The season finale of Doctor Who has been and gone, and I was profoundly disappointed by the entire season.     The advent of the first female Doctor Who should have been a time of glorious reinvention for the show, broadening horizons and taking the opportunity to do something utterly fantastic to demonstrate how the character we’ve grown up with is still with us but in a whole new way.

Instead we got a season of simplistic contrived stories populated by forgettable characters accomplishing nothing remarkable.

Since my grumbling dissatisfaction with the show is pressing down on me I’m going to vent here in the hope it will purge the boil.

Three companions is too many.   In each episode there is no time to do anything meaningful with each of them which means they are reduced to cyphers with expository dialogue and one clunky emotional hook each (Graham’s loss of Grace, Ryan’s daddy issues and Yaz’s I’m not even sure what).

The dialogue in general is poor.  It exists only to explain either what we can already see or hear on screen (“Did you hear that?  It was an explosion!”) or to clumsily dump exposition (““You’re the ux, the duo species? Lifespan of millennia. Only ever two of you!” You know just like you would speak to someone you’ve just met)

The threats are not threatening.   This is the show that brought us the Daleks, the Weeping Angels, the Vashta Narada – real nightmare fuel.   Last night we had squads of marching killer robots that stomped around and did nothing.   When they met Graham and Ryan, the companions ducked as the robots obligingly lined up on either side of their targets and thus shot each other.    Later they resurfaced, stomping through a doorway until Graham blew them up with a grenade.  Because you know kids, weapons solve your problems.    At no point did the robots do anything dangerous or threatening.

Weapons… yes.  Since when does the Doctor hand out grenades to her companions, even with a “don’t use them to hurt people” throwaway.   Since the writers can’t conceive of a problem that can’t be dealt with by violence, that’s when.    Too often this season we’ve had the threats just blasted away — and even a gun that displaces them in time or a teleportation device that spirits them away is pretty much just a weapon.   The show should be above that sort of thing, with the Doctor being the driving force to find other solutions.

Speaking of which… the Doctor should find clever solutions.    What we have now is a breathy over excited social worker running round asking fatuous questions of the world and then saying “ooh I am clever” before being forced to deliver some nonsensical technobabble that relates to nothing previously established, fanny about with some cables and electrical sparks and then the problem goes away.    She may as well say “I’ve just remembered a spell that will deal with this” or “I’m going to wish really hard”.

There’s no sense of story – just characters moving through generic sets asking questions and getting infodump answers.

Ryan’s actor either cannot act or is a brilliant actor who has been given the task of playing a character who looks like his actor cannot act and is pulling it off magnificently.

Graham’s actor can act, he puts some real emotion into his lines but the lines and character development are bland and predictable.

The big bad of this episode was the forgettable, mocked and easily thwarted Tim Shaw from episode one.    He did nothing but stride around, approach Graham and get shot in the foot.   Yep, this fierce Stenza warrior and hunter when faced with an untrained human just stood and postured, got shot in the foot and was vanquished.    This led to the utterly predictable “I was too weak to kill him”/”No Graham  you’re the strongest blah di bore di platitude di killing is bad” dialogue that was inevitable from the moment he’d announced to the Doctor earlier that he was going to get his revenge.

It was appalling.   And the cynic in me wonders if the showrunner is banking on people overlooking the flaws in the writing and presentation because of the presence of the first female Doctor and a wonderfully diverse cast.    Is that the equivalent of a human shield for the show, that they can say “Ah people who don’t like it are misogynists or racists that just don’t want a female lead and a diverse set of companions”?     I hope not.   I love this show and I was utterly thrilled at the idea of Jodie Whitaker as the Doctor, keen to see how the stories would continue and grow under a proper Yorkshire Time-Lord.  Instead this sub CBBC science fiction show, that happens to use the Doctor Who name has been squeezed out and the only thing memorable about it is how far it has fallen.

It feels like a chapter is coming to a close at last, and I hadn’t realised I’d been in it until I got to see the blank space at the end of the page and realised the facing page had a big number on it.

Continue reading “Moving on” →

Just to get it out of the way, as I suspect it may be held up as a human shield in front of snipers, the reason I do not like the new Doctor Who series is NOT because it now has a female lead.

I was thrilled to bits when the reveal of Jodie Whitaker took place, looking forward to a new era of the show that I’ve loved ever since my earliest memories of television.    I’ve always scorned those reactionary Whovians who said that the Doctor could never be a woman and teased them by asking if they only liked the character because it had testicles and if so wasn’t that a weird criterion for liking a show.     I cheered at the mention of the Corsair in The Doctor’s Wife who was clearly described as having been in their time both male and female, and at the introduction of Missy who was by far the most interesting iteration of The Master since Delgado passed in 1973.

What My Concerns Were

From the moment I heard that Chris Chibnall was going to be the new show runner, well before the new Doctor’s casting was announced, I was bothered.  I’ve been assured by people that his writing in Torchwood and Broadchurch was good, but every episode of his of Doctor Who had to my taste being massively underwhelming.    I was concerned about a repeat of abominations like The Power of Three which had some quirky character moments but with a tacked on, lacklustre plot with a ridiculously contrived simple ending.

And Now?

We’re five episodes into the new season and I’ve lost interest in the show.   Fifteen minutes into last night’s episode my attention had wandered enough to start posting a disappointed review of the episode so far on Facebook.   Rather than morbidly dissect each episode here are a few points in a more or less random order, though I’ll save my biggest problem with the show till last as it’s the one I feel least comfortable admitting.

