James Aylett on 1.35pm on Saturday 2nd January, 2010
I think I wasn't as clear as I could have been what my problems were with it: a large part of it was weak dialogue, insufficient characterisation, and altogether too much running around instead of coming up with Cunning Plans, which is endemic to RTD's work on Doctor Who (with a couple of notable exceptions), and so is a little boring to talk about at this stage. The other main problem was the lack of courage to follow through with a big awesome idea; pressing the "no Time Lords" button so shortly after they appear left me feeling cheated. A lot of the things we actually disagree on are more minor (except my proposed alternative, which I'll come to in a minute)!
To your points:
(2) The rich black people comment was a cheap shot, although I do think that it was stereotyping (but not racist) to have the black woman in Planet of the Dead be the one with psychic abilities. Like that line in Community: "I was raised on TV. I was conditioned to believe that every black woman over 50 is a mentor of some kind". Wouldn't it have been more interesting for the premonition to come from a young Polish immigrant, or a Scouse builder, or frankly anyone else? Similarly, the megalomaniac rich guy is a stereotype, as you point out, and it really doesn't matter what colour his skin is. (Yay! Our stereotypes can now be minorities!)
(3) The particular Law of Time I was thinking of that the Time Lords had to violate in order to make a psychic link with the Master from when he was a baby was that he was a baby on Gallifrey, and some of the Counsellors would have known him back then. So that's changing your own past; although I guess it's not that different to Rose saving her Dad. I'm certainly not bothered about the Time Lords suddenly getting all interventionist as a result of the Time War; that seems perfectly natural to me. (And I may have changed my mind and decided he actually is Rassilon, since resurrecting their "greatest President" to lead them at the darkest part of the war would also make sense. Of course, he was bonkers to begin with, and deciding that the best way of winning is to destroy the material universe so he can transcend feels entirely in keeping with what was know about him.)
(4) Yes, it was a little glib of me to suggest that a conduit created by sending the diamond to Earth would only allow through diamond-sized things. But I'm still unclear as to why, from a Time Lock, they could send a physical thing just by having a psychic link. I'd have believed the other way round, that the sound of drums in the Master's head acted as some sort of hypnosis, and caused him to open the Time Lock from the outside and bring the Time Lords through. (That would have been awesome, particularly if he didn't know what was inside and then hurriedly tried to claim credit in front of the High Council.) But hey, lots of things seem to escape Time Locks: both the Dalek and Cyber fleets have (Daleks twice now, at least), so clearly they aren't all that robust against cleverness. It does seem that the Doctor increasingly uses them as his weapon of choice against big complex things, which seems entirely fair, but maybe he should have the TARDIS remind him every few years to go round and check that they're not leaking ;-)
(5) It's not so much that all the characters RTD created are shit, because they're not. It's more that it was completely unnecessary for the Doctor to go back and visit every single one (someone pointed out that Rose has now had four tear-jerking farewell scenes). He's the Doctor, he knows full well that he's regenerating, and that largely his memories and love for them will be intact into his next regeneration; this feels entirely as RTD saying goodbye to the series, which he could have done with a special bumper edition of Confidential instead. (I haven't watched the Sarah Jane Adventures, but I admit that I like Sarah Jane a lot more now than I did when first watching her with either Pertwee or Baker, so I'll accept and even revel in RTD's positive influence there. And I really should get round to watching her series.) My point wasn't intended to be taken literally, it was hyperbole intended to emphasise how self-indulgent the last half-hour was.
And onto the problems with my alternative story. There are three things I'd want to pull out specifically. First, in the modern Whoniverse, humanity is aware of the stars. They look up at the sky whenever weird stuff happens; but then they go back to their lives, because living gives more than enough to worry about. Maybe they forget, maybe they ignore, maybe they just get on with struggling to make enough money to pay rent, but there's no doubt that the humans in the series have an important difference to the humans in the real world. So there's precedent for having the worlds different.
Of course, having them entirely under the thumb of a mad, conquering alien race is a significant step further. (Although it's happened, several times, it always gets undone swiftly.) But there's actually no need to deal with this (second point), for two main reasons: firstly, the focus is on the Doctor, and if he wanders the universe for a year, we don't see back home during that time. Secondly, we've already seen tensions within the High Council of Time Lords, and so it would be entirely believable for the less crazy ones to gain the upper hand during the Doctor's absence. Imagine him raising an army, Caesar-like (or maybe Crassus, with the Master as Caesar), to find his way back despite all the blocks and difficulties flung in his way by the Time Lords when he is exiled—only to walk into the Panopticon on the day of Rassilon's trial, with a miffed Chancellor Flavia looking sharply at him and saying "you're late". (It doesn't have to be an actual army with weapons, although RTD's Doctors have been much more fond of explosives, guns, machinery of death and generally the large and quick solution to problems rather than the clever, pacifist approaches that the 4th and 5th favoured. It makes me wonder if the Doctor, moving towards the end of his spans, is turning back more into the curiously detatched and slightly amoral character of the 1st Doctor. From the previews, apparently the 11th will follow this trend, or at least hit people and grin about it.)
