggage' by adding a whole lot more. I liked the acknowledgement of the Doctor's wig – that was an amusing moment. I liked the Doctor's throwaway comment about putting the TARDIS engines on silent – far more fitting than River's smug claim that he drives wrong. I really, really liked seeing the Seal of the High Council of Gallifrey again – a call back to The Five Doctors, 30 years ago. It even looks the same! I don't even mind that the Doctor just happens to have it on him, because he always just happens to have stuff like that in his pockets when he needs it. I always enjoy the Doctor's affinity with children, and I enjoyed his final speech about embracing change while remembering who you used to be – a far better way to go out than the Tenth Doctor's pity-fest.
So I've grumbled at length about Clara and her lack of consistently developed characterisation and how that impacts on my viewing experience. What about the episode plot and its rather plot-holey details? Well, the episode does at least attempt to tie up all the loose threads that have been left dangling throughout the Eleventh Doctor's era; it's just a shame that there were so many of them to be rounded up here, so that the episode as a whole felt as if it were going through a checklist of those loose ends and scrabbling to get them all tied off in some way, each one mostly tied up individually and separately from the others, without really making it into a coherent whole, so that the overall result is something of a mess that doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Moffat also succumbed to the temptation of making this a Grand Event to mark the end of Smith's era, hence the amount of spectacular but repetitive battles (lots of civilians running from weapons fire, much like in the previous episode) and shots of ships assembled in space, intercut with sentimental filler scenes, meant to tug at the heart strings. It's visually very impressive, but emotionally empty. And also as has become usual, we were left with sub-plots and characters left hanging or insufficiently explored.
Let's start with the Papal Mainframe church, or whatever they call themselves, and the fact that we've met them before and no one needed to go naked then – just as no one but the Doctor and Clara seems to have to go naked here. Yes, it is possible to come up with rationalisations, of a sort, but at the end of the day what it all boils down to is that this is just another one-off gag thrown in purely for the sake of contrived screwball comedy, because why expend time on meaningful character interaction when you can waste it on an extended 'joke' that adds nothing to the story or characters whatsoever. I'm sorry, but this simply is not my kind of humour, it felt forced and unnecessary – an irrelevant plot contrivance intended to generate some forced, slapstick comedy rather than humour developing naturally from the characters and their situation.
Then there's Tasha Lem, head of the church. We've never met her before, but she and the Doctor appear to know each other well…except that she's never seen this body before. So this is yet another so-called 'old friend' of the Doctor whose entire relationship with him belongs to an unseen past (because his actual past and actual old friends just aren't exciting enough, clearly) – and whose relationship with him is founded, yet again, on flirting and sexual innuendo, even though that isn't remotely in keeping with who he used to be, which should be the version of him that she knows according to their dialogue here, so the timey-wimey doesn't even make sense by its own rules. It both retcons and cheapens the actual past of the character, superimposing the current vision for the show over its very different history as if to airbrush it out, recreating the past in the image of the present. Also, we keep being told that the Eleventh is an awkward, asexual Doctor of the old school, but that isn't what we're shown on-screen. On-screen he flirts with everyone and goes around snogging everyone, and that isn't the Doctor. It's a massive personality shift that does a huge disservice to the character. Matt Smith deserved so, so much better. We catch glimpses here and there of the Doctor he could have been, but the scripts let him down time and time again. I've been so disappointed with his time on the show, and that isn't his fault, he's done marvellously with weak material, but it is what it is.
There doesn't seem to be any real reason why Clara couldn't be allowed to hear Tasha's conversation with the Doctor, other than to leave her alone to encounter the Silence – an effective enough scene, to be sure, but completely pointless because the Silence aren't really relevant to the plot at all. They are there just for the sake of it, just as the weeping angels are encountered on the planet mostly just for the sake of it. This episode feels as if it was designed to be the greatest hits of the Eleventh Doctor's era, which is exactly the kind of thing Steven Moffat specifically said he wanted to avoid when he wrote the 50th anniversary episode. Yet the 50th anniversary episode was the one that deserved to be a collection of greatest hits, because it was a one-off celebrating a very special anniversary, whereas this is just another regeneration story, important but not 50th anniversary special. Well, if nothing else, this tells us something about where Moffat's priorities lie.
I'm fairly certain that the various bits of information we've been given about the Silence over the past couple of seasons don't really make much sense when it's all put together. I mean, they started out as the baddest of bad guys ever to plot against humanity (always there, always guiding things behind the scenes on Earth, remember, for millions of years) yet now we're suddenly told that actually they are nothing more than genetically engineered priests, which – what? What's the point of engineering priests who make you forget your confession? The whole point of confession is that you remember it and are then able to move on from your sin! And apparently they belong to the Church of the Papal Mainframe…which is a human thing. So they were created by humans for humans and then went back in time (with the Kovarian sect?) and became the baddest of bad guys ever to plot against humanity? I'm having trouble reconciling these conflicting pieces of information! Also, when did the Doctor learn this about them, because he didn't know it last time they met.
Why doesn't the weeping angel zap Clara into the past when it touches her? The nature of those creatures has been distorted beyond all recognition since we first met them, so that the original weeping angels we first met back in Blink now seem the odd ones out.
Why does the town of Christmas even have a truth field? Other than as a device to a) generate a comedic moment, and b) ensure that if the Doctor answers the Time Lords' question, he has to tell the truth. There is no reason. It's a plot contrivance that makes no attempt to make sense even within the story's own internal universe, there's no explanation given for it, it is simply there because the plot requires it to be there. Also, how would the Time Lords even know that the truth field was there in this town, on this world, where there also just happens to also be a residual crack in space-time that they can send a message through? Surely they can't control where the 'scar tissue' was left after the universe was put back together? The message coming through the crack in a place where the truth has to be spoken is the cornerstone of the entire plot, yet the contrivance of it makes no sense whatsoever when you stop and think about it. We are required to simply accept it without question because when questioned it falls apart.
Also, why would the Time Lords send through a message that no one can understand, but that terrifies everyone? What does that achieve? And if it is being sent through all of space and time, how come it is only being responded to in this timestream? Perhaps we'd better not ask.
I don't really want to expend too much mental energy on the Papal Mainframe and how that works. We've seen the organisation quite a few times now but it still makes very little sense to me on a practical or logistical level. They are human, yes? But where (or when) do they come from? How are they so powerful, powerful enough to hold such mighty enemies in check? Where do they get their technology? Why don't they seem to age? Which bits of the sect come from where in the Doctor's timeline, and how does the internal chronology of the organisation fit together? I'm fairly certain that if we put all their episodes together and studied them, the details would not tie together neatly at all. Like…if Kovarian's sect broke away and travelled back in time to stop the Doctor ever coming to Trenzalore, they had to know about the events of this episode, which means their breakaway should take place during the centuries that pass during this episode, yet there's no sign of that here (no room in the plot to address that kind of detail) and Tasha Lem already knows about them before the siege begins. The convoluted timey-wimeyness of it makes my head hurt almost as much as River Song or Mel Bush's timeline. How did Tasha Lem even know what was going on with Trenzalore? She heard the message and got her people there to seal off the planet before anyone else arrived, sure, (although if the message is being beamed through all of time and space, I'm not sure how she managed that) but until the Doctor used the Seal of the High Council of Gallifrey and Handles the Cyberhead to translate the message, no one knew what it meant, we were specifically told that. Yet the moment the Doctor figured it out, it seemed Tasha Lem was already ahead of him, predicting a new Time War if he answered the question and allowed the Time Lords through – so if she'd already deciphered it herself, how?
Doctor who? You know, I always feel it's a mistake when the show focuses too closely on the Doctor himself. This show is an anthology disguised as a series, its mythology has been assembled piecemeal over five decades, and there is no way to truly reconcile the often conflicting pieces of information we've been given over those years. So the best way to handle that is by not looking too closely at the detail, by allowing the Doctor to be the catalyst for adventure he was originally designed as, instead of playing him as a mystery to be solved. Trying to solve that mystery makes the show smaller, somehow (just as the continued domestication of the Doctor reduces the character, somehow). Leaving the mystery unanswered and looking elsewhere for adventure frees the show to continue, unfettered, into the future.
Way back, Dorium's severed head told us that 'On the fields of Trenzalore, at the fall of the Eleventh, where no one can speak falsely or fail to answer, a question will be asked.' Where did that prophecy come from – the Kovarian sect who travelled back in time? It isn't clear. It isn't a very accurate prophecy, anyway, since the Doctor absolutely does fail to answer the question, for centuries. The church taking 'silence will fall' as their rallying cry doesn't really make any sense either, when you think about it; they don't actually do anything to stop the Doctor answering the question – it's just words that have to be used because they already were, just like Clara's 'run, pretty boy, and remember me' line had to be used because it already had been rather than because it made any real sense in context.