• The stories are dull and over simple.   There’s a baddy doing bad things.   They’re stopped.   No twists or turns, no delightful The Doctor Dances style revelations that turn things on their head and make them a joy to watch other people discover for the first time.
• The bad guys are bland and forgettable.   I know the show has made a conscious decision to step away from the established rogues’ gallery of Daleks, Cybermen etc, but their replacements are…. Well I don’t know what they are.     They are not memorable.   Tooth-face guy from episode one had teeth in his face and they called him Tim Shaw.  Space racist in Rosa was a racist, apparently, and had weapons that allowed him to do absolutely jack shit, and was defeated by being shot.    Hindu Harry Potter in Demons of the Punjab at least had some interesting human motivations but not really enough to justify a whole episode
• The companions are cyphers.   Each has their own little bit of backstory (Ryan has dyspraxia and didn’t know his Dad, Yaz’ family relationships are strained and…. Oooh… does she fancy the Doctor?   Graham is mourning the loss of his wife) but beyond that there is no sense of them as people and their dialogue outside of those factors could be interchanged with each other with no jarring.    Also the guy who plays Ryan can’t act.   He really can’t.   He speaks his lines with a certain screwed-up brow intensity but that’s all.  Bradley Walsh can act, I’ve seen him do it, but he’s struggling with this material.
• The TARDIS team are largely irrelevant to what’s going on.   If there is to be any resolution to the issues in the episode it is a quick, unlikely press of a magic button that teleports the enemies away or locks them in a dark room (and then forgets about them entirely).  We no longer have a Doctor who is righting wrongs across space and time but one who is wandering around aimlessly noticing things that then go away more or less under their own steam.    No, I’m not saying that they should have stepped in and protested alongside Rosa at the end of the eponymous episode, that was handled perfectly – but the threat of space-racist was ended by Ryan shooting him with a time travel gun.   That’s it.   He got shot.   After the Doctor, earlier in the episode, lampshaded telling Ryan how the gun worked in one of the  most clunky bits of “this is how the plot will resolve” bits of dialogue since episode two’s nonsense about the self lighting Chekhov’s cigar.
• The tone is preachy.   This isn’t me saying “Oh it’s all PC and inclusive!” – Doctor Who has always tackled social issues and promoted a progressive message.  What it’s doing now is doing so with all the skill and finesse of an amateur dramatic company touring schools doing plays about “Issues” – hamfisted lecturing with clumsy metaphors.
• And finally?  I hate to say it but I’m not loving Jodie Whitaker as the Doctor.   The woman can really act, I’ve seen her do it in other things, but here she’s managed to make the Doctor …  dull.     In five episodes I struggle to find anything interesting about her character.  The Doctor runs around eager as a terrier, breathily announcing how things are brilliant, or exciting, or confusing or wrong.  She’ll occasionally spout forth a few self deprecating questions about herself and then back to dashing around being keen.   There has been no sense of gravitas or authority or even intelligence (yes the writer occasionally has her spout technobabble or make a plot solving machine out of hilariously mundane objects).  Eccleston was the emotionally damaged war veteran, Tennant the newly liberated explorer with burgeoning hubris, Smith the weary immortal, Capaldi the self-searching savant.   So far Whitaker is just eager.    I am sure she is doing the best she can with the material, but the material is not good, and that means that her best is not exactly engaging.

I really wanted to love the new era of the show, but I really don’t.   And I’m fed up pretending, as I have for the past few weeks, that things are just “settling in” and will soon improve, and ‘isn’t it nice they’re taking a fresh approach’.    I’m just not excited to watch anymore, and that’s really bugging me.

But it is a lot of fun.

A good friend of mine is having a birthday party later this month and, being of excellent judgement, he has decided to make it a costume party. The theme is movie characters and, since I went as one of my favourite masked psychopaths (V from V for Vendetta) to his last party I decided to be TOTALLY ORIGINAL this time and go as a different one of my favourite masked psychopaths- to whit Erik, the eponymous fellow from The Phantom of the Opera

Which of course means I need to go completely overboard and learn how to create suitably grim make up for the required disfigurement.

So far I’ve tried a few different looks more or less so I can figure out how the various makeup techniques work (being s complete novice).

Pictures follow, and I think I have now had an idea that should work as a concept- I’m going to try for a partially exposed skull with ragged edges of skin around it. Once I’ve tried it out I will share it here.

Some words from the Sage of Northampton, as recorded in an interview here which bear repeating:

The Bardic tradition of magic, when satires were justifiably more feared than curses and when the creator was respected as a powerful magician rather than as someone getting by out on the fringes of the entertainment industry, is one that today’s artists, occultists and writers would do well to reacquaint themselves with. You can kill or cure with a word. Get off of your knees.

Sir Terry Pratchett commented through one of his many characters that the human race has a design fault – we bend at the knees.   Today there are a great many forces designed to trick or coerce or simply brutalise us to our knees, because it is only then that the stunted troglodytes who seek to rule us can believe themselves greater than we are.   I suspect that those forces are on the edge of increasing their hold on the world and on the power structures that will give them more authority.

Don’t let them.   Don’t let them get away with a word, not one single word, that says the world is other than it is.   Every word unchallenged is a word carved in stone.   Speak the truth, speak, sing, paint, carve and dance the truth even in the face of those shouting for you to stop.   Picture the world that we should be living in and make it happen, step by step, thought by thought, brush-stroke by brush-stroke and share it.  Don’t allow anyone to trick you into thinking the world thinks as they do in order to silence you.   Your neighbour may be silenced too and thinking they too are the only ones who see the truth.

Let no one build walls to divide us, walls of hatred nor walls of stone
Come greet the dawn and stand beside us; we live together or we die alone

Anyone fancy a new roleplaying campaign set in a dystopian isolated nation with a crumbling economy and a rising trend of fascism?

Oh yeah.  The UK does.