Third point: I didn't want a series reboot now at all. I'd have been much happier with the Master versus the Doctor, struggling for the control of time, the prize: for the Master, creating a new race of Time Lords, entirely under his control; and for the Doctor the quandary of whether to take on the burden of protecting causality himself, or trying to find a way of defeating the Master and preserving the current status quo (which he has decided to like, after Waters of Mars). So that's what I wanted, but given the desire to bring back the Time Lords, and make them a menace (which I like, and the subtlety of really the menace being driven by one mad, but very powerful, person, with a lot of more timid folk scuttling around trying not to speak too loudly lest he destroy them, and a few very cunning people working hard to undo the evil they've unleashed by making him President), you have to do one of two things: either bring them back much earlier in the story, so the Doctor has to actually struggle with them for a while, rather than the somewhat brief and hence unsatisfying confrontation we saw; or have them win, leaving an enormous and threatening cliff-hanger.
Of course, the latter wouldn't have been fair to do given that the production team is changing. The former would have been a totally different story (with more Time Lord screen time), so I guess I was just trying to do a "last third" rewrite, and those never work out well. But as to making the Time Lords an epic, recurring force? As soon as they get out of the Time Lock, it's game over and the universe ends—so we're left with the Doctor fighting against avatars of the Time Lords, which is a lot less fun. (Although it still will be fun.) It's starting to smell a little like the struggle with the Nameless God in Raymond E. Feist's books, a force so terrifying and powerful that even half-dead, asleep, at the bottom of a mountain in another universe, it can incite minions to scurry around here trying to free it. Not that this doesn't lend itself to some interesting storytelling, but I want actual Time Lords, dammit! They're fun, and I've missed them.
Finally, yes, I'm thankful that RTD brought back Doctor Who, and its huge commercial success under his banner means it'll be around for quite some time. There have been some amazing episodes so far; my favourites have been mostly but not exclusively written by Steven Moffat, and certainly the series is set for an exciting future.
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No, no — I partly agree with you :-)
I think I wasn't as clear as I could have been what my problems were with it: a large part of it was weak dialogue, insufficient characterisation, and altogether too much running around instead of coming up with Cunning Plans, which is endemic to RTD's work on Doctor Who (with a couple of notable exceptions), and so is a little boring to talk about at this stage. The other main problem was the lack of courage to follow through with a big awesome idea; pressing the "no Time Lords" button so shortly after they appear left me feeling cheated. A lot of the things we actually disagree on are more minor (except my proposed alternative, which I'll come to in a minute)!
To your points:
(2) The rich black people comment was a cheap shot, although I do think that it was stereotyping (but not racist) to have the black woman in Planet of the Dead be the one with psychic abilities. Like that line in Community: "I was raised on TV. I was conditioned to believe that every black woman over 50 is a mentor of some kind". Wouldn't it have been more interesting for the premonition to come from a young Polish immigrant, or a Scouse builder, or frankly anyone else? Similarly, the megalomaniac rich guy is a stereotype, as you point out, and it really doesn't matter what colour his skin is. (Yay! Our stereotypes can now be minorities!)
(3) The particular Law of Time I was thinking of that the Time Lords had to violate in order to make a psychic link with the Master from when he was a baby was that he was a baby on Gallifrey, and some of the Counsellors would have known him back then. So that's changing your own past; although I guess it's not that different to Rose saving her Dad. I'm certainly not bothered about the Time Lords suddenly getting all interventionist as a result of the Time War; that seems perfectly natural to me. (And I may have changed my mind and decided he actually is Rassilon, since resurrecting their "greatest President" to lead them at the darkest part of the war would also make sense. Of course, he was bonkers to begin with, and deciding that the best way of winning is to destroy the material universe so he can transcend feels entirely in keeping with what was know about him.)
