Doctor Who 50th
Spoilers. Indirect kinda.
Reposted from the NZDWFC board...It was very Moffat, of course, but unlike most of s5 and s6 it worked for me. I think the reason is that, unlike the last few seasons, he went into this story with a purpose. The time war was a wound at the heart of the show - and probably a necessary one, certainly a powerful and ( Read more... )
Reposted from the NZDWFC board...It was very Moffat, of course, but unlike most of s5 and s6 it worked for me. I think the reason is that, unlike the last few seasons, he went into this story with a purpose. The time war was a wound at the heart of the show - and probably a necessary one, certainly a powerful and ( Read more... )
I give Day of the Doctor a rousing 5 out of 10, and for the last two seasons of Moffatt that's about as high as they get.
Loved War Doctor vs the Moment. I wish that was the entire episode. I like that the Time War has been if not reset, at least Gallifrey is now the Bottle City of Kandor. There's room to make an epic plot about its rediscovery, confronting its dark legacy, facing the wounds of the past. There could be an absolute winner there.
I just don't think Moffatt is the showrunner who's going to give that story anywhere near the breathing room and emotional grounding it deserves. He's failed so many times before. There'll be a season worth of meaningless misdirection, ominous foreshadowing and some glib cheap timey-wimey gimmick at the last moment which technically 'finishes' the plot but gives it no deeper resolution.
But at least this time we have something to shoot for that's better than 'let's tell a story about kidnapping, forced birth, torture, baby-snatching and memory erasure and and then let's throw it all away so the Doctor can have a younger girlfriend'.
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Yeah, on reflection I think I did like DotD more than a 5. The heart and bones of it were strong, it told a functional story with some side embellishments and despite a bit of running around and timey-wimey it wasn't nearly as sturm and drang as the worst of the Davies era big specials. And it brings the underlying arc of all nu-Who to a satisfying turning point. We started with Eccleston's 'will I genocide the Daleks or won't I', then went Tennant's 'I'm so very, very sorry... just once, can nobody die?', to Smith's... Doctor on the run, I guess, trying to outpace his past.
And Eleven in his running has gone to some very, very dark places, with constant undercurrents of repressed memory, body horror and the existential despair of encountering events outside their natural order or being erased from time (Day of the Moon being for me the absolute creepiest episode of Who ever, and not at all in a good way. Brr. So dark, both the idea of an Alien Problem and a Final Solution to it; again, genocide rears its head.) Thematically, I didn't like this, but it does perhaps fit with the concept of a Doctor who thinks he's come to terms with his dark choice, but is actually in full-on denial; so much so that he's blocked an entire incarnation.
(It's probably not an accident that this introspective darkness comes at a time when the British-American world alliance is starting to look and feel more morally shabby than it has since the Bush years when nu-Who began, with torture, drones, economic crash and jobless recovery, the NSA-GCSB affair. There's a lot, as a culture, that we're repressing, but our dreams and our shows know and keep reminding us of. There's an entire sprawling secret military world that basically is our unredeemed War Doctor... at least, we hope it is. At best it might be. At worst...)
So facing The Moment and undoing it perhaps vents some of this dark subtext from the show and brings it into the centre. Hopefully we can have a Doctor now who grows up a bit and starts to take on the Time Lords - and the Establishment they symbolise - head on instead of skirting around the edges. Can Western civilisation change? Are we too far gone to be redeemed? Can we break out of the war cycle? Can we have it all, or are there sacrifices we need to make? Those are the questions I'd like to see the new Doctor try to face, and preferably come up with honest answers to.
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(I hope I can come up with something useful to say in reply apart from that, but right now I must sleep!)
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He does have some interesting observations, and omg a whole lot of them too. I need someone to summarise the Gallifrey storylines for me sometime; I think I remember Deadly Assassin and not much else.
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