In The Forest of the Night
Oct. 26th, 2014 07:07 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
llywelaOnce upon a time when I was 11 years old, I was in the school choir for a very small window of time. One of the songs we learned, for a competition, was a musical rendition of Blake's 'Tiger Tiger', and it has stayed with me ever since - it's a lovely song; the words are haunting enough on their own, the music even more so. Then, on the way home from the competition, my sister and I were the last to be dropped off but the bus driver decided that was too much like hard work to actually drive to that one last house, so made us get out with the person being dropped off before us, which meant we were stranded in the wrong place quite late at night and had to go into this other person's house (not even a friend, just a random person who happened to be in the choir) and phone our dad to come and get us. And it freaked me out so much that I never went back to choir again.
Why am I talking about this? Because telling this story allows me to put off grumbling about Doctor Who!
So. This episode. Well, it did at least make sense of that time I wandered past the museum at lunch and saw a film crew setting up a small jungle of potted plants around the doors. As a runaround, I suppose it was middling - I've seen worse - but the cons definitely outweigh the pros. The episode broke my suspension of disbelief in a number of ways, and never recovered from that.
For starters, remember when Doctor Who was a show whose brief was to introduce some real science and history to the children watching? It isn't even pretending to be science fiction any more. At least when the Tom Baker era had vegetation rampaging out of control there was an explanation (it was aliens wot dunnit!) that didn't boil down to 'trees are magic and will save the world just because'. This was pure fairytale, harking back to the worst of the Amy Pond era. The logic wasn't even internally consistent.
Also, I figured out the twist way, way before the Doctor did. Isn't he supposed to be cleverer than me?
That was meant to be London in an emergency? And the group with the Doctor plus Maebh's mother were the only people moving around? Over 8million people and they all decided to stay at home instead of going out to see the mysterious magical trees? No one else had family they were worried about and wanted to look for? Sorry, I'm not buying it.
And I haven't even started on the characters yet. Nobody reacted like a real person would. Clara and Danny believed that the world was about to be incinerated, no way of stopping it, and they had the opportunity to at least save the lives of the children whose safety they were responsible for...but instead made a unilateral decision that the children would be better off burning to death than escaping in the TARDIS...because they would be sad? Seriously? Saving at least a fragment of the human race and starting again is too much like hard work, so we'd rather die? What kind of message does that send? What happened to that indomitable spirit of survival that Tom Baker's Doctor used to wax lyrical about? Give me The Ark in Space any day!
So Danny got to be the big damn hero, improbably scaring a tiger away with a handheld torch...after taking a group of schoolchildren to within 10 feet of it. And Clara's reaction was 'what a hero, you saved us' instead of 'what were you thinking, bringing those children into such danger?' I don't buy it. All gloss, no plausibility.
All the characterisation here was determined by plot requirement, rather than how anyone, least of all these characters, would actually react.
And the Doctor reckons everyone will forget what happened, except that all the destruction caused by the vegetation is still there and all those escaped animals from the zoo are still rampaging around. Not quite the reset ending it wanted to be, but no mention of any consequences.
I watched the teaser for next week and could only think what a waste of time all this has been - whatever twist is coming won't be enough to redeem the contrived, poorly executed build-up that has stifled the entire season.
Why am I talking about this? Because telling this story allows me to put off grumbling about Doctor Who!
So. This episode. Well, it did at least make sense of that time I wandered past the museum at lunch and saw a film crew setting up a small jungle of potted plants around the doors. As a runaround, I suppose it was middling - I've seen worse - but the cons definitely outweigh the pros. The episode broke my suspension of disbelief in a number of ways, and never recovered from that.
For starters, remember when Doctor Who was a show whose brief was to introduce some real science and history to the children watching? It isn't even pretending to be science fiction any more. At least when the Tom Baker era had vegetation rampaging out of control there was an explanation (it was aliens wot dunnit!) that didn't boil down to 'trees are magic and will save the world just because'. This was pure fairytale, harking back to the worst of the Amy Pond era. The logic wasn't even internally consistent.
Also, I figured out the twist way, way before the Doctor did. Isn't he supposed to be cleverer than me?
That was meant to be London in an emergency? And the group with the Doctor plus Maebh's mother were the only people moving around? Over 8million people and they all decided to stay at home instead of going out to see the mysterious magical trees? No one else had family they were worried about and wanted to look for? Sorry, I'm not buying it.
And I haven't even started on the characters yet. Nobody reacted like a real person would. Clara and Danny believed that the world was about to be incinerated, no way of stopping it, and they had the opportunity to at least save the lives of the children whose safety they were responsible for...but instead made a unilateral decision that the children would be better off burning to death than escaping in the TARDIS...because they would be sad? Seriously? Saving at least a fragment of the human race and starting again is too much like hard work, so we'd rather die? What kind of message does that send? What happened to that indomitable spirit of survival that Tom Baker's Doctor used to wax lyrical about? Give me The Ark in Space any day!
