Doctor Who: spoiler-free meta-theorycraft
So etcet and I just watched the entire last season of Doctor Who in a single weekend, which was deeply satisfying and made it far more comprehensible than when I originally saw the episodes roughly one per week with a two-month gap in the middle. The marathon was sparked in part by my getting caught up by a completely spoilerless "spoiler" officially released a few days ago about events in the upcoming season. Fans were told that there was a meaningful event in a certain previous episode*, and I immediately had my suspicions about what it might be; that particular episode had several untied threads and apparent inconsistencies thrown away in Moffat's trademark manner, right before explosions or screams or lurking in the background of Really Interesting Conversations, but most of those seem adequately wrapped up by later events.* Only one of them stayed stuck in my craw as either an unaccounted-for loose thread or bad planning/direction/camerawork/lighting/characterization/set-design/costuming/acting**, and I wanted to see if anyone else had come up with the same theory about it that I have. (So far, not only has nobody come up with a theory even vaguely similar to mine without getting it ridiculously wrong, nobody's even noticed the... anomaly... I've fixated on. That I've found, anyway.)
Does anyone know of an online, up-to-date collection of non-imbecilic criticism of apparent plot holes in New Who? I'm really tired of combing through "the Ponds are way too passive, so the writing is awful, plus Amy saves the day way too often, so she's way too powerful and must secretly be the Master*** in yet another stopwatch disguise" just to see if anybody has noticed the same things I've noticed.
There are a bunch of... unexplained things. The problem I'm having is that everything I've found talking about them is whining about how terrible Moffat's writing is, as demonstrated by the fact that he isn't a good enough writer to have planned X three seasons in advance, therefore he's just retconning desperately to keep the plot above water, proving that he's a terrible writer and therefore incapable of planning things three seasons in advance... Have these critics never seen Babylon 5? Moffat's two seasons so far as producer have easily been 4.5 to 4.75 B5s out of (naturally) 5 in terms of chronoentanglement. In fact, my main criticism of him is that he's having so much fun making events across so many seasons of the show link up intimately to each other that it's getting tough to follow on more than an episode-by-episode basis****. The man is worse than Katharine Kerr. This last rewatch, I literally had to take notes spanning the last two seasons. If RTD was annoying in his tendency to write as if for a soap opera, teasing with the hint of a revelation for episodes on end but never actually letting anything important happen until Friday, Moffat is an order of magnitude more annoying by giving you Friday's revelation on Monday, but only in such a way that you won't realize he's done it until three years later.
Well, that's not actually my precise gripe with Moffat. Back when "Silence in the Library" first aired, I said "If Lungbarrow (and/or the Cartmel Master Plan) is (being adopted by the new show as) canon, she can only have said X" in reference to River whispering in the Doctor's ear to gain his trust quickly. More precisely, she could only have said X, which she could only have found out from the Doctor, which he would (could?) only have told her upon event Y, which is exactly and uniquely why her whispering it back to him in his past would cause him to trust her, because he'd actually be trusting future!himself -- a prediction based on extensive knowledge of not only the original TV show but also some of the supplemental media, especially the hiatus-era revisions of the CMP, and requiring great trust in Moffat not only to have done his due diligence several times over but also to have a watchmaker's touch with intricate narrative... and also a prediction that has been 95% borne out. And by that, I mean 100% supported by facts, with only a couple of details left to nail down to consider it proven explicitly -- and those details, I suspect, are going to be the plot arc of the next season anyway. So my gripe with Moffat isn't even that he's getting too intricate to follow; it's that he's getting too intricate to trust without exhaustive knowledge and intensive effort, leaving casual fans to feel like the plot is full of holes, without actually making the plot less predictable for those of us who've put in the work. I've "known" (on a spectrum from "suspected" to "accepted through confirmation bias" to "understanding what's going on only because I already know") that spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler for four years now, making the "spoiler spoiler is spoiler spoiler spoiler and spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler"***** plot twist completely predictable, seeing foreshadowing as mere wibbly-wobbly causality, ruining some of the tension of the show and causing me to know both "the spoiler" and (the nature of) "the spoiler"****** as soon as they were introduced as next season's likeliest arc-plot-hook. It's not that I'm not enjoying the hell out of the show, but I do wish the major revelations hadn't been so predictable just because a single sentence occurred to me in 2008.
