Day of the Doctor
I finally got to watch "Day of the Doctor."
I enjoyed it a lot while I was watching it. There were fun shout-outs to the classic series, John Hurt was marvellous, and Billie Piper was good as Bad Wolf, which means that I got to enjoy watching her in Who for the first time since Doctor/Rose started to become A Thing In Canon.
But then it was over and I started to think. This is usually a bad idea with new Who episodes, Moffat's no less than Davies's, because the episodes don't bear serious thinking.
Here's where this one broke down for me: nothing means anything now. Nothing the Doctor does need ever have any consequences, because he can always go back and fix it. He can cross his own timeline with impunity, he can change history at will. I agree with ibishtar that removing consequences and pain and loss from the Whoniverse in this way is cowardly storytelling. Without consequences, there is no meaning. None. The Doctor can play dice with the universe and always win. Moffat can have his big high stakes stories with planets blowing up, and yet add on the handy moral that violence is always wrong, kids! We viewers can have our Doctor Who adventures without ever have our consciences troubled by how this relates to the real world, because it just plain doesn't anymore. The Doctor never has to make a hard choice. The Doctor can scold Kate Stewart for being willing to blow up London when there was no alternative that wouldn't cost more lives, pull a technological rabbit out of his hat that was not available to her, and she gets the blame and he gets the praise. And the Doctor will never see the irony of it (if he ever did) because yes, for him there are always alternatives. The rules of the universe bend for him, and for him only.
The problem, storytelling-wise, with making an unlimited superhero is that there is no excuse for him not to save everybody. How can the Doctor be justified in doing anything, anything at all for the rest of his lives except going back and endlessly rewriting history? Moffat has done his best to include an excuse: time locks still happen, but "something" allowed the Doctor to go back and fix the end of the Time War. So . . . "something" cares about Gallifrey but not about Pompeii, nor about any of the horrifying real-world events whose names you can easily supply, nor about any of the other horrors that are canon in the Whoniverse? It's lousy storytelling, because it makes a special exception to the rules of the universe so that the Doctor can get his planet back and feel better about himself. (No, it's not really about the children of Gallifrey, because if it is, we again have to ask why the children of Gallifrey are worth a universe-bending exception while the children of earth, dying in their thousands every day from poverty, war, economic exploitation, and abuse, aren't.)
Moffat has written himself into a premise from which no further storytelling is possible except as an act of bad faith. To show the Doctor saving, say, the people of the Philippines from all their current suffering would insult the real suffering that they aren't really being saved from, but to show him happily continuing his adventures (which do involve saving people, yes, but not everybody all the time relentlessly) means that we all, the Doctor and his companions and Moffat and we viewers, have to forget that "Day of the Doctor" ever happened. We have to pretend he's got limits and constraints.
Well, I liked it better when he really had them.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.
I enjoyed it a lot while I was watching it. There were fun shout-outs to the classic series, John Hurt was marvellous, and Billie Piper was good as Bad Wolf, which means that I got to enjoy watching her in Who for the first time since Doctor/Rose started to become A Thing In Canon.
But then it was over and I started to think. This is usually a bad idea with new Who episodes, Moffat's no less than Davies's, because the episodes don't bear serious thinking.
Here's where this one broke down for me: nothing means anything now. Nothing the Doctor does need ever have any consequences, because he can always go back and fix it. He can cross his own timeline with impunity, he can change history at will. I agree with ibishtar that removing consequences and pain and loss from the Whoniverse in this way is cowardly storytelling. Without consequences, there is no meaning. None. The Doctor can play dice with the universe and always win. Moffat can have his big high stakes stories with planets blowing up, and yet add on the handy moral that violence is always wrong, kids! We viewers can have our Doctor Who adventures without ever have our consciences troubled by how this relates to the real world, because it just plain doesn't anymore. The Doctor never has to make a hard choice. The Doctor can scold Kate Stewart for being willing to blow up London when there was no alternative that wouldn't cost more lives, pull a technological rabbit out of his hat that was not available to her, and she gets the blame and he gets the praise. And the Doctor will never see the irony of it (if he ever did) because yes, for him there are always alternatives. The rules of the universe bend for him, and for him only.
The problem, storytelling-wise, with making an unlimited superhero is that there is no excuse for him not to save everybody. How can the Doctor be justified in doing anything, anything at all for the rest of his lives except going back and endlessly rewriting history? Moffat has done his best to include an excuse: time locks still happen, but "something" allowed the Doctor to go back and fix the end of the Time War. So . . . "something" cares about Gallifrey but not about Pompeii, nor about any of the horrifying real-world events whose names you can easily supply, nor about any of the other horrors that are canon in the Whoniverse? It's lousy storytelling, because it makes a special exception to the rules of the universe so that the Doctor can get his planet back and feel better about himself. (No, it's not really about the children of Gallifrey, because if it is, we again have to ask why the children of Gallifrey are worth a universe-bending exception while the children of earth, dying in their thousands every day from poverty, war, economic exploitation, and abuse, aren't.)
Moffat has written himself into a premise from which no further storytelling is possible except as an act of bad faith. To show the Doctor saving, say, the people of the Philippines from all their current suffering would insult the real suffering that they aren't really being saved from, but to show him happily continuing his adventures (which do involve saving people, yes, but not everybody all the time relentlessly) means that we all, the Doctor and his companions and Moffat and we viewers, have to forget that "Day of the Doctor" ever happened. We have to pretend he's got limits and constraints.
Well, I liked it better when he really had them.
Crossposted at Dreamwidth (
comments); you can comment here or there.