Tom Coates (not verified) on 2.11am on Saturday 2nd January, 2010
To your five points:
(1) I mostly agree. That could have been played a little more simply - Master is weak, desperate, hungry, more dangerous as a result, is captured by humans who want to use him for some purpose. Despite being weak, he uses his superior Doctor-like amazingness to get whatever gizmo is around to enslave the planet. The leaping and the energy, not really necessary, and the docks thing was a bit weird, but I guess the Doctor has to figure out where he is somehow...
(2) I think you're comments on black people are actually really off the mark here. RTD has brought in a lot of characters from different backgrounds and ethnicities and treats alien species similarly - I find it difficult to think that a series that has Martha and her family, Donna's husband and Mickey in it could really be considered to be racist in the way you're implying here. That just doesn't seem like a fair accusation at all. If anything it's "rich people are evil, and hey - for a change, let's say that black people can be rich too". I'd actually argue it's almost a progressive moment in a weird way.
(3) I think it's difficult to argue that the Time Lords shouldn't be breaking the laws of time when the Doctor did an episode and a half ago and was then mortified by the whole thing. The Time Lords, presumably, do not care! They're okay with violating everything, they think the structure of space and time is broken and want the whole thing to burn so they can transcend it. It seems reasonable to me that they'd be doing stuff along the lines of the Doctor here. I think that's a bit unfair too.
(4) Don't have too much trouble with any of that stuff, bizarrely. All seems okay to me. I don't think when people say in TV shows that there's a connection between two objects, that they mean there's an actual pipe between them the size of the smaller of the objects.
(5) I'm sort of puzzled by the all these characters are shit thing too. Martha wasn't shit. She was awesome! Donna started off really annoying, but that was the whole point - that she starts off with a small world and gets to see the universe and it changes her and reveals her to be as awesome as she was in Turn Left - one of the best episodes of the run, in my opinion. I was never a huge Billie fan, I'll admit, and Mickey was always a bit meh. Captain Jack mugs to camera a bit too much. But I think I'd have trouble saying they were all shit. And I quite like the Sarah Jane Adventures. She remains awesome as a character after RTD's treatment - in fact I think she's got better, if anything. Been a long time since anyone gave a crap about the adventures of a sixty-one year old woman through time and space, or what it would be like for her to be single, alone and childless after seeing the universe. I think that's sort of amazing that they did that.
So yeah, I guess, I'd agree with you that it wasn't brilliantly plotted, that it was uneven and some of the dialogue was a bit strange, and that RTD's Christmas episodes have been a bit too broadly family entertainment, and that some of them are really just not very good at all. I'd go along with all of that. But on the whole, it's been a pretty decent run, with some really brilliant bits in it, and that last episode seemed to me to be terribly good!
Let's get to your proposed plot! So you're suggesting that - what - we have a set up situation whereby Gallifrey turns up, the Time Lords remain on the other side of the solar system, enslave humanity and then the doctor wanders off for a year or something, only to try and resolve it in the end of the next season!?
Are. You. Mad?!
That kind of plot would write them into a terrible situation with no escape! Eventually they'd have to do a proper huge retcon to stop the next twenty years of Doctor Who being about post-traumatic stress disorder on Earth! And the world that they live in would never again feel even vaguely like our world. It would make a series that lurched off into a completely new reality that was so dramatically different from our planet that mainstream viewers would have to know years of continuity to know what was going on, and probably would not be able to identify with any of the characters or situations at all.
It's not only not practical, it would have been a disaster! I can't believe you think it would make any sense at all to do something like that!
Instead, I think, RTD has done a very clever thing indeed. Just at the point where pretty much everyone has been saying that there aren't enough iconic Doctor Who villains left - there's just the Daleks, the Master and the Cybermen - and that we have to deal with seeing them every single year in the finales - he's made an actually really brilliant move. He's taken the whole Time Lord race, and turned them into an enemy! An epic, timelocked, desperate for escape group of people keen to destroy and destabliise the whole structure of time and space so that they can transcend it! That's a recurring enemy that can last for the ages! He took a bit of continuity that was generally positive - a moribund, bureaucratic, clumsy race of people who had become useless and lazily corrupt, and turned them into a huge idea.
Frankly, you should be thanking him. We go into a new period in Doctor Who where the series has been brought back from complete desolation, low budget, smirked-at hell, into one of the top TV series in the UK. It's one where the Daleks are back and are genuinely powerful, where the Cybermen are back and are creepy as hell, where The Master has come back and seems like a proper anti-doctor, and where the line-up of good villains has been extended to include the Time Lords. Plus a fairly rich new environment to work in, some really stunning episodes (not of RTD's writing on the whole, but there you go) and it's all wrapped up in a political liberal, non-violent, positive, wonder-of-the-universe, gay and racially positive bundle.
You might not have liked all the stuff that RTD has done, but surely you can see that the series is now in a brilliant position to move forward! Surely?!
I also can't believe you liked the cactus aliens. You talk about excesses of RTD - that's one right there - comedy aliens slapped in for no reason just for some comic relief and so the nine year olds can get a giggle. They'll probably be action figures before you know it too.