Anyway, I'm trying to sort out the hidden teasers still lacking explanation from the hidden teasers that have been explained from the red herrings from the genuine discontinuities, and I'm getting increasingly irritated by the vast cesspools of "Moffat has ruined the show with ego and poor planning/execution and I hate it now and hope they cancel it after the 50th". Moffat has had many flaws over his careers on many shows, but I have never caught him being flat-out sloppy; whereas by contrast, the people discussing his work for Doctor Who...
Rassilon help me. I'm getting annoyed by the lack of scholarship in my fandom. Someone just shoot me now. I'll get a SPOILER******* somewhere, later .
____________
* Neither of these statements are spoilers, since they describe nearly every Moffat episode ever made, either under him as executive producer or specifically credited to him as writer.
** Well, not all at once, but putting it that way despoilers it.
*** This specific conclusion does not deserve a potential spoiler warning since it's absurd from start to finish. I could come up with three different speculative arguments for Amy being the Master in disguise in five minutes, either strictly from within the plot or using meta-knowledge, and none of them are that dumb or self-contradictory. Also, the conclusion is the dumbest part anyway, so I wasn't even half trying. And on the gripping hand, every bit of it that isn't mere value-judgment is provably false from within the plot of the new show alone. And if it turns out I'm wrong about that, and this really is a spoiler, then I will be delighted because I staunchly disbelieve it and will therefore be surprised.
**** Much like my syntax.
***** RktDnRStDwAaRd -- and that's the closest I'll get to spoilering, because if you already know those things, you'll be able to work out what I'm talking about, and if you haven't seen those bits yet, then you'll still be able to work out what I'm talking about, but I'll laugh at you if you accuse me of spoilering after you put that much effort into figuring it out.
****** No. Just no. If you've already seen that far, it's easy, and if you haven't, there's no way I'm letting you put yourself in my position.
******* That one was really, really clever and made a fantastic way to wrap up the post, and if you haven't seen the last non-Christmas episode in the intervening ten months, then you personally are the reason I can't use it and I'm very, very cross with you. Go to your room, right now!
Does anyone know of an online, up-to-date collection of non-imbecilic criticism of apparent plot holes in New Who? I'm really tired of combing through "the Ponds are way too passive, so the writing is awful, plus Amy saves the day way too often, so she's way too powerful and must secretly be the Master*** in yet another stopwatch disguise" just to see if anybody has noticed the same things I've noticed.
There are a bunch of... unexplained things. The problem I'm having is that everything I've found talking about them is whining about how terrible Moffat's writing is, as demonstrated by the fact that he isn't a good enough writer to have planned X three seasons in advance, therefore he's just retconning desperately to keep the plot above water, proving that he's a terrible writer and therefore incapable of planning things three seasons in advance... Have these critics never seen Babylon 5? Moffat's two seasons so far as producer have easily been 4.5 to 4.75 B5s out of (naturally) 5 in terms of chronoentanglement. In fact, my main criticism of him is that he's having so much fun making events across so many seasons of the show link up intimately to each other that it's getting tough to follow on more than an episode-by-episode basis****. The man is worse than Katharine Kerr. This last rewatch, I literally had to take notes spanning the last two seasons. If RTD was annoying in his tendency to write as if for a soap opera, teasing with the hint of a revelation for episodes on end but never actually letting anything important happen until Friday, Moffat is an order of magnitude more annoying by giving you Friday's revelation on Monday, but only in such a way that you won't realize he's done it until three years later.