So the Doctor ages to death on Trenzalore, under siege for centuries. And this is another point where episodes like this completely lose me, because it's all talk and no show; playing it so ridiculously big loses me completely. The story tells me that centuries are passing, but those words have no meaning because we aren't shown any sign of that passage of time. The Doctor ages (physically, at least; he doesn't seem to change much in other ways, even picking up with Clara pretty much where he left off whenever she pops up, despite having not seen her in centuries), but nothing else changes at all. Tasha Lem doesn't age – yet isn't she supposed to be human? So how does that work, exactly, and can I have some? 'She doesn't believe in aging', that's all the explanation we get, except that it explains nothing, simply asks us to handwave the contrivance away and pretend it doesn't exist. And then there are all those aliens up in space, apparently prepared to spend centuries sitting above this planet trying to break through the forcefield and attack the Doctor. That situation really doesn't change at all, in all those years? No one gets bored, no one gets distracted or finds something better to do, no one comes up with a better plan to change the status quo – such as, for example, evacuating the planet before war can break out? No one attempts to broker a peace treaty or find a way to close the crack? The plot requires too many people to be far too passive for too many years to be plausible. Meanwhile down on the planet, the people of Christmas also don't change at all – there seems to be no development of the community whatsoever, even though hundreds of years pass, which is another implausibility that I simply can't swallow. Just because no technology can get past the forcefield doesn't mean the people won't develop their own – it's a human colony and humans develop, it's what we do. Look how much we've changed in the past 50 years since the show began, never mind the hundreds of years that pass during this story! I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it, that isn't how the passage of time works, which is a good part of why the storytelling feels allegorical, instead of being a drama rooted in a credible universe. I just can't suspend my disbelief, and so the hyperbole of the terrible war over Trenzalore falls completely flat for me. I don't believe for a moment that the kind of war we were shown could have been sustained for centuries – that little agricultural town would have been obliterated in minutes, even with the Doctor trying to defend it.
It saddens me to see what a joke Sontarans have become. The two we saw here were basically just played as Strax. I know they are a clone race, but still! There used to be more to them than that. And as for the wooden Cyberman…well, let's not go there. And calling the Silence the Doctor's 'ancient enemy' might sound good, but overstates their case entirely; I'd have liked to know more about his alliance with them, though, and how exactly the Doctor can fight alongside allies whose existence he must regularly forget. But as has become fairly typical, this episode is simply too busy to actually explore any of the concepts it raises.
So the severed head of a Cyberman, seen in this one episode only, is now canonically the Doctor's longest-lasting companion ever, complete with sorrow at its passing. And it isn't even that I wasn't amused by Handles or that I didn't appreciate those scenes, it's just that that, right there, just about sums up something I dislike most about Moffat's showrunning style. Part of me has always tried to brush it off and make excuses – he loves the show and I know he does, he's a lifelong fan…but I think that's part of the problem. In storytelling, there's a fine line between stories you can tell and stories you should tell, and Moffat crosses that line repeatedly, for me – it's as if he's allowed his inner 12-year-old to take over and make all his wildest fanfiction a reality, without any discipline or boundaries at all, he just wants to throw all these ideas out there because he can rather than because he should, to make his mark and cement his legacy. The show is 50 years old and Moffat has been at the helm for just four of those years. Yet he has written the show so that his Doctor is the longest-lived ever, cramming centuries' worth of experience into the space between episodes, mostly, so that this Doctor's largely off-screen adventures outweigh all the experiences of previous Doctors, creating a huge imbalance. He has written the show so that not one of the companions he created is just an ordinary friend and companion, oh no, he provided each one of them with a plot contrivance to make them more important in the Doctor's life than anyone has ever been, just like that. His companions are the Doctor's wife, mother-in-law and father-in-law, companions he apparently loved so much more than anyone else that he broke the habit of almost a dozen lifetimes by returning to them again and again instead of moving on and making new friends, which is what would actually be in character for him – it bolsters these companions at the expense of the old, which is not the slightest bit respectful, and it twists the Doctor's character to achieve it. And now there's Clara, who was artificially inserted into the Doctor's entire timeline when she barely knew him and when we barely knew her, a contrivance to make her canonically more important in his life than any other companion has ever been, without any effort having to be expended on actually getting to know her or on developing her relationship with the Doctor via their on-screen interaction. Moffat keeps saying in interviews that thanks to having been through the Doctor's timeline Clara now knows him inside out, better than anyone else ever has …but it's just words, it doesn't mean anything because we haven't seen that relationship develop on-screen – and she certainly doesn't play on-screen as someone who really does know him inside out, except when the plot requires her to be sentimental. The experience seems to have had no impact on her at all, just as Rory's 2000 years as a plastic centurion also failed to change him in the slightest, and just as the true impact on Amy and Rory of losing their child was never really explored. It's inconsistent, plot-driven characterisation at its worst.
I can't help comparing these companions to others who've had an important place in the history of the show –Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in particular. No one set out to design the Brigadier as a character who would play an enormous role in the Doctor's lives. That role and that place in Doctor Who history grew naturally out of the character as he developed. From a one-off appearance to a recurring regular role to his later guest appearances, the Brigadier earned his place in the Doctor's life and history, the hard way, by working alongside him as a friend and ally over a 20 year period and numerous regenerations. Steven Moffat seems to want a similar legacy for his own companions, but because he knows he only has a relatively short span as showrunner within which to work, he wants to achieve it instantaneously and artificially by telling us that it exists via plot contrivance, instead of allowing it to grow naturally over time. Yet those kinds of writing shortcut simply cannot ever have the same impact. Seeing the Eleventh Doctor drop in on Amy and Rory to pick up exactly where they left off the week before while casually telling them that it's been 200 years between episodes even though he hasn't changed at all and doesn't seem to have met anyone else in the meantime, or watching him flirt awkwardly with River Song over the course of their largely off-screen and unhealthy out-of-order relationship…that can never achieve the same effect as watching the Brigadier meet and work alongside five different Doctors over a 20 year period. It looks and sounds good, on the surface, but when you scratch that surface there's very little substance to back it up. I suppose I just wish that Moffat would trust his characters a bit more – let us love them because of who they are as people and the way their time with the Doctor develops, instead of telling us repeatedly that we should love them because of how important and special they are.
There is much the same feel to the way this episode deals with the Doctor coming to the end of his regenerative cycle – a very real issue that had the potential for very real character drama, instead shoehorned into a single episode that already had too much to do and therefore not really explored effectively at all. On the surface it looks fair enough – the classic show established both that there was a 12 regeneration limit and that it was possible for the Time Lords to bestow a new regeneration cycle, in special circumstances, so there's the set-up right there. Except that this is only the Eleventh Doctor, he should still be two regenerations away from the end of his natural lifecycle, which could and probably should have been dealt with as an ongoing background story arc for that last Doctor, mining the drama to maximum effect. Instead, perhaps because Steven Moffat wanted to deal with it himself rather than trust another showrunner with the concept, or perhaps because he wanted it to be part of his legacy, it was rushed into place here, raised and then dealt with within the span of a single episode. Suddenly we learn that the Tenth Doctor's abortive regeneration that resulted in the metacrisis actually did count as a full regeneration, one of the twelve. Suddenly we learn that there was a whole other regeneration that we never knew about…and I have enormous cognitive dissonance about that one because I loved John Hurt's Doctor, I really did, I'd have happily watched seasons worth of him, but it can't be denied that his one-off existence was artificially contrived largely as set-up for this episode, so that Matt Smith's Doctor could suddenly announce that he is on his last life already, despite only being the Eleventh Doctor (and despite having previously behaved as if he fully expected to regenerate again if anything happened to him), and it just makes everything horribly messy. Easy for Moffat to smile and tell us that the numerical system of reckoning Doctors hasn't changed, but the fact is that it has – the 'number' of the Doctors no longer tallies with the number of regenerations, an enormous and entirely unnecessary complication that the show really, really didn't need. And for what? So that Steven Moffat could be the showrunner to start the next cycle of Doctors? So that Matt Smith could have something big to leave on? I'm just not sure that it worked, and it certainly doesn't seem the best way to tell the story of the end of the Doctor's natural regenerative cycle.