(4) Yes, it was a little glib of me to suggest that a conduit created by sending the diamond to Earth would only allow through diamond-sized things. But I'm still unclear as to why, from a Time Lock, they could send a physical thing just by having a psychic link. I'd have believed the other way round, that the sound of drums in the Master's head acted as some sort of hypnosis, and caused him to open the Time Lock from the outside and bring the Time Lords through. (That would have been awesome, particularly if he didn't know what was inside and then hurriedly tried to claim credit in front of the High Council.) But hey, lots of things seem to escape Time Locks: both the Dalek and Cyber fleets have (Daleks twice now, at least), so clearly they aren't all that robust against cleverness. It does seem that the Doctor increasingly uses them as his weapon of choice against big complex things, which seems entirely fair, but maybe he should have the TARDIS remind him every few years to go round and check that they're not leaking ;-)
(5) It's not so much that all the characters RTD created are shit, because they're not. It's more that it was completely unnecessary for the Doctor to go back and visit every single one (someone pointed out that Rose has now had four tear-jerking farewell scenes). He's the Doctor, he knows full well that he's regenerating, and that largely his memories and love for them will be intact into his next regeneration; this feels entirely as RTD saying goodbye to the series, which he could have done with a special bumper edition of Confidential instead. (I haven't watched the Sarah Jane Adventures, but I admit that I like Sarah Jane a lot more now than I did when first watching her with either Pertwee or Baker, so I'll accept and even revel in RTD's positive influence there. And I really should get round to watching her series.) My point wasn't intended to be taken literally, it was hyperbole intended to emphasise how self-indulgent the last half-hour was.
And onto the problems with my alternative story. There are three things I'd want to pull out specifically. First, in the modern Whoniverse, humanity is aware of the stars. They look up at the sky whenever weird stuff happens; but then they go back to their lives, because living gives more than enough to worry about. Maybe they forget, maybe they ignore, maybe they just get on with struggling to make enough money to pay rent, but there's no doubt that the humans in the series have an important difference to the humans in the real world. So there's precedent for having the worlds different.
Of course, having them entirely under the thumb of a mad, conquering alien race is a significant step further. (Although it's happened, several times, it always gets undone swiftly.) But there's actually no need to deal with this (second point), for two main reasons: firstly, the focus is on the Doctor, and if he wanders the universe for a year, we don't see back home during that time. Secondly, we've already seen tensions within the High Council of Time Lords, and so it would be entirely believable for the less crazy ones to gain the upper hand during the Doctor's absence. Imagine him raising an army, Caesar-like (or maybe Crassus, with the Master as Caesar), to find his way back despite all the blocks and difficulties flung in his way by the Time Lords when he is exiled—only to walk into the Panopticon on the day of Rassilon's trial, with a miffed Chancellor Flavia looking sharply at him and saying "you're late". (It doesn't have to be an actual army with weapons, although RTD's Doctors have been much more fond of explosives, guns, machinery of death and generally the large and quick solution to problems rather than the clever, pacifist approaches that the 4th and 5th favoured. It makes me wonder if the Doctor, moving towards the end of his spans, is turning back more into the curiously detatched and slightly amoral character of the 1st Doctor. From the previews, apparently the 11th will follow this trend, or at least hit people and grin about it.)
Third point: I didn't want a series reboot now at all. I'd have been much happier with the Master versus the Doctor, struggling for the control of time, the prize: for the Master, creating a new race of Time Lords, entirely under his control; and for the Doctor the quandary of whether to take on the burden of protecting causality himself, or trying to find a way of defeating the Master and preserving the current status quo (which he has decided to like, after Waters of Mars). So that's what I wanted, but given the desire to bring back the Time Lords, and make them a menace (which I like, and the subtlety of really the menace being driven by one mad, but very powerful, person, with a lot of more timid folk scuttling around trying not to speak too loudly lest he destroy them, and a few very cunning people working hard to undo the evil they've unleashed by making him President), you have to do one of two things: either bring them back much earlier in the story, so the Doctor has to actually struggle with them for a while, rather than the somewhat brief and hence unsatisfying confrontation we saw; or have them win, leaving an enormous and threatening cliff-hanger.
Of course, the latter wouldn't have been fair to do given that the production team is changing. The former would have been a totally different story (with more Time Lord screen time), so I guess I was just trying to do a "last third" rewrite, and those never work out well. But as to making the Time Lords an epic, recurring force? As soon as they get out of the Time Lock, it's game over and the universe ends—so we're left with the Doctor fighting against avatars of the Time Lords, which is a lot less fun. (Although it still will be fun.) It's starting to smell a little like the struggle with the Nameless God in Raymond E. Feist's books, a force so terrifying and powerful that even half-dead, asleep, at the bottom of a mountain in another universe, it can incite minions to scurry around here trying to free it. Not that this doesn't lend itself to some interesting storytelling, but I want actual Time Lords, dammit! They're fun, and I've missed them.
Finally, yes, I'm thankful that RTD brought back Doctor Who, and its huge commercial success under his banner means it'll be around for quite some time. There have been some amazing episodes so far; my favourites have been mostly but not exclusively written by Steven Moffat, and certainly the series is set for an exciting future.
But I still feel cheated.