Well, that's not actually my precise gripe with Moffat. Back when "Silence in the Library" first aired, I said "If Lungbarrow (and/or the Cartmel Master Plan) is (being adopted by the new show as) canon, she can only have said X" in reference to River whispering in the Doctor's ear to gain his trust quickly. More precisely, she could only have said X, which she could only have found out from the Doctor, which he would (could?) only have told her upon event Y, which is exactly and uniquely why her whispering it back to him in his past would cause him to trust her, because he'd actually be trusting future!himself -- a prediction based on extensive knowledge of not only the original TV show but also some of the supplemental media, especially the hiatus-era revisions of the CMP, and requiring great trust in Moffat not only to have done his due diligence several times over but also to have a watchmaker's touch with intricate narrative... and also a prediction that has been 95% borne out. And by that, I mean 100% supported by facts, with only a couple of details left to nail down to consider it proven explicitly -- and those details, I suspect, are going to be the plot arc of the next season anyway. So my gripe with Moffat isn't even that he's getting too intricate to follow; it's that he's getting too intricate to trust without exhaustive knowledge and intensive effort, leaving casual fans to feel like the plot is full of holes, without actually making the plot less predictable for those of us who've put in the work. I've "known" (on a spectrum from "suspected" to "accepted through confirmation bias" to "understanding what's going on only because I already know") that spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler for four years now, making the "spoiler spoiler is spoiler spoiler spoiler and spoiler spoiler spoiler spoiler"***** plot twist completely predictable, seeing foreshadowing as mere wibbly-wobbly causality, ruining some of the tension of the show and causing me to know both "the spoiler" and (the nature of) "the spoiler"****** as soon as they were introduced as next season's likeliest arc-plot-hook. It's not that I'm not enjoying the hell out of the show, but I do wish the major revelations hadn't been so predictable just because a single sentence occurred to me in 2008.
Anyway, I'm trying to sort out the hidden teasers still lacking explanation from the hidden teasers that have been explained from the red herrings from the genuine discontinuities, and I'm getting increasingly irritated by the vast cesspools of "Moffat has ruined the show with ego and poor planning/execution and I hate it now and hope they cancel it after the 50th". Moffat has had many flaws over his careers on many shows, but I have never caught him being flat-out sloppy; whereas by contrast, the people discussing his work for Doctor Who...
Rassilon help me. I'm getting annoyed by the lack of scholarship in my fandom. Someone just shoot me now. I'll get a SPOILER******* somewhere, later .
____________
* Neither of these statements are spoilers, since they describe nearly every Moffat episode ever made, either under him as executive producer or specifically credited to him as writer.
** Well, not all at once, but putting it that way despoilers it.
*** This specific conclusion does not deserve a potential spoiler warning since it's absurd from start to finish. I could come up with three different speculative arguments for Amy being the Master in disguise in five minutes, either strictly from within the plot or using meta-knowledge, and none of them are that dumb or self-contradictory. Also, the conclusion is the dumbest part anyway, so I wasn't even half trying. And on the gripping hand, every bit of it that isn't mere value-judgment is provably false from within the plot of the new show alone. And if it turns out I'm wrong about that, and this really is a spoiler, then I will be delighted because I staunchly disbelieve it and will therefore be surprised.
**** Much like my syntax.
***** RktDnRStDwAaRd -- and that's the closest I'll get to spoilering, because if you already know those things, you'll be able to work out what I'm talking about, and if you haven't seen those bits yet, then you'll still be able to work out what I'm talking about, but I'll laugh at you if you accuse me of spoilering after you put that much effort into figuring it out.
****** No. Just no. If you've already seen that far, it's easy, and if you haven't, there's no way I'm letting you put yourself in my position.
******* That one was really, really clever and made a fantastic way to wrap up the post, and if you haven't seen the last non-Christmas episode in the intervening ten months, then you personally are the reason I can't use it and I'm very, very cross with you. Go to your room, right now!