It just all feels so rushed, the outcome deeply unsatisfying as a result, and that's been the major shortcoming of Steven Moffat's time as showrunner all along. He's great at coming up with imaginative and intriguing concepts that fire off in all directions, but he falls short in terms of bringing about the necessary storytelling discipline in his function of supervising the scripts, both those by himself or by other writers, a fault that I thought very apparent in this episode. He doesn't take his time with anything. He doesn't like to expend time on build-up or follow-through (especially not follow-through). He likes impact, big and immediate and shocking, and then he likes to move on, quick, before anyone has time to stop and think about what just happened and what it really means. As showrunner, he's finally got to play in the sandbox he's been hankering after since childhood and it often feels as if he's in such a tearing rush to get all his ideas out there before someone takes that sandbox away from him again that he doesn't take time to step back and think things through properly, he just throws it all out there, cramming as many ideas as he can into the shortest span of time possible, because realising those ideas in any form is more important than exploring them effectively. It feels self-indulgent, in fact. And it's such a shame because he does have some fantastic ideas and there have been some lovely moments during his era, not to mention all manner of brilliant little references back to the history of the show, it's just impossible to fully appreciate them because the pace is so frenetic, the plot-work overly convoluted and the characters so poorly developed that I just can't engage with any of it – I'm left feeling detached from what should be the big emotional pay-off.
It's all subjective, I'm sure. Steven Moffat is an ideas man. He likes to paint big, epic ideas in broad brush strokes. His style of storytelling uses characters as cogs in the wheel of complicated plots, with the drama stemming from 'epic' set-pieces. I prefer smaller-scale, more intimate storytelling about characters and their experiences –small, simple plot rocks dropped into a pond, with the drama stemming from the ripple effect of the impact on the characters. The two styles simply don't mesh, which is why this era of Doctor Who is now firmly cemented as my all-time least favourite.
Tasha Lem fetching Clara back from Earth to be with the dying Doctor at the end was pure plot contrivance. The plot required Clara to be there, but she had to have been sent back to Earth first or she'd have died centuries earlier, which meant somehow she had to be brought back to Trenzalore when she was needed, and so Tasha Lem was used to fulfil that end. But why would she bother to go and get Clara in the middle of this supposedly epic war? How did she know how to fly the TARDIS so very precisely, or where to find Clara? How was she even still alive and unchanged, after so many centuries had supposedly passed? Is she really human, and if not then what is she? Could she really have held back the Dalek conversion inside her for so long? Too many questions, not enough answers, and I just don't buy it. Fiction relies on suspension of disbelief, and this episode broke mine. We didn't even see what became of her in the end, after she'd served her final plot purpose.
One thing I do like about the Doctor sending Clara away is that among all the contrivances and the watering down and distorting of the character, this is something that really is bang in character for him - for all versions of him. He sends her away so that she won't grow old and die in front of him. Except that going back home to Earth isn't going to stop her growing old and dying. It just means that it won't happen in front of him. And that, right there, is the reason he doesn't look back at the companions who have left him. They leave, for whatever reason, and he turns around and walks away and doesn't look back, and because he doesn't look back, they get to live forever in his mind. He's a time traveller. From his point of view, no one has been born yet and everyone is already dead, and he deals with that by not looking at the detail, if he can possible help it. His timestream aligns with someone else's for a time and he travels with that person and enjoys their friendship and loves them for who they are, and then their timestreams diverge once more, and just about everywhere he goes that person is already long dead, but that's an abstract concept, and it's the tangible that he avoids. For as long as he doesn't look at the detail of what happened to them, after they left, they can live forever in his mind, just as they were on that last day.
The Doctor lied about having a plan while standing right in front of the crack, in the tower where the truth field was supposed to be at its strongest. That pretty much says it all about the internal consistency of this episode.
And then there's the regeneration. The aged Doctor goes out to face the victorious Daleks believing he is about to die and Clara turns to the crack, through which the Time Lords have been beaming their unchanging message for all this time, and she asks them to help the Doctor. Because, she says, they 'should love him', which…if she knows him inside out because she's been through his timestream, shouldn't she know his complex history with his people better than that? Yet that plea is apparently all it takes for the nameless, faceless Time Lords to give up on trying to break through into our universe again and instead send through a new regeneration cycle for the Doctor. Their motivation? I guess we're not supposed to ask. Just like we're not supposed to ask how they had that juice right there ready, or how they were able to close the crack, or how they were able to move the crack, or why they needed to move it, or, you know, anything. The moment you question any of it, it all falls apart.
I mean, I can come up with possible reasons why the Time Lords might choose to save the Doctor and cut themselves off again – perhaps to ingratiate themselves with him in hopes that he might return the favour someday, perhaps because they realised that if the Doctor died they'd be stuck forever, or heck, perhaps it was just Romana defying everyone else to save the Doctor because she at least does love him, her dear old friend. But we can't actually know because we weren't told. Maybe more will be revealed in the future, but I won't hold my breath. In terms of this episode, it was pure deus ex machina – a shiny reset employed out of nowhere to save the day because nothing else established within the episode could.
The Doctor's regeneration is incredibly violent and destroys all the invading Daleks, who are the last aliens standing. We have to rationalise, I suppose, that this is because it's the start of a new cycle or because the energy was sent through from another universe, because it makes no sense otherwise – just as it made no real sense that the last regeneration from Ten to Eleven was similarly destructive, something that has never previously been part of the regenerative process. Let us remember that regeneration is a normal part of the Time Lord life cycle, and most of those regenerations take place on Gallifrey – there'd be nothing left of the Citadel if it was normal for regeneration to be this violent!
So the Doctor is saved and so is Trenzalore, because a) all the enemies have finally been destroyed, and b) without the Time Lord message beaming through that crack, no one has any reason to care about the planet any more. But all this means that the Doctor's personal timeline has been well and truly changed – Clara's too – and that's a massive paradox, no matter which way you spin it. We saw the Doctor's grave on Trenzalore only two episodes ago. We also saw his body, which was how Clara got into his timestream in the first place to meet and supposedly save all his previous selves (although I have to point out here that we've seen dead Time Lords before and they didn't look like that). That happened. Yet now it can't happen. And didn't we already do this in season six? We saw the Doctor die but we knew he couldn't have really died, and then later we were shown how he got out of it. This is pretty much the same story, only told over three episodes instead of a season, and with added paradox that gives me a headache even beginning to think through the permutations. I'm pretty sure that the paradox won't be addressed on-screen at all, either, despite the magnitude of it.
For the second time in a row, the regeneration was terribly drawn-out – it's gotta be said, even though the stories are shorter and faster, the new show has just as much padding as the classic, just of a different sort! Karen Gillan's cameo was nice, although the Doctor seeing fake little Amelia would have been enough for me. I think I actually preferred it when the Fourth and Fifth Doctors hallucinated all their companions as they regenerated, rather than having just one singled out as special – the idea of him being imprinted on the first face he saw sounds cute and all, but isn't how regeneration has ever worked before (although it does amuse me to think of, for e.g., the Eighth Doctor being imprinted on that mortuary attendant! :D) I did like the simplicity of the transition between the two actors when it finally happened, not only because it was logical since the fireworks of regeneration had already been gone through, but also because it harked back to the classic show when flashy light shows were not needed to make the event memorable.
I'm not sure why Clara was so upset at the thought of him changing if she's supposed to remember her splinter selves encountering all his incarnations and therefore knows that he's always the same man beneath the skin. But then again the show has failed to even glance sideways at the consequences of that little escapade, never mind attempted to explore the impact on her character in any way, so who can tell what she does or doesn't remember about it? I just hope that post-regeneration she remembers her desire to travel and becomes a proper companion, travelling with the Doctor because she wants to see the universe, instead of dragging him down to her life on Earth all the time because she fancies him.
Overall, I'm happy that the narrative mess that was the Eleventh Doctor's era is over now. It started out promisingly enough, but failed to fully wrap things up as it went along, leaving open-ended questions that spanned over the seasons in a never-ending spiral of convolution and plot holes – a mess that makes less and less sense the more I think about it. So I'm grateful we can move in a new direction now. Of course I don't have an abundance of faith that the problems I have with Moffat's leadership are magically going to get 100% better, but perhaps he'll reign himself in just enough to not let things get so out of hand and unwieldy again. Also perhaps he'll hand over the reigns sooner rather than later now – I'm ready for new blood there as well. He's had a good crack at the whip, but this is a show that thrives on change and I feel that a bigger change than merely the leading man is needed now.
Well, time will tell, I suppose.
ETA I found this article, which pretty much sums up the problems I've had with the writing in this era: The Captain Kirk Problem - how Doctor Who betrayed Matt Smith
I wasn't going to post this, but my dissatisfaction has been building up for a long time now and this episode was kinda the straw that broke the camel's back and I need to get the rant off my chest, so let me apologise up front to everyone who enjoyed this episode and who really loves the current Moffat era of the show and say that I'm glad you're getting what you need from it. I'm not, though, and I want to talk a bit about why. So if you enjoyed Time of the Doctor and have loved the Eleventh Doctor era, don't bother to read on!
