In The Forest of the Night

[llywela]

Once 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.

Comments

[issy5209.livejournal.com]

I also really want the TARDIS to break so he can't control it any more, like in the old days -

now that would be awesome! Yes, get us back to the days where Tardis takes the Doctor where he needs to go, not where he wants to go. There would be so much scope, instead of this *thing* we're getting which is supposedly character development, but is more like regression. (I'm still with catsdownunder having Merlin flashbacks, because I'd never seen characters go from three, to two then to one dimensional before)

[llywela13.livejournal.com]

I think part of the problem is that fans (and writers) have come to believe that it isn't possible to develop a character unless you explore every detail of their backstory - which in Doctor Who terms has come to mean meeting their parents, visiting their childhood, spending extended periods of time in their home environment. I've actually seen posters on forums claiming that no classic companions have any personality at all, because we don't know their family backstories, and how can they have a personality if we don't know their biographical details in full? Seriously. It's an attitude that completely misses the point of what personality and character development actually are. Backstory is simply one tool that can be used to explore different facets of a character's personality, and isn't actually essential. It would be perfectly possible to introduce a character in one episode, exploring the homelife they come from in that story (a la Rose or Smith & Jones), and then whisk them away and never go back there again (or make contact) and still develop that character in all kinds of meaningful ways that would be much fresher and freer than the nonsense we've seen with Clara, whose characterisation and homelife remain little more than skin deep. It just requires commitment to telling a character story that actually is a character story and not an artificially contrived plot grafted onto them and disguised as a character story.

I sometimes look at the potential in the companion stories of the classic era and long to see development of similar stories today, but it'll never happen under Moffat.

[issy5209.livejournal.com]

That's true, and I think it shows that for Moffat, and his band of writers, Clara (and Danny AND the Doctor) is still an idea, and he can graft whatever he wants to see happen, or see her behave from one week to the next. (or I suspect just write stories around what sort of scenes he wants to see, never mind that is doesn't make any sense or is consistent in anyway)
I understand from an actors point of view, creating a backstory, is important to them to play the character, but as viewers, we don't really need to see it.

Looking at next week, I'm sort of hoping that none of this is real, perhaps the whole earth is Earth Mark 2, possibly paid for by a intelligent mice to find out the question to the answer of Life, The Universe and Everything,
either that, or she's a Tesselecter, if she's the Master, The Rani, or the Great Intelligence, and Danny's been put by her side to manipulate her somehow, I'll be so annoyed!

[llywela13.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of hoping that none of this is real, perhaps the whole earth is Earth Mark 2, possibly paid for by a intelligent mice to find out the question to the answer of Life, The Universe and Everything

Hahaha, I like it, I'm adopting it as my headcanon. :D

Actually, that's one of the things I like about Doctor Who. The Show doesn't really have any official canon, but what it does have are lots of separate canons and a central mythology that includes the concepts of time travel and alternate universes, so whenever anything happens that doesn't jibe with my own vision of the show, I just handwave it into an alternate universe and tell myself it never happened really! The entire Steven Moffat era never happened really, any more than the Lungbarrow novels did!