Retconning the Doctor (on New Doctor Who)

 Retconning the Doctor

by Cynthianna

***Spoiler Alert!***

"Am I supposed to understand anything you're saying?" -- Clara in the Matrix on Gallifrey

Take all the cool and interesting things that a multitude of writers have created for Doctor Who since its inception--the Time Lords, Gallifrey, the TARDIS, time travel, the Matrix, the cloister bells, those odd cardinal-like robes and funky head/shoulder gear the bigwigs wear--toss into a big pot, forget all about series canon, and stir. Upturn pot and pour out onto the page. Ta-da! You have the season finale, Hell Bent.

Of course, since this is Moffat's Who script you have to add in his creations--Clara and Ashildr (Me)--and plenty of creepy bits of his Blinking Angels and a Dalek stuck in a haunted-house-like data collection device known as the Matrix. (Google the Tom Baker episode The Deadly Assassin to see how different the original Matrix on Gallifrey is from this new incarnation. Yeah, it's that different!) There are some funny bits tossed in as well, such as Time Lords now regenerate without much of a hangover, changing gender/age/race simultaneously. Tack on a relatively satisfactory ending after a lot of head scratching and feet dragging.  Ta-da!

This time it's the Doctor who gets the mind wipe and not the companion (see Donna Noble) so he can move on. The undead Clara gets to have some "girlfriend time" with Ashildr in their own fifties diner-shaped TARDIS with a pure-white classic interior. How either of these young ladies know how to pilot a TARDIS isn't explained. Neither is the previous "rule" given that only a Time Lord could manage a TARDIS because of their psychic link. 

Is it good to violate the TV series canon? Nah, who cares! Nobody will notice.

Even for new Whovians who haven't a clue that Leela lives somewhere on Gallifrey, this "word salad" of a script seems to be missing something vital: emotional connection. Even with a script jumping all over the place like a hyperactive kid on a Christmas candy rush, you'd think it would be able to settle down long enough for the characters to connect with their audience. But therein lies its weakness: the emotions are telegraphed for you. 

You don't have to think or feel for yourself when you're told pretty much what is going to happen up front, similar to what happened in an earlier episode this season. (See my review for Before the Flood.) You know that Clara is going to "live" again, and the Doctor is going to forget all about her since we start out in a scene at the diner where this is made painfully obvious. I suspect the current show runner feels he has to spell everything out because he believes Doctor Who's viewers have IQs to match their shoe sizes, and we all have tiny feet.

I think my husband, a long time Whovian, said it best: "The show has gone from good scripts and wobbly sets to good sets and wobbly scripts."

All the lovely photography, location shoots, costuming, special effects, musical score, etc., do not a strong story make. (Just ask George Lucas.) Not even a classic character like the Doctor can withstand all the retconning that's happened to him in the Moffat era and come out for the better. He's been diminished somehow, made into a permanent fool, a pale shadow of the strong action character he used to be. 

Peter Capaldi reminds me of Pierce Brosnan when he finally got the part of James Bond after many years. Pierce made a great Bond, but unfortunately he got stuck with the weak scripts of that period and left early. If only the great writer Robert Holmes was around to give Peter's Doctor the shot in the arm he so badly needs after this season. A great actor like Peter Capaldi deserves the best!

We have the Christmas special with River Song to look forward to in a couple of weeks, and it appears to be a comical tale. That's good. After all the forced drama and tears of the Clara years, it'll be nice to see the Doctor relax and enjoy himself a bit with a mad romp. Fingers crossed!

What do you think? Please leave your comments below, and check out my reviews of earlier episodes of this season of Doctor Who:

Heaven Sent
Face the Raven  
Sleep No More
The Zygon Inversion (or Inversion of the Zygons)
The Zygon Invasion

The Woman Who Lived

The Girl Who Died    
Before the Flood

Under the Lake

The Witch's Familiar

The Magician's Apprentice

Classic Who on Retro TV

Waiting for Godot with the Doctor (On New Doctor Who)

Waiting for Godot with the Doctor

by Cynthianna

***Spoiler Alert!***

Heaven Sent is mistitled. Moffat obviously hasn't done his research into Roman Catholic tradition. His story is set in Purgatory, the place between life on Earth and eternal life in Heaven, and the Doctor is being punished for his sins, or at least he's being tortured until he makes a confession. Of course, we won't know who is doing the punishing until the very last scene, so let's hope his torture chamber is at least an interesting place to spend an hour, right?

Alas, this simply isn't the case. With a beautiful setting of a Baltic-styled castle that can rotate its rooms and floors about like a gear-work clock and the dapper Peter Capaldi--dressed elegantly once again without the black hoodie under the velvet jacket--you'd think you could spend an hour gazing into the Doctor's handsome face easily and not grow bored. How I wish I could say this was true. The predictability of the inevitable ending only brought back memories of boring theater coursework in college and being forced to sit through a performance of Waiting for Godot. If you've never seen the play, don't worry. You have much better things to do with your time.