It's entirely subjective, I know, but to me the show has felt terribly shallow and superficial throughout the Moffat era, and that's getting worse instead of better – we seem to skim over the surface of vast swathes of time and huge events, without any of it ever seeming to mean very much in the long run. It's all gimmicks and contrived comedy and excess in place of meaningful characterisation and universe building – entertaining enough while you watch, to be sure, but ultimately insubstantial and unsatisfying, like candyfloss. It feels like an allegory, rather than a real, tangible universe in which real people live – and I've seen a bunch of interviews with people claiming that Doctor Who has always been a 'fairy story', but, you know, I've seen about 75% and counting of the classic show and it really, really wasn't a fairy story. It was a drama; fantastical and far-fetched and a bit silly at times, sure, but still a drama, about people and the universe in which they lived. It doesn't have that any more, not for me, at any rate. And as much as I know Moffat loves the show and is a lifelong fan and as much as I love the little references and parallels he sneaks in all over the place, his storytelling style does not always feel respectful of the history of the show – it feels more as if he is constantly trying to one-up the history of the show in order to assert his own place in it. Anything you can do, I can do better, I can do anything better than you.
Okay, so let's start with a rundown of the basic plot of the episode, to establish what actually happened. The Doctor detects a mysterious message coming from an unidentified planet, so he goes to investigate only to find the planet sealed off behind a forcefield and surrounded by hundreds of spaceships containing just about every enemy he's ever had, all curious to know what's going on (the message is apparently being beamed through all of space and time, but only the people in this particular time-zone have bothered to respond, which is strike one against the hyperbolic but ultimately nonsensical narrative language used here to sound epic without actually being meaningful). On investigation, the Doctor finds a residual crack in space-time through which the Time Lords are calling from another universe – so it's just as well he didn't find the crack until after he learned that the Time Lords might not be dead after all, then. Through the crack they are asking the question 'Doctor who?' apparently so that when the Doctor hears and replies (and they somehow managed to find a crack in a place that just happens to have a truth field in place, for no apparent reason) they'll know its okay to bust back through into this universe. Except that this will apparently set off the Time War all over again, because of all the trigger-happy aliens besieging the planet…which turns out to be Trenzalore, where the Doctor knows he will die because he's been there in the future and seen his own grave. So he decides to stay and guard the town instead – and let us notice how the whole planet apparently consists of just this one town, called Christmas. He stays there for centuries, we are told, centuries during which a better plan never occurs to him and no one else does a damn thing to change the status quo, the only thing that changes is him as he slowly ages to death. Then, just as he is about to die, Clara thinks to ask the Time Lords to help him, through the crack, and just like that they totally give up on returning to this universe and instead close the crack, but not before sending through a whole new regeneration cycle for the Doctor. Because why not, apparently. The regeneration is so violent that it kills all the Daleks, because that's totally how regeneration works, and then the Doctor eventually changes.
Well, it sort of makes sense, if you squint, except that it doesn't really because at every turn you run into contrivances that don't stand up to even the slightest scrutiny – it's incredibly messy, too much relies on no one questioning anything at all, there's so much plot that there's no room for character, and it all just falls completely flat. For me, anyway.
So I'm going to get it all off my chest by ranting about it at length.
Let's start at the beginning. We open in media res, as the Doctor is off adventuring without Clara, who is instead busy cooking Christmas dinner for her family and phones him in the middle of his life-or-death struggle to ask him to a) pretend to be her boyfriend and b) use his time machine to help her cook dinner. Now, comedy is entirely subjective, I know, but these opening scenes are not my idea of comedy at all. I like my Doctor Who best when it plays as a drama – a light-hearted and humorous drama, perhaps, but still a drama. This feels more like a bad sitcom.
And what about Clara's family, previously known to us as a father and the mother she lost at age 16. Here we meet her dad (played by a different actor than previously seen), her gran, and someone called Linda, whose relationship to the rest of the family is never actually explained. Is she an unpleasant aunt? Is she an unpleasant stepmother? We aren't told, because the family isn't there to further our understanding of Clara or to be meaningful characters in their own right, they are simply set-dressing for a 'comedic' set-piece (I suspect there is also meant to be something meaningful about the Doctor's centuries on Trenzalore lasting no longer than a Christmas dinner for Clara, but that doesn't really come across). Christmas dinner is taking place in a block of flats – filmed at one of the locations previously used for the Powell Estate where Rose lived. But whose flat is it? Is it Clara's? I suspect so, since she's the one cooking dinner, but we aren't actually told, and the last time we saw Clara at home she was a live-in nanny with a room in someone else's house, so there's a disconnect there, just like there was a disconnect between Clara being a nanny through series 7b and then suddenly being a schoolteacher in Day of the Doctor (and between Amy's abrupt off-screen career changes, also). It could equally be her gran's flat, or her dad's, or Linda's, but as we aren't told, who can tell? It looks more like a council tenement than the kind of place you'd expect Clara or her family to live – the council estate background worked for Rose, it was a fundamental building block of the character, but Clara has always seemed more middle class, so it doesn't quite sit right.
It also doesn't feel right to see Clara calling the Doctor in the middle of a crisis just because she wants a) her family to think she's got a boyfriend (why?) and b) help cooking Christmas dinner – it turns into a whole huge joke about her apparently regularly asking him to use the TARDIS to help with everything from dinner reservations to watching TV shows she's missed, but I just can't find the joke funny. I would appreciate the character continuity of Clara being rubbish with technology except isn't she a computer genius now? Shouldn't she be able to figure out iPlayer? But mostly, seeing her taking the Doctor and the TARDIS for granted and using them like that just feels so wrong. It cheapens something that should be amazing. Doctor Who works best when it's a show about the Doctor travelling and adventuring with his companion(s). The companion should be fully involved; s/he shouldn't feel like a distraction or an afterthought.
I'm just not sure what we're meant to make of Clara as a character. She's really cute, but there's no substance to the character at all, behind the glib quips and banter. For example, if she is no longer being nanny for Angie and Artie, why isn't she travelling with the Doctor full time? We were originally told that she'd always wanted to travel and her commitment to those kids was the only thing holding her back, but that commitment is now ended and she still isn't travelling – flat out admits here that she's only actually interested in the Doctor because she fancies him, which is depressing beyond belief – so what's the point of her? What are we supposed to make of her? She's supposed to have always longed to travel, and now she's met this alien and he's ancient and enigmatic and charismatic and he's got a time machine and he can take her anywhere in the universe, and in the past (classic and new Who) we've seen characters wrestle with the tension between taking that opportunity and holding onto their own lives, because they had to make a choice, one or the other, that was how it worked, because the Doctor doesn't settle and he doesn't stay still…but with Clara there's no tension at all. Instead of taking the opportunity to fulfil her life's dream of travelling, she's just getting on with her life on Earth and only goes off for occasional jaunts with the Doctor, when it suits her, while completely taking for granted that she can phone him and have him come running whenever she wants, without even earning that privilege. She's completely blasé about having him at her beck and call, even though it is something that no other companion has ever had before in 50 years of the show, everyone else had to make a choice, stay or go, and then live with that choice, and the show was stronger for it. Clara's attitude, playing the relationship in this way…it robs the show, takes something special and unique and makes it seem mundane. And it needn't be like that, if only it were played differently, if only a bit more time was taken to develop the characters and their relationship instead of wasting valuable screen time on contrived gags and unnecessarily convoluted plots. Because, you know, I do kinda like the idea that Clara's life is moving forward (new job and new flat in the last two episodes, apparently) as well as being the Doctor's friend…or I would like it if that development was allowed to be in any way meaningful, if those changes in her life were actually discussed instead of being tacked onto the character without comment. I might also like it if the show played a bit more overtly on the idea of the Doctor trying something new in his relationship with Clara, taking forward a pattern he first attempted with Amy and Rory, a deliberate change in his approach to friendship with humans, but there was very little exploration of that shift with Amy and Rory and there's been none whatsoever with Clara. So as it is, the set-up just feels trivial and cartoonish – it feels like children's television rather than family entertainment, which is a subtle distinction, but an important one (although, you know, the Sarah Jane Adventures was a children's show and still did better with the characters than this). And it doesn't feel like Doctor Who.
