rtd - what have we learned?

[qthewetsprocket]

isn't it brilliant when someone really articulate says exactly what you were thinking?the main point of the article is exactly what i've been saying for the past three years: davies is a very good writer, but not a great one; because he never seems to learn from his mistakes. which, by the way, the author is very fair about pointing out in balance

Comments

[nostalgia_lj]

It is v sad but Rose's bad endings happen because her creator has reduced her to half of a ship, and the less important half at that. It can't be allowed to end well so she has to have awful endings where she "dies" or gets married off to someone she's only just met. I hope with Donna there's no point he's trying to prove about how awesome the Doctor is, but I am thinking probably she can get a happyish ending. I suppose also we count making Martha leave and then trying to make it better with an invisible fiance and a wedding that isn't even on the main show of the franchise?

Maybe he is missing the writer's required thought of "that would be AWESOME but how would it end"? And he just sort of hopes an ending will happen when he gets to it? So he is quite lazy with the reset buttons cos that's easiest.

Don't know if he'd kill everyone, more likely Moffat doesn't want to play with those toys anyway. But there may well be at least one moment of "Ah HA! Deal with THAT, Steven!"

[qthewetsprocket]

what with the clip we saw of donna holding her head in the trailer, i'm now (hopefully irrationally) convinced that rtd is going to do to her exactly what he did to ianto: she WILL get her memories back, and her brains WILL asplode (because, of course, a woman could never hold a man's massive intellect in her poor tiny mind; silly womens), and her death will be used not for its own sake, but as a contrived Plot Device to motivate another character into an action they were going to do already

[nostalgia_lj]

I think Donna will survive, because Rusty is too chicken to kill anyone and I don't think she'll be in it enough for it to have any impact. Is my guess.

I have gone from thinking of him as someone where I'd watch his stuff if the concept interested me to never wanting to hear of him again. Like, I can't watch his Casanova now that the racefail is an ongoing thing. Plus his whole "uninteresting women > accomplished, fascinating women" which really doesn't paint a nice picture of his gender politics. It's not that I went off him cos he can't write (though his DW work is generally far from his best), it's that it's made me think he's a horrible person who puts that horribleness into his work.

[qthewetsprocket]

"uninteresting women > accomplished, fascinating women"

yeah, that's a huge one, although i'd amend it to 'ordinary, average, infantilized women'. he seems to glorify women who are 'spunky' in the passively rebellious way that children are, but who have no real power or agency and therefore pose no real threat to the male power structure. and those that do get punished severely: harriet jones and yvonne hartman spring immediately to mind.

I have gone from thinking of him as someone where I'd watch his stuff if the concept interested me to never wanting to hear of him again.sadly, amen to this. i can put up with him until the finales are over, but after that, i don't think i'm ever going to watch anything else he's ever written if i can help it. seriously, it's not worth the tooth-grinding. 'augh, teh genderfail; it burns

[fenm]

Yeah, the "Big stakes /= big drama" is a really good point more shows would do well in remembering. It's the reason disaster movies and historical dramas focus on a few characters/families; if it's all just abstraction, it's hard to find anything to focus on and care about. I thought his examples of "Logopolis" and "Cave of Androzani" were good.

[jblum]

...and then read this posting, which rebuts the whiney fanboy bits of the article at least as well as I could. :-)

[qthewetsprocket]

you say 'whiney fanboy'; i say 'not a brown-noser'. potato; potah-to. :)

(btw, the OG seems to have dumped my account AGAIN since i'm never on there...any chance of a copy-cut-paste via email er summat?)