So, we have a Time Lord all by himself who can "live forever" taking an eternity to figure out what needs to be done to get out of his own personal hell--designed with his childhood phobias in mind. As a short story, the premise might have had more punch, but as an hour-long television program the energy lagged almost from the start. The over-orchestrated soundtrack gave an early clue to the story's weaknesses of pacing and tension. The music seemed to say, "Stay awake! This is supposed to be exciting!" But how exciting can something be if you have to be hit over the head with loud music and told that it is?


The entire season seems devoid of emotional connection that one felt in the RTD days. (Who didn't cry when Donna Noble had to have her memory of the Doctor blanked?) Heaven Sent comes across more like a video game with the Doctor being your "first person shooter" as he goes from room to room or level to level. When your shooter "dies" of course you can always continue on with the game--you have more "lives" saved up, right? Dramatic tension is pretty much not expected or needed in video games, and if you get stuck on a level oftentimes you can hit a button to give you verbal or printed helpful hints to help you get to the next level. Sound familiar? (The faceless Clara at the chalkboard is playing the hints giver.)

So, like a video game, I give points for the lovely photography and intriguing sets, and points to the gorgeously photographed Peter Capaldi as the Doctor who gives it his all, but not many points to a weak script lacking in emotional resonance. Last season gave us the stronger scripts of Flatline, Mummy on the Orient Express and even the enjoyable frivolity of Robots of Sherwood. This year we're stuck with the dust in which the Doctor scribbles clues to himself in his haunted castle. Let's hope the season finale isn't any drier.

What do you think? Please leave your comments below, and check out my reviews of earlier episodes of this season of Doctor Who:

Face the Raven  
Sleep No More
The Zygon Inversion (or Inversion of the Zygons)
The Zygon Invasion

The Woman Who Lived

The Girl Who Died    
Before the Flood

Under the Lake

The Witch's Familiar

The Magician's Apprentice

Classic Who on Retro TV

Inconsistencies in Tone (in New Doctor Who)

A great actor in need of a better script.

Inconsistencies in Tone (in New Doctor Who)

by Cynthianna

***Spoiler Alert!***


Face the Raven is presented as a "swan song" for the character of Clara Oswald, without the pay-off of being one. There is a genuinely interesting mystery happening at the first and it sucks the Doctor and us in immediately. Rigsy (a nice young man from last year's strongly written episode Flatline) is now grown up and a daddy to an adorable baby girl. Unfortunately, he's missing an entire day from his memory and discovers a macabre tattoo that acts like a bomb countdown on the back of his neck. He, of course, contacts the Doctor for help. 

After all, that's what characters do on Doctor Who--they look to the Doctor for solutions to their problems. Right?

The Doctor, Clara and Rigsy trace Rigsy's last known whereabouts before his amnesia kicked in and discover all isn't as it appears. The  "alien refugee camp" hidden in plain sight in the middle of London is a very cool setting, and the rag-tag lot of aliens who dwell in its Tudor-like maze of shops are all visualized nicely. Once again, the Doctor encounters the immortal Viking girl Ashildr (Madame Me) and finds she's been doing the dirty work for some unknown villains. The script has a creepy Edgar Allen Poe feel to it up to this point, and it comes complete with ravens that punish capital offenders by stealing their lives away. (Quoth the raven: Nevermore!)

The acting is good, the costuming inventive. The horror set-up seems to be working well--but then everything goes off the rails with a seemingly tacked on "death scene." It just doesn't fit the tone of the rest of the story. In classic Doctor Who, the Doctor solves the mystery and saves the day and rights wrongs, but in this tale he just steps back and allows the "Impossible Girl" Clara to die because she's foolishly traded places with Rigsy and taken his "killer tattoo" as her own. 
 

What's a stasis chamber for?

What about sticking countdown Clara into the stasis chamber standing which held the apparently dead Janus woman who Rigsy was accused of murdering? What about hopping into the TARDIS and going back in time to stop Clara from acting foolishly or to put her into another stasis-type situation to stop the clock? What about implanting an immortality chip into Clara, the chip Doctor gave to Ashildr to prevent her from dying earlier this season? There are no good explanations for the Doctor's passivity in the situation given other than we're suppose to see Clara die.

As I recall, the Doctor saw Clara as an old woman in the future in the 2014 Christmas special, but she's not going to live this long now because...? In the 50th Anniversary special year, Clara was shown to have lived throughout the Doctor's twelve (thirteen) lives, being there since the day he stole the TARDIS. She seems immortal as Ashildr. She's been a  girl in the future (turned into a Dalek), and she's been a Victorian-era nanny (who also died). But now we the viewers are to take it that Clara is finally dead and gone because they needed to write Jenna Coleman out of the series. That's the only explanation that works really.