Part-time adventuring alongside every day life worked back in the UNIT era because at the time the Doctor's own lifestyle was structured around his exile on Earth, but it isn't working with Clara because her lifestyle just doesn't jibe with his – it's out of character for him not to have drifted away from her in between adventures and found someone else to travel with, in fact. How can we feel attached to Clara as a companion if she isn't actually the Doctor's companion? We need to see them spending quality time together in order for their friendship to feel real, but instead they were strangers one minute and BFFs the next, with no natural flow to that development at all – the bonding seemed to take place off-screen, because why waste time developing the characters organically when you can simply tell us that they've now bonded and use the screen-time instead on a flashy plot that looks clever until you poke at it? As a result, the relationship feels horribly disjointed and I simply can't engage with it. Clara keeps being given big emotional scenes but they always feel hollow to me because I don't feel I know her as a person and her friendship with the Doctor doesn't ring true to me, and it's such a shame because I've always loved the Doctors' relationships with their companions. It makes me sad that I couldn't like the Eleventh Doctor with Clara, but I just don't feel that she's earned her place in these momentous events at all. She feels like a placeholder for the 'companion card', rather than an actual person. She just does and says whatever the plot requires, with no consistency of character whatsoever, and the sitcom requirements of this particular plot were particularly damaging to her.
You know, there was a time when this show was about adventure. It was about ordinary people caught up in something bigger than themselves and learning from it, learning what they were capable of and how extraordinary they could be. It was about ideas and ideals, and about friendship in all its forms, rich and varied and meaningful. How did we end up with this self-absorbed 'companion' who isn't really a companion and has all the depth of a puddle? How did we end up with such a long string of companions whose primary relationship with the Doctor is defined, on-screen and out loud, repeatedly, by whether or not they fancy each other? Is that really all the writers believe a modern audience cares about? Are we really that shallow? I don't believe we are – I just wish the writing had more faith in us.
Wow, that was a long rant, and I've barely even started on the events of the episode! So here are some things that I did like about it, before I go on. I liked the Doctor calling Gallifrey home. It's his homeworld, and his feelings toward it were complex long before the Time War was dreamed up in order to 'remove baggage' by adding a whole lot more. I liked the acknowledgement of the Doctor's wig – that was an amusing moment. I liked the Doctor's throwaway comment about putting the TARDIS engines on silent – far more fitting than River's smug claim that he drives wrong. I really, really liked seeing the Seal of the High Council of Gallifrey again – a call back to The Five Doctors, 30 years ago. It even looks the same! I don't even mind that the Doctor just happens to have it on him, because he always just happens to have stuff like that in his pockets when he needs it. I always enjoy the Doctor's affinity with children, and I enjoyed his final speech about embracing change while remembering who you used to be – a far better way to go out than the Tenth Doctor's pity-fest.
So I've grumbled at length about Clara and her lack of consistently developed characterisation and how that impacts on my viewing experience. What about the episode plot and its rather plot-holey details? Well, the episode does at least attempt to tie up all the loose threads that have been left dangling throughout the Eleventh Doctor's era; it's just a shame that there were so many of them to be rounded up here, so that the episode as a whole felt as if it were going through a checklist of those loose ends and scrabbling to get them all tied off in some way, each one mostly tied up individually and separately from the others, without really making it into a coherent whole, so that the overall result is something of a mess that doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. Moffat also succumbed to the temptation of making this a Grand Event to mark the end of Smith's era, hence the amount of spectacular but repetitive battles (lots of civilians running from weapons fire, much like in the previous episode) and shots of ships assembled in space, intercut with sentimental filler scenes, meant to tug at the heart strings. It's visually very impressive, but emotionally empty. And also as has become usual, we were left with sub-plots and characters left hanging or insufficiently explored.
Let's start with the Papal Mainframe church, or whatever they call themselves, and the fact that we've met them before and no one needed to go naked then – just as no one but the Doctor and Clara seems to have to go naked here. Yes, it is possible to come up with rationalisations, of a sort, but at the end of the day what it all boils down to is that this is just another one-off gag thrown in purely for the sake of contrived screwball comedy, because why expend time on meaningful character interaction when you can waste it on an extended 'joke' that adds nothing to the story or characters whatsoever. I'm sorry, but this simply is not my kind of humour, it felt forced and unnecessary – an irrelevant plot contrivance intended to generate some forced, slapstick comedy rather than humour developing naturally from the characters and their situation.
Then there's Tasha Lem, head of the church. We've never met her before, but she and the Doctor appear to know each other well…except that she's never seen this body before. So this is yet another so-called 'old friend' of the Doctor whose entire relationship with him belongs to an unseen past (because his actual past and actual old friends just aren't exciting enough, clearly) – and whose relationship with him is founded, yet again, on flirting and sexual innuendo, even though that isn't remotely in keeping with who he used to be, which should be the version of him that she knows according to their dialogue here, so the timey-wimey doesn't even make sense by its own rules. It both retcons and cheapens the actual past of the character, superimposing the current vision for the show over its very different history as if to airbrush it out, recreating the past in the image of the present. Also, we keep being told that the Eleventh is an awkward, asexual Doctor of the old school, but that isn't what we're shown on-screen. On-screen he flirts with everyone and goes around snogging everyone, and that isn't the Doctor. It's a massive personality shift that does a huge disservice to the character. Matt Smith deserved so, so much better. We catch glimpses here and there of the Doctor he could have been, but the scripts let him down time and time again. I've been so disappointed with his time on the show, and that isn't his fault, he's done marvellously with weak material, but it is what it is.
There doesn't seem to be any real reason why Clara couldn't be allowed to hear Tasha's conversation with the Doctor, other than to leave her alone to encounter the Silence – an effective enough scene, to be sure, but completely pointless because the Silence aren't really relevant to the plot at all. They are there just for the sake of it, just as the weeping angels are encountered on the planet mostly just for the sake of it. This episode feels as if it was designed to be the greatest hits of the Eleventh Doctor's era, which is exactly the kind of thing Steven Moffat specifically said he wanted to avoid when he wrote the 50th anniversary episode. Yet the 50th anniversary episode was the one that deserved to be a collection of greatest hits, because it was a one-off celebrating a very special anniversary, whereas this is just another regeneration story, important but not 50th anniversary special. Well, if nothing else, this tells us something about where Moffat's priorities lie.
I'm fairly certain that the various bits of information we've been given about the Silence over the past couple of seasons don't really make much sense when it's all put together. I mean, they started out as the baddest of bad guys ever to plot against humanity (always there, always guiding things behind the scenes on Earth, remember, for millions of years) yet now we're suddenly told that actually they are nothing more than genetically engineered priests, which – what? What's the point of engineering priests who make you forget your confession? The whole point of confession is that you remember it and are then able to move on from your sin! And apparently they belong to the Church of the Papal Mainframe…which is a human thing. So they were created by humans for humans and then went back in time (with the Kovarian sect?) and became the baddest of bad guys ever to plot against humanity? I'm having trouble reconciling these conflicting pieces of information! Also, when did the Doctor learn this about them, because he didn't know it last time they met.
Why doesn't the weeping angel zap Clara into the past when it touches her? The nature of those creatures has been distorted beyond all recognition since we first met them, so that the original weeping angels we first met back in Blink now seem the odd ones out.
Why does the town of Christmas even have a truth field? Other than as a device to a) generate a comedic moment, and b) ensure that if the Doctor answers the Time Lords' question, he has to tell the truth. There is no reason. It's a plot contrivance that makes no attempt to make sense even within the story's own internal universe, there's no explanation given for it, it is simply there because the plot requires it to be there. Also, how would the Time Lords even know that the truth field was there in this town, on this world, where there also just happens to also be a residual crack in space-time that they can send a message through? Surely they can't control where the 'scar tissue' was left after the universe was put back together? The message coming through the crack in a place where the truth has to be spoken is the cornerstone of the entire plot, yet the contrivance of it makes no sense whatsoever when you stop and think about it. We are required to simply accept it without question because when questioned it falls apart.
Also, why would the Time Lords send through a message that no one can understand, but that terrifies everyone? What does that achieve? And if it is being sent through all of space and time, how come it is only being responded to in this timestream? Perhaps we'd better not ask.
I don't really want to expend too much mental energy on the Papal Mainframe and how that works. We've seen the organisation quite a few times now but it still makes very little sense to me on a practical or logistical level. They are human, yes? But where (or when) do they come from? How are they so powerful, powerful enough to hold such mighty enemies in check? Where do they get their technology? Why don't they seem to age? Which bits of the sect come from where in the Doctor's timeline, and how does the internal chronology of the organisation fit together? I'm fairly certain that if we put all their episodes together and studied them, the details would not tie together neatly at all. Like…if Kovarian's sect broke away and travelled back in time to stop the Doctor ever coming to Trenzalore, they had to know about the events of this episode, which means their breakaway should take place during the centuries that pass during this episode, yet there's no sign of that here (no room in the plot to address that kind of detail) and Tasha Lem already knows about them before the siege begins. The convoluted timey-wimeyness of it makes my head hurt almost as much as River Song or Mel Bush's timeline. How did Tasha Lem even know what was going on with Trenzalore? She heard the message and got her people there to seal off the planet before anyone else arrived, sure, (although if the message is being beamed through all of time and space, I'm not sure how she managed that) but until the Doctor used the Seal of the High Council of Gallifrey and Handles the Cyberhead to translate the message, no one knew what it meant, we were specifically told that. Yet the moment the Doctor figured it out, it seemed Tasha Lem was already ahead of him, predicting a new Time War if he answered the question and allowed the Time Lords through – so if she'd already deciphered it herself, how?
