The Twist in the Tale…

[wingsmith]

Originally published at Tom Pollock. Please leave any comments there.

Warn­ing: SPOILERS for ‘Dr Who: A Good Man Goes to War’




Every­one loves a twisty tale, right? Every­one loves to have their expec­ta­tions of a story go up in flames, incin­er­ated  by a brighter, shinier, more pro­found real­iza­tion. It’s one of the great­est plea­sures to be found in fiction.

Oth­ers have, and will con­tinue, to decon­struct the plot mechan­ics of the Dr Who Mid-series Finale ‘A Good Man Goes to War’. Includ­ing the var­i­ous twists and rever­sals that have become a Dr Who sta­ple in the Mof­fatt era.

One of those twists, I thought was par­tic­u­larly well exe­cuted - The Doc­tor and Rory and all of their friends infil­trate and take over an aster­oid base to recover Amy and her baby, only to dis­cover that the baby is another Flesh clone.

It has every­thing you’d want from a twist: it’s sim­ple, ele­gant, well timed and relies only on story ele­ments we’re already famil­iar with. Great twist. No really. Great.

My ques­tion is sim­ple: why didn’t I care more?

I think the rea­son is that stated above. Mof­fatt includes so many twists that it’s hard to be sur­prised at the sur­prises. It’s not that I guessed it before­hand, far from it.  But deep down I had an inkling that some­thing was com­ing, after all, this is the Steven Mof­fatt Dr Who we’re talk­ing about! I’ve kind of built up a tol­er­ance to his twists. As with Alias I can’t go back to the time I naively trusted it.

This idea fits with the trend that the sto­ries famous for hav­ing great twists (The Sixth Sense, Fight Club, The Usual Supects etc.) all seem to have one thing in com­mon, they each only really have one. They set off the dyna­mite and really blow your expec­ta­tions out from under you, and they do it before you realise you can’t trust them.




What do you guys think? Do you like your dra­mas to be a roller­coaster ride of con­founded expec­ta­tion? Or do you like them to save it all for one really big shock?