asylum of the why the fuck are there daleks
Doctor Who fandom, I am tired.
I saw the episode, mostly because I was tired of seeing other people's opinions posts and not knowing what they were talking about, so I just went ahead and watched.
And you know? I could talk about what was problematic in this episode. I could talk about Amy and Rory and how love is not a competition. I could talk ( Read more... )
I saw the episode, mostly because I was tired of seeing other people's opinions posts and not knowing what they were talking about, so I just went ahead and watched.
And you know? I could talk about what was problematic in this episode. I could talk about Amy and Rory and how love is not a competition. I could talk ( Read more... )
That's actually not my biggest issue with it? I mean, yes, I'm normally going to call all the misogyny shit when I see it, but at this point... well, I don't go to the bookstore to get groceries, and I don't go to Moffat to get well-written women whose lives don't revolve around men. I can accept this, even if I wish for better.
It's the storytelling that gets me. Like, the entire thing with the souffles in this episode had nothing to do with anything, it was just forced in there so the Doctor could ask about the milk repeatedly and have it be The Big Clue that Oswin wasn't living as a human. In the show, post-Time War all remaining Daleks have been random escapees, yet somehow there is a whole society of Daleks here? The Daleks have ALWAYS, though classic and new Who, been focused on genetic purity, so why on earth would they take humans to turn into Daleks (even though it was done in that s3 episode, but there was a lot of Dalek self-loathing involved, which was not displayed here)? How does it work that nanoparticles could turn someone into a metal Dalek from the inside when Daleks have always basically been some cloned calamari in a metal condom with some weaponry attached? How does the Doctor, who in Genesis of the Daleks refused to kill the initial creation of the Daleks and then in Nine's series refused to commit genocide to destroy all the Daleks in The Parting of the Ways, gleefully stick a grenade inside a Dalek to blow a whole bunch of them up and then gets a force field lowered to destroy an entire planet of them? He always considered himself to be lowering himself to their murderous level if he behaved like them, and yet he does it without a thought here. And with Amy and Rory, their divorce comes out of nowhere, and when it is actually discussed is resolved in about thirty seconds, instead of using the opportunity of the last half season to deal with the fact that Amy was kidnapped, forced to give birth, had her baby stolen, and was never able to be River's parent, and all of her reactions to this and Rory's reactions (which, what? had he EVER mentioned he always wanted kids before?) were never examined. Instead of exploring his own characters more deeply and crafting journeys for them, Moffat ignores what happens to them and makes up new things about them each time in order to fit a flashy, but not necessarily logical, plot. I used to like him a lot, but even when I listened to the audio commentary on Girl in the Fireplace, Moffat said he had not watched the previous episode and didn't know anything about it, and just wrote what he wanted. When you're writing as part of a team and you choose to disregard the work of your fellow writers and disregard the season arc for the show, that just seems really unprofessional to me (as a professional writer and editor).
So, yeah, the storytelling is my issue, because Moffat never chooses to explain why anything is happening, just wraps it all up and handwaves it away with fast talk and random threats.
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She could have used evaporated milk. Just sayin'
Anyway, you raise a whole load of issues, basically all which I've raised myself in one place or another. (Except the Doctor killing daleks, which is a pretty notable exception that I hadn't picked up on and don't entirely agree with. Also I was too slow to even catch the dynamite thing, I thought the dalek self-destructed while going backwards ahaha.) So I don't actually disagree with any of your individual points in themselves. In fact, what I was trying to get across in my previous comment was almost just that, that the issues people keep bringing up (like, you know, mildly appalling treatment of women) are to me, subsidiary issues to Moffat failing on the plot, which I personally think isn't necessarily illogical but rather fiendishly complicated to the point of being naff (like the Doctor not dying because he was in a giant robot)!
It's personal preference, of course. It just happens that personally, I remain interested in the story and I appreciate some of the postives in Moffat era writing. I loved S5 and the fact that it sustained an over-arching storyline for about ten years longer than anything done by Russel T. Davies (who, to be fair, I love) and out of all the writers, I think that Moffat paints the Doctor's more ~introspective moments the darkest. I also love the way he jumps in scale from one episode to another (e.g small scale episodes like 'Vincent and the Doctor' and 'The Lodger' being followed by epic scale shit like 'The Pandorica Opens' and 'The Big Bang'). It doesn't mean there aren't problems, they just don't detract enough from my enjoyment for me to give it up.
LOL well I'm not a professional anything, so I don't have a personal or professional problem with Moffat. I don't even know what he looks like. It may well be my amateurishness that accounts for our differences on this matter LOL. Who knows...
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