Doctor who? You know, I always feel it's a mistake when the show focuses too closely on the Doctor himself. This show is an anthology disguised as a series, its mythology has been assembled piecemeal over five decades, and there is no way to truly reconcile the often conflicting pieces of information we've been given over those years. So the best way to handle that is by not looking too closely at the detail, by allowing the Doctor to be the catalyst for adventure he was originally designed as, instead of playing him as a mystery to be solved. Trying to solve that mystery makes the show smaller, somehow (just as the continued domestication of the Doctor reduces the character, somehow). Leaving the mystery unanswered and looking elsewhere for adventure frees the show to continue, unfettered, into the future.
Way back, Dorium's severed head told us that 'On the fields of Trenzalore, at the fall of the Eleventh, where no one can speak falsely or fail to answer, a question will be asked.' Where did that prophecy come from – the Kovarian sect who travelled back in time? It isn't clear. It isn't a very accurate prophecy, anyway, since the Doctor absolutely does fail to answer the question, for centuries. The church taking 'silence will fall' as their rallying cry doesn't really make any sense either, when you think about it; they don't actually do anything to stop the Doctor answering the question – it's just words that have to be used because they already were, just like Clara's 'run, pretty boy, and remember me' line had to be used because it already had been rather than because it made any real sense in context.
So the Doctor ages to death on Trenzalore, under siege for centuries. And this is another point where episodes like this completely lose me, because it's all talk and no show; playing it so ridiculously big loses me completely. The story tells me that centuries are passing, but those words have no meaning because we aren't shown any sign of that passage of time. The Doctor ages (physically, at least; he doesn't seem to change much in other ways, even picking up with Clara pretty much where he left off whenever she pops up, despite having not seen her in centuries), but nothing else changes at all. Tasha Lem doesn't age – yet isn't she supposed to be human? So how does that work, exactly, and can I have some? 'She doesn't believe in aging', that's all the explanation we get, except that it explains nothing, simply asks us to handwave the contrivance away and pretend it doesn't exist. And then there are all those aliens up in space, apparently prepared to spend centuries sitting above this planet trying to break through the forcefield and attack the Doctor. That situation really doesn't change at all, in all those years? No one gets bored, no one gets distracted or finds something better to do, no one comes up with a better plan to change the status quo – such as, for example, evacuating the planet before war can break out? No one attempts to broker a peace treaty or find a way to close the crack? The plot requires too many people to be far too passive for too many years to be plausible. Meanwhile down on the planet, the people of Christmas also don't change at all – there seems to be no development of the community whatsoever, even though hundreds of years pass, which is another implausibility that I simply can't swallow. Just because no technology can get past the forcefield doesn't mean the people won't develop their own – it's a human colony and humans develop, it's what we do. Look how much we've changed in the past 50 years since the show began, never mind the hundreds of years that pass during this story! I'm sorry, but I just don't buy it, that isn't how the passage of time works, which is a good part of why the storytelling feels allegorical, instead of being a drama rooted in a credible universe. I just can't suspend my disbelief, and so the hyperbole of the terrible war over Trenzalore falls completely flat for me. I don't believe for a moment that the kind of war we were shown could have been sustained for centuries – that little agricultural town would have been obliterated in minutes, even with the Doctor trying to defend it.
It saddens me to see what a joke Sontarans have become. The two we saw here were basically just played as Strax. I know they are a clone race, but still! There used to be more to them than that. And as for the wooden Cyberman…well, let's not go there. And calling the Silence the Doctor's 'ancient enemy' might sound good, but overstates their case entirely; I'd have liked to know more about his alliance with them, though, and how exactly the Doctor can fight alongside allies whose existence he must regularly forget. But as has become fairly typical, this episode is simply too busy to actually explore any of the concepts it raises.
So the severed head of a Cyberman, seen in this one episode only, is now canonically the Doctor's longest-lasting companion ever, complete with sorrow at its passing. And it isn't even that I wasn't amused by Handles or that I didn't appreciate those scenes, it's just that that, right there, just about sums up something I dislike most about Moffat's showrunning style. Part of me has always tried to brush it off and make excuses – he loves the show and I know he does, he's a lifelong fan…but I think that's part of the problem. In storytelling, there's a fine line between stories you can tell and stories you should tell, and Moffat crosses that line repeatedly, for me – it's as if he's allowed his inner 12-year-old to take over and make all his wildest fanfiction a reality, without any discipline or boundaries at all, he just wants to throw all these ideas out there because he can rather than because he should, to make his mark and cement his legacy. The show is 50 years old and Moffat has been at the helm for just four of those years. Yet he has written the show so that his Doctor is the longest-lived ever, cramming centuries' worth of experience into the space between episodes, mostly, so that this Doctor's largely off-screen adventures outweigh all the experiences of previous Doctors, creating a huge imbalance. He has written the show so that not one of the companions he created is just an ordinary friend and companion, oh no, he provided each one of them with a plot contrivance to make them more important in the Doctor's life than anyone has ever been, just like that. His companions are the Doctor's wife, mother-in-law and father-in-law, companions he apparently loved so much more than anyone else that he broke the habit of almost a dozen lifetimes by returning to them again and again instead of moving on and making new friends, which is what would actually be in character for him – it bolsters these companions at the expense of the old, which is not the slightest bit respectful, and it twists the Doctor's character to achieve it. And now there's Clara, who was artificially inserted into the Doctor's entire timeline when she barely knew him and when we barely knew her, a contrivance to make her canonically more important in his life than any other companion has ever been, without any effort having to be expended on actually getting to know her or on developing her relationship with the Doctor via their on-screen interaction. Moffat keeps saying in interviews that thanks to having been through the Doctor's timeline Clara now knows him inside out, better than anyone else ever has …but it's just words, it doesn't mean anything because we haven't seen that relationship develop on-screen – and she certainly doesn't play on-screen as someone who really does know him inside out, except when the plot requires her to be sentimental. The experience seems to have had no impact on her at all, just as Rory's 2000 years as a plastic centurion also failed to change him in the slightest, and just as the true impact on Amy and Rory of losing their child was never really explored. It's inconsistent, plot-driven characterisation at its worst.
I can't help comparing these companions to others who've had an important place in the history of the show –Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart in particular. No one set out to design the Brigadier as a character who would play an enormous role in the Doctor's lives. That role and that place in Doctor Who history grew naturally out of the character as he developed. From a one-off appearance to a recurring regular role to his later guest appearances, the Brigadier earned his place in the Doctor's life and history, the hard way, by working alongside him as a friend and ally over a 20 year period and numerous regenerations. Steven Moffat seems to want a similar legacy for his own companions, but because he knows he only has a relatively short span as showrunner within which to work, he wants to achieve it instantaneously and artificially by telling us that it exists via plot contrivance, instead of allowing it to grow naturally over time. Yet those kinds of writing shortcut simply cannot ever have the same impact. Seeing the Eleventh Doctor drop in on Amy and Rory to pick up exactly where they left off the week before while casually telling them that it's been 200 years between episodes even though he hasn't changed at all and doesn't seem to have met anyone else in the meantime, or watching him flirt awkwardly with River Song over the course of their largely off-screen and unhealthy out-of-order relationship…that can never achieve the same effect as watching the Brigadier meet and work alongside five different Doctors over a 20 year period. It looks and sounds good, on the surface, but when you scratch that surface there's very little substance to back it up. I suppose I just wish that Moffat would trust his characters a bit more – let us love them because of who they are as people and the way their time with the Doctor develops, instead of telling us repeatedly that we should love them because of how important and special they are.