So Danny got to be the big damn hero, improbably scaring a tiger away with a handheld torch...after taking a group of schoolchildren to within 10 feet of it. And Clara's reaction was 'what a hero, you saved us' instead of 'what were you thinking, bringing those children into such danger?' I don't buy it. All gloss, no plausibility.
All the characterisation here was determined by plot requirement, rather than how anyone, least of all these characters, would actually react.
And the Doctor reckons everyone will forget what happened, except that all the destruction caused by the vegetation is still there and all those escaped animals from the zoo are still rampaging around. Not quite the reset ending it wanted to be, but no mention of any consequences.
I watched the teaser for next week and could only think what a waste of time all this has been - whatever twist is coming won't be enough to redeem the contrived, poorly executed build-up that has stifled the entire season.
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no subject
Date: 2014-10-26 11:43 am (UTC)I do appreciate that this was one of the original aims of the show, but I must admit I've never ever thought of Doctor Who as being about that! Even the first eps completely made it up about the neanderthals etc. - neither real science nor history, except perhaps the media version (even for their time). Make kids aware of the joys and adventure of science and history maybe... *g* I watch DW for the imagination and whoosh of it, not because I expect to see actual science on there - or even history!
So I'm not perhaps not as down on this ep as you are from that pov - and I didn't at all mind the twinkly-light trees (though I wish they'd been matched up a bit with the ones from that Christmas special a few years ago, or even perhaps nanogenes), and I actually like fairy-tales-are-based-on-reality type explanations - I can take them from the other side, that the fairy-tales are based on this "science". I can "fix" some of the other gaps as well - how many times has the Earth been devastated on DW, and the next time we see it it's all fixed? Apparently we're just really good at that... *g* (And they nodded towards the way we all forget things like that so easily too, which isn't believable, but it's DW and it really is supposed to be the opposite of reality, it's the escape, so I can go with that.)
But......I must say I agree with you about the other things. If it was London, where was everyone? I've never bought Clara as a teacher, because no matter how much she protests out loud she doesn't act like a teacher. In fact you might take the kids out with you to try and find your way back to safety, if you judged it was more dangerous to stay where you were, and I can buy that Danny was 10ft away from the tiger before he saw it - it was jungly there! - but I can't buy that none of the kids screamed and startled it before he got his torch out! And when Clara and Danny were taking the kids together, you wouldn't both walk at the front, one of you'd take the back to make sure you didn't lose any of them! And she fluctuates far too much between "ooh, but adventure" and "put the poor kids in danger how will they cope?" etc...
I'm at the point - potentially confirmed by the trailer for next week - that Clara still isn't really real, and that's why she doesn't get anything, and that Danny's not really real either, but has been sent in as some kind of confusing set-up by Missy... I liked the taunting glance we got of Osgood in the trailer too, and (like many other people!) wonder if she's Clara's flip/split side, which would explain all Clara's annoyances too. But even if that's true, then it's backfired a bit, cos there are so many people who don't seem to like Clara! Or maybe that's just in the (admittedly limited!) circles I hang out in, cos I keep seeing reviews from people who seem to like her in the more national media. Anyway - I'm looking forward to finding out next week!
no subject
Date: 2014-10-27 10:02 am (UTC)Heh. I was mostly just stressing the point of how far the show has diverged from its original brief. There was actually a lot of teaching in the early seasons - a lot of guff, too, because that's how storytelling works, but viewers would also learn real stuff. Even into the '70s and '80s it was still a science fiction show, even if the science was made up half the time. And then today we have magic trees and moon eggs hatching into space dragons - this era is more fantasy than science fiction, and...I love the imagination and whoosh of it as well, but I just would rather science fiction than fantasy in this setting - I've never enjoyed the fairytale styling of the Moffat era. And although Moffat loves to throw in little references to the past, his stuff feels very disconnected from the larger continuity of the show in general, in large part due to his 'history can be re-written' conceit, which has been overplayed.
Clara and Danny both proved themselves to be absolutely lousy teachers in this episode - well, we've seen them being lousy at their jobs before, but they were appallling here. Maebh managed to get out of a locked museum and halfway across London and they didn't even notice she was gone until they were told - and they kept losing her and not noticing, throughout. They didn't do a single head count while trekking through the unexpected jungle, they failed to position themselves around the children appropriately - Danny was more focused on the children than Clara was, but both failed abysmally in their duty of care, long before they decided it would be better for the children to die than survive and have to deal with grief. Awful message. It made me think of the solar flare survivors of The Ark in Space, carrying with them the weight of the world, knowing that they owed it to the billions who died to keep the human race alive - schlocky '70s production values notwithstanding, the story dealt with the concept with such elegance compared to this mawkish fatalism which I'm pretty sure was contrived purely so that Clara could have that exchange with the Doctor about not wanting to be the last of her kind.
I watched the trailer for next week (I don't usually) and it just left me wondering why the hell we've been watching Clara for the past season and a half if she isn't even real. I'm sure there will be a twist, but I'm also sure it won't justify the way Clara's story has stifled the entire season. I would glady sacrifice a 'blockbuster' season finale for the sake of a likeable companion who got on well with the Doctor and who I could root for along the way. Over-complicated arcs do more harm than good, imo.