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Bizarrely I completely disagree with you!
To your five points:
(1) I mostly agree. That could have been played a little more simply - Master is weak, desperate, hungry, more dangerous as a result, is captured by humans who want to use him for some purpose. Despite being weak, he uses his superior Doctor-like amazingness to get whatever gizmo is around to enslave the planet. The leaping and the energy, not really necessary, and the docks thing was a bit weird, but I guess the Doctor has to figure out where he is somehow...
(2) I think you're comments on black people are actually really off the mark here. RTD has brought in a lot of characters from different backgrounds and ethnicities and treats alien species similarly - I find it difficult to think that a series that has Martha and her family, Donna's husband and Mickey in it could really be considered to be racist in the way you're implying here. That just doesn't seem like a fair accusation at all. If anything it's "rich people are evil, and hey - for a change, let's say that black people can be rich too". I'd actually argue it's almost a progressive moment in a weird way.
(3) I think it's difficult to argue that the Time Lords shouldn't be breaking the laws of time when the Doctor did an episode and a half ago and was then mortified by the whole thing. The Time Lords, presumably, do not care! They're okay with violating everything, they think the structure of space and time is broken and want the whole thing to burn so they can transcend it. It seems reasonable to me that they'd be doing stuff along the lines of the Doctor here. I think that's a bit unfair too.
(4) Don't have too much trouble with any of that stuff, bizarrely. All seems okay to me. I don't think when people say in TV shows that there's a connection between two objects, that they mean there's an actual pipe between them the size of the smaller of the objects.
(5) I'm sort of puzzled by the all these characters are shit thing too. Martha wasn't shit. She was awesome! Donna started off really annoying, but that was the whole point - that she starts off with a small world and gets to see the universe and it changes her and reveals her to be as awesome as she was in Turn Left - one of the best episodes of the run, in my opinion. I was never a huge Billie fan, I'll admit, and Mickey was always a bit meh. Captain Jack mugs to camera a bit too much. But I think I'd have trouble saying they were all shit. And I quite like the Sarah Jane Adventures. She remains awesome as a character after RTD's treatment - in fact I think she's got better, if anything. Been a long time since anyone gave a crap about the adventures of a sixty-one year old woman through time and space, or what it would be like for her to be single, alone and childless after seeing the universe. I think that's sort of amazing that they did that.
So yeah, I guess, I'd agree with you that it wasn't brilliantly plotted, that it was uneven and some of the dialogue was a bit strange, and that RTD's Christmas episodes have been a bit too broadly family entertainment, and that some of them are really just not very good at all. I'd go along with all of that. But on the whole, it's been a pretty decent run, with some really brilliant bits in it, and that last episode seemed to me to be terribly good!
Let's get to your proposed plot! So you're suggesting that - what - we have a set up situation whereby Gallifrey turns up, the Time Lords remain on the other side of the solar system, enslave humanity and then the doctor wanders off for a year or something, only to try and resolve it in the end of the next season!?
Are. You. Mad?!
That kind of plot would write them into a terrible situation with no escape! Eventually they'd have to do a proper huge retcon to stop the next twenty years of Doctor Who being about post-traumatic stress disorder on Earth! And the world that they live in would never again feel even vaguely like our world. It would make a series that lurched off into a completely new reality that was so dramatically different from our planet that mainstream viewers would have to know years of continuity to know what was going on, and probably would not be able to identify with any of the characters or situations at all.
It's not only not practical, it would have been a disaster! I can't believe you think it would make any sense at all to do something like that!
Instead, I think, RTD has done a very clever thing indeed. Just at the point where pretty much everyone has been saying that there aren't enough iconic Doctor Who villains left - there's just the Daleks, the Master and the Cybermen - and that we have to deal with seeing them every single year in the finales - he's made an actually really brilliant move. He's taken the whole Time Lord race, and turned them into an enemy! An epic, timelocked, desperate for escape group of people keen to destroy and destabliise the whole structure of time and space so that they can transcend it! That's a recurring enemy that can last for the ages! He took a bit of continuity that was generally positive - a moribund, bureaucratic, clumsy race of people who had become useless and lazily corrupt, and turned them into a huge idea.
Frankly, you should be thanking him. We go into a new period in Doctor Who where the series has been brought back from complete desolation, low budget, smirked-at hell, into one of the top TV series in the UK. It's one where the Daleks are back and are genuinely powerful, where the Cybermen are back and are creepy as hell, where The Master has come back and seems like a proper anti-doctor, and where the line-up of good villains has been extended to include the Time Lords. Plus a fairly rich new environment to work in, some really stunning episodes (not of RTD's writing on the whole, but there you go) and it's all wrapped up in a political liberal, non-violent, positive, wonder-of-the-universe, gay and racially positive bundle.
You might not have liked all the stuff that RTD has done, but surely you can see that the series is now in a brilliant position to move forward! Surely?!
I also can't believe you liked the cactus aliens. You talk about excesses of RTD - that's one right there - comedy aliens slapped in for no reason just for some comic relief and so the nine year olds can get a giggle. They'll probably be action figures before you know it too.