There is much the same feel to the way this episode deals with the Doctor coming to the end of his regenerative cycle – a very real issue that had the potential for very real character drama, instead shoehorned into a single episode that already had too much to do and therefore not really explored effectively at all. On the surface it looks fair enough – the classic show established both that there was a 12 regeneration limit and that it was possible for the Time Lords to bestow a new regeneration cycle, in special circumstances, so there's the set-up right there. Except that this is only the Eleventh Doctor, he should still be two regenerations away from the end of his natural lifecycle, which could and probably should have been dealt with as an ongoing background story arc for that last Doctor, mining the drama to maximum effect. Instead, perhaps because Steven Moffat wanted to deal with it himself rather than trust another showrunner with the concept, or perhaps because he wanted it to be part of his legacy, it was rushed into place here, raised and then dealt with within the span of a single episode. Suddenly we learn that the Tenth Doctor's abortive regeneration that resulted in the metacrisis actually did count as a full regeneration, one of the twelve. Suddenly we learn that there was a whole other regeneration that we never knew about…and I have enormous cognitive dissonance about that one because I loved John Hurt's Doctor, I really did, I'd have happily watched seasons worth of him, but it can't be denied that his one-off existence was artificially contrived largely as set-up for this episode, so that Matt Smith's Doctor could suddenly announce that he is on his last life already, despite only being the Eleventh Doctor (and despite having previously behaved as if he fully expected to regenerate again if anything happened to him), and it just makes everything horribly messy. Easy for Moffat to smile and tell us that the numerical system of reckoning Doctors hasn't changed, but the fact is that it has – the 'number' of the Doctors no longer tallies with the number of regenerations, an enormous and entirely unnecessary complication that the show really, really didn't need. And for what? So that Steven Moffat could be the showrunner to start the next cycle of Doctors? So that Matt Smith could have something big to leave on? I'm just not sure that it worked, and it certainly doesn't seem the best way to tell the story of the end of the Doctor's natural regenerative cycle.
It just all feels so rushed, the outcome deeply unsatisfying as a result, and that's been the major shortcoming of Steven Moffat's time as showrunner all along. He's great at coming up with imaginative and intriguing concepts that fire off in all directions, but he falls short in terms of bringing about the necessary storytelling discipline in his function of supervising the scripts, both those by himself or by other writers, a fault that I thought very apparent in this episode. He doesn't take his time with anything. He doesn't like to expend time on build-up or follow-through (especially not follow-through). He likes impact, big and immediate and shocking, and then he likes to move on, quick, before anyone has time to stop and think about what just happened and what it really means. As showrunner, he's finally got to play in the sandbox he's been hankering after since childhood and it often feels as if he's in such a tearing rush to get all his ideas out there before someone takes that sandbox away from him again that he doesn't take time to step back and think things through properly, he just throws it all out there, cramming as many ideas as he can into the shortest span of time possible, because realising those ideas in any form is more important than exploring them effectively. It feels self-indulgent, in fact. And it's such a shame because he does have some fantastic ideas and there have been some lovely moments during his era, not to mention all manner of brilliant little references back to the history of the show, it's just impossible to fully appreciate them because the pace is so frenetic, the plot-work overly convoluted and the characters so poorly developed that I just can't engage with any of it – I'm left feeling detached from what should be the big emotional pay-off.
It's all subjective, I'm sure. Steven Moffat is an ideas man. He likes to paint big, epic ideas in broad brush strokes. His style of storytelling uses characters as cogs in the wheel of complicated plots, with the drama stemming from 'epic' set-pieces. I prefer smaller-scale, more intimate storytelling about characters and their experiences –small, simple plot rocks dropped into a pond, with the drama stemming from the ripple effect of the impact on the characters. The two styles simply don't mesh, which is why this era of Doctor Who is now firmly cemented as my all-time least favourite.
Tasha Lem fetching Clara back from Earth to be with the dying Doctor at the end was pure plot contrivance. The plot required Clara to be there, but she had to have been sent back to Earth first or she'd have died centuries earlier, which meant somehow she had to be brought back to Trenzalore when she was needed, and so Tasha Lem was used to fulfil that end. But why would she bother to go and get Clara in the middle of this supposedly epic war? How did she know how to fly the TARDIS so very precisely, or where to find Clara? How was she even still alive and unchanged, after so many centuries had supposedly passed? Is she really human, and if not then what is she? Could she really have held back the Dalek conversion inside her for so long? Too many questions, not enough answers, and I just don't buy it. Fiction relies on suspension of disbelief, and this episode broke mine. We didn't even see what became of her in the end, after she'd served her final plot purpose.
One thing I do like about the Doctor sending Clara away is that among all the contrivances and the watering down and distorting of the character, this is something that really is bang in character for him - for all versions of him. He sends her away so that she won't grow old and die in front of him. Except that going back home to Earth isn't going to stop her growing old and dying. It just means that it won't happen in front of him. And that, right there, is the reason he doesn't look back at the companions who have left him. They leave, for whatever reason, and he turns around and walks away and doesn't look back, and because he doesn't look back, they get to live forever in his mind. He's a time traveller. From his point of view, no one has been born yet and everyone is already dead, and he deals with that by not looking at the detail, if he can possible help it. His timestream aligns with someone else's for a time and he travels with that person and enjoys their friendship and loves them for who they are, and then their timestreams diverge once more, and just about everywhere he goes that person is already long dead, but that's an abstract concept, and it's the tangible that he avoids. For as long as he doesn't look at the detail of what happened to them, after they left, they can live forever in his mind, just as they were on that last day.
The Doctor lied about having a plan while standing right in front of the crack, in the tower where the truth field was supposed to be at its strongest. That pretty much says it all about the internal consistency of this episode.
And then there's the regeneration. The aged Doctor goes out to face the victorious Daleks believing he is about to die and Clara turns to the crack, through which the Time Lords have been beaming their unchanging message for all this time, and she asks them to help the Doctor. Because, she says, they 'should love him', which…if she knows him inside out because she's been through his timestream, shouldn't she know his complex history with his people better than that? Yet that plea is apparently all it takes for the nameless, faceless Time Lords to give up on trying to break through into our universe again and instead send through a new regeneration cycle for the Doctor. Their motivation? I guess we're not supposed to ask. Just like we're not supposed to ask how they had that juice right there ready, or how they were able to close the crack, or how they were able to move the crack, or why they needed to move it, or, you know, anything. The moment you question any of it, it all falls apart.
I mean, I can come up with possible reasons why the Time Lords might choose to save the Doctor and cut themselves off again – perhaps to ingratiate themselves with him in hopes that he might return the favour someday, perhaps because they realised that if the Doctor died they'd be stuck forever, or heck, perhaps it was just Romana defying everyone else to save the Doctor because she at least does love him, her dear old friend. But we can't actually know because we weren't told. Maybe more will be revealed in the future, but I won't hold my breath. In terms of this episode, it was pure deus ex machina – a shiny reset employed out of nowhere to save the day because nothing else established within the episode could.
The Doctor's regeneration is incredibly violent and destroys all the invading Daleks, who are the last aliens standing. We have to rationalise, I suppose, that this is because it's the start of a new cycle or because the energy was sent through from another universe, because it makes no sense otherwise – just as it made no real sense that the last regeneration from Ten to Eleven was similarly destructive, something that has never previously been part of the regenerative process. Let us remember that regeneration is a normal part of the Time Lord life cycle, and most of those regenerations take place on Gallifrey – there'd be nothing left of the Citadel if it was normal for regeneration to be this violent!
So the Doctor is saved and so is Trenzalore, because a) all the enemies have finally been destroyed, and b) without the Time Lord message beaming through that crack, no one has any reason to care about the planet any more. But all this means that the Doctor's personal timeline has been well and truly changed – Clara's too – and that's a massive paradox, no matter which way you spin it. We saw the Doctor's grave on Trenzalore only two episodes ago. We also saw his body, which was how Clara got into his timestream in the first place to meet and supposedly save all his previous selves (although I have to point out here that we've seen dead Time Lords before and they didn't look like that). That happened. Yet now it can't happen. And didn't we already do this in season six? We saw the Doctor die but we knew he couldn't have really died, and then later we were shown how he got out of it. This is pretty much the same story, only told over three episodes instead of a season, and with added paradox that gives me a headache even beginning to think through the permutations. I'm pretty sure that the paradox won't be addressed on-screen at all, either, despite the magnitude of it.
For the second time in a row, the regeneration was terribly drawn-out – it's gotta be said, even though the stories are shorter and faster, the new show has just as much padding as the classic, just of a different sort! Karen Gillan's cameo was nice, although the Doctor seeing fake little Amelia would have been enough for me. I think I actually preferred it when the Fourth and Fifth Doctors hallucinated all their companions as they regenerated, rather than having just one singled out as special – the idea of him being imprinted on the first face he saw sounds cute and all, but isn't how regeneration has ever worked before (although it does amuse me to think of, for e.g., the Eighth Doctor being imprinted on that mortuary attendant! :D) I did like the simplicity of the transition between the two actors when it finally happened, not only because it was logical since the fireworks of regeneration had already been gone through, but also because it harked back to the classic show when flashy light shows were not needed to make the event memorable.
I'm not sure why Clara was so upset at the thought of him changing if she's supposed to remember her splinter selves encountering all his incarnations and therefore knows that he's always the same man beneath the skin. But then again the show has failed to even glance sideways at the consequences of that little escapade, never mind attempted to explore the impact on her character in any way, so who can tell what she does or doesn't remember about it? I just hope that post-regeneration she remembers her desire to travel and becomes a proper companion, travelling with the Doctor because she wants to see the universe, instead of dragging him down to her life on Earth all the time because she fancies him.
Overall, I'm happy that the narrative mess that was the Eleventh Doctor's era is over now. It started out promisingly enough, but failed to fully wrap things up as it went along, leaving open-ended questions that spanned over the seasons in a never-ending spiral of convolution and plot holes – a mess that makes less and less sense the more I think about it. So I'm grateful we can move in a new direction now. Of course I don't have an abundance of faith that the problems I have with Moffat's leadership are magically going to get 100% better, but perhaps he'll reign himself in just enough to not let things get so out of hand and unwieldy again. Also perhaps he'll hand over the reigns sooner rather than later now – I'm ready for new blood there as well. He's had a good crack at the whip, but this is a show that thrives on change and I feel that a bigger change than merely the leading man is needed now.
Well, time will tell, I suppose.
ETA I found this article, which pretty much sums up the problems I've had with the writing in this era: The Captain Kirk Problem - how Doctor Who betrayed Matt Smith
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Date: 2013-12-30 11:40 am (UTC)It's as if he's allowed his inner 12-year-old to take over and make all his wildest fanfiction a reality, without any discipline or boundaries at all, he just wants to throw all these ideas out there because he can rather than because he should, to make his mark and cement his legacy.
I wonder if that is why I find Moffat's tenure as showrunner on Sherlock a lot more enjoyable (and competent) than on Who. I mean, with Sherlock, Moffat is forced to remain within the boundaries of the novels. He can play with elements of the story, and he certainly has fun translating Sherlock into a modern language, so to speak, but since he needs to stay within the basic narrative structure of the novels, his play instinct is thwarted to an extent. Moreover, since the Sherlock Holmes novels are self-contained, Moffat also does not have the freedom to invent season-long, convoluted arcs that put a strain on the single episodes. Moffat's exuberance, his fondness for comedy and his love for fast pacing are tangible in Sherlock as well, but it feels a lot more tamed than in Doctor Who. Maybe it also helps that he shares responsibility as a showrunner on Sherlock with Mark Gatiss. :)
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Date: 2013-12-30 09:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-30 01:13 pm (UTC)His tenure as showrunner has been so disappointing when I had such high hopes of him. He can write tight scripts as evidenced in Coupling where his set up and pay offs were magnificent but he seems to have completely lost his way on Doctor Who.
RTD is also a huge fan and his storylines also had their share of criticism but when rewatched now, they mostly look so much more professional compared with Moffat's messes.
In A Writer's Tale, RTD seems to think very highly of Moffat's writing - and indeed, his scripts under RTD are very good - I wonder what he thinks of the current series.
Much as I kept hoping things would get better or that Moffat would pull a timey whimey trick out of the hat that would make sense of everything, I agree, it's time he moved on now and let somebody else do what they can to smooth things over and restore a sense of order.
Sue
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Date: 2013-12-30 09:49 pm (UTC)Every era of Who has its flaws, and every era eventually gives way to the next. I keep reminding myself of that whenever this one disappoints me! It'll be easier to be forgiving of the flaws here when they are history and the show has moved on. I hope so, anyway.
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Date: 2013-12-30 01:53 pm (UTC)It started off slow but quickened up ... have watched 4 times now and still bawling my eyes out at the ending ... the Doctor aging and not abandoning the people of Christmas.
HANDLE reminded me of K-9 not that I watched the original series but we have of course seen K-9 in the reboot, if only for a few moments and he is as famous as the show itself.
I never can work out plots just know it works ... so many jigsaw pieces and you need to select from each episode to get the full picture.
I am hoping Clara learns how to cook in the Capaldi run.
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Date: 2013-12-30 07:42 pm (UTC)But this is the original Clara, the same Clara whose parents were brought together by that dratted magical leaf - and she wasn't born to save the Doctor, whatever the hyperbolic language used in that episode might claim. Her splinter selves were created for that purpose, sure, but this Clara, the original, is an ordinary human being who chose to risk her life to save the Doctor. And the family we saw her with at Christmas dinner could have done with a bit more explanation.
I can work out plots. I followed this one just fine, I just don't think it holds water. I'm glad you enjoyed it, though. :)
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Date: 2013-12-30 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-30 06:39 pm (UTC)I don't even have the energy/interest to comment on DW anymore.... Moffat's tenure has driven me, in my very short acquaintance with the show, from love to absolute hatred. It's not only lack of interest/enjoyment, I'm at the point where unfortunately the show inspires revulsion in me. I hope Capaldi's run is better for me, and that I can get back into the show... but I don't trust Moffat in the slightest.
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Date: 2013-12-30 09:58 pm (UTC)Personally, whenever the current show disappoints me, I just retreat into the old to remind myself that every era has its strengths and weaknesses and every era passes. I suppose there have been plenty of times when the fans must have been spitting nails about new directions taken - just imagine the reaction to the first ever regeneration! It's a lot easier, in general, to be forgiving of the weaker eras once there's a bit of distance, so I'm hoping that will hold good for this one once it is over and there's a new regime in place. Every showrunner brings a unique style to the show. Bob Holmes in the '70s inherited the UNIT era and promptly sent the Doctor back into space while reimagining the show as gothic horror (to great effect). Andrew Cartmel in the '80s saw the Doctor as a kind of intergalactic Merlin. Russell Davies leant heavily on the soap opera genre to create a new Doctor Who rooted in real life and family. And to Moffat the show is a fairy tale - or possibly a sitcom. Fingers crossed the next showrunner will have a better vision for the show!
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Date: 2013-12-30 07:58 pm (UTC)So I have had Clara issues for a while. But this episode had holes out the wazoo. All the Doctor had to do was load the population of Christmas into the Tardis, relocate them and never go back to Trenzalore. After all The Tardis is "bigger on the inside than on the outside". Once there was no city to protect from the rampaging hordes who wanted the Time Lords to not come back, all The Doctor had to do was not bring them back, end of story. Or if he wants them back give his name and coordinates where the rampaging hordes aren't waiting for the Time Lords to enter our universe and then throw up a cloaking device and easy peasy no galactic war. I hate it when I'm more cleaver than The Doctor, because I'm not all that clever.
But I really resent Clara being the super specialist snowflake companion ever. I loved Sarah Jane and The Doctor left her behind and never gave her a second thought. Donna, well I really loved Donna and IMHO she was the most totally screwed of all the companions, even more screwed than the ones that died, and he never really looked back that much at her either. I don't know Clara. I don't have a feeling for Clara. If she had stayed Victorian Clara, I would have liked her better, but this Clara? I can't see how The Doctor remembered her, when he couldn't remember that the kid he had been living with wasn't Barnaby (or Barnabas it didn't stick). He couldn't remember who had lived and died among the people he was seeing EVERY SINGLE DAY, but he remembered a woman he saw for what, a year, 300+ years ago? It made no sense.
I liked Matt Smith. I know many people love David Tennant's Doctor, but he became way too emo for me, although David's acting was always superb. I disliked River because he story never held together for me. I liked Amy mostly because she brought Rory along with her and I really liked Rory, but Clara, Clara needs some real development because right now, she could be anyone.
I wish that like Russel T. Davies, Steven Moffet had decided that when "his doctor" left that he was leaving too. Then the show could start with a clean slate and bring the show back to something that resembles the show I loved. And maybe stop having the universe in danger of being destroyed EVERY season. Things really were fine when The Doctor was just trying to save one planet, not the entire galaxy or the entire universe.
no subject
Date: 2013-12-30 10:16 pm (UTC)So I have had Clara issues for a while
Oh, me too, sister, me too! I wanted so badly to like her, especially since I never really liked Amy all that much, and Clara had so much potential that's been completely wasted on overblown plots and it's just too late now. The damage is done. It's the first time a Doctor Who companion hasn't felt like a person to me and I'm really sad about that.
Small-scale, intimate storytelling, that's what the show needs to get back to. A struggle doesn't have to be world- or universe-shattering to be significant in the life of an individual. If we could just bring the focus back to the characters and stop tossing out absurdly enormous plots that aren't really explored at all...
Well, we can keep our fingers crossed, I suppose.
no subject
Date: 2014-01-01 12:44 pm (UTC)We found the Time of the Doctor disappointing, even without being as invested in the whole thing as you are.
Carol
no subject
Date: 2014-01-01 01:07 pm (UTC)