The inconsistencies in tone in the new Who series are troublesome. At least the fifth Doctor's companion Adric was written out in a very noble way--he blew up when the spaceship crashed into Earth, saving the lives of others, and there was no logical sci-fi way to bring Adric back after the ship crashed. But Clara Oswald--love her or leave her--has been given a "rebirth" several times in the Moffat era. We're suppose to think she's used up all her nine lives now? 

Nope, doesn't make sense really. So, I suspect we'll see Clara again soon in some other incarnation. It would make the most sense in a fantasy universe, after all, one where heroes have held the power over of life and death on numerous occasions. Or we won't see her again. She's finally as dead as her late boyfriend Danny is, who may or may not be dead, either, if he's a Cyberman. 

Confused? I know I am! Inconsistent plot points abound in Moffat's Doctor Who. Why didn't the script editor check the "series bible" to make sure they all added up?

Let's forget we're all intelligent for a moment, shall we?

The teen-angst, soap opera tone of Clara's drawn-out death scene brings the entire episode down and ruined the first part of it for me. I like science fiction/fantasy adventure because the heroes usually can change the laws of time, physics and life/death itself so the viewers can enjoy a satisfying ending. Sure, the "logic" is made up at times (since we've yet to discover time travelers or travel faster than the speed of light), but at least it's consistent within its own fantasy universe rules. And usually the Doctor's companions have left the TARDIS alive and on their own terms--for instance, Barbara and Ian, Jo Grant, Romana, and Martha Jones.

If the character of the Doctor has the knowledge of time travel and advanced science, then of course he can save Clara by sticking her in a stasis chamber conveniently located in the same room she's standing in when she's "dying." He's not an idiot, is he? But once again, in Face the Raven inconsistencies strike. Clara is no longer the "Impossible Girl" and the Doctor is not quite as clever as one would expect him to be in the situation.

I see why my British husband has stopped watching the new series altogether. He started watching the show when the first Doctor, William Hartnell, was on the air. The charm of the sci-fi/fantasy adventure has been bled away and replaced with dreary inconsistencies of a daytime drama. What could have been an interesting mystery story full of fascinating alien creatures languishes in the end with a downer demise of a controversial character who was never quite one thing or the other. The hero has become yet another soap opera character battered in the seas of angst, unable to engage his brain and come up with a solution when a challenges arises before the next commercial break.

It all leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Oh, well, perhaps when we hear the news the series is being moved to a daytime slot (next to the other soap operas) it won't hit us quite so hard.

What do you think? Please leave your comments below. And check out my reviews of earlier episodes of this season of Doctor Who:

Sleep No More
The Zygon Invasion

The Woman Who Lived

The Girl Who Died    
Before the Flood

Under the Lake

The Witch's Familiar

The Magician's Apprentice

Classic Who on Retro TV

Telling Not Showing (on New Doctor Who)

Obviously, the excitement is killing evil Clara. Not.

Telling not Showing (on new Doctor Who)

By Cynthianna

***Spoiler Alert!***

If you’ve ever taken a writing course, I know you’ll recognize this maxim: Show not tell!

What does this mean to the average person who isn’t a writer or even interested in learning how to write well? Essentially it means what it says—you never tell a story by listing dry facts or endless narration telling the reader/viewer what to think, what is happening, what to feel. Instead, the effective writer shows the story’s characters in motion (in a manner appealing to the senses) and that action imparts the story to the reader/viewer. Face it, it’s more exciting to experience a scene when we see and almost feel something happening where the stakes are high than to simply be told what’s going to happen to the characters if they don’t do such-and-such.

The Zygon Inversion or Inversion of the Zygons (depending on which site you look for pictures for it) gives us a good example of tell not show which my college screenplay writing professor would have given failing marks. After last week’s episode, it’s a true non-event. Sure, we get to see “evil Clara” looking smart with heavier make-up and her hair pulled back, but essentially all she does is walk around, shoot an airplane, stares at the “sleeping Clara” in the pod, zaps one Zygon to turn him “inside out” and…that’s about it. No particularly exotic locations, no big action scenes, no exciting complications of plot. She does her bit as she’s told and very little else.

The last act consists of a lot of talking in a room at UNIT headquarters where evil Clara and Kate Lethbridge-Stewart face off by staring across a table at each other with their hands hovering over a couple of boxes while the Doctor pontificates for several minutes too long.  (Kate miraculously survives her journey home from New Mexico we learn, but, of course, the excitement of her escape takes place off stage. Sigh!) Staring across a table in a dimly lit room—that’s the extent of the climactic action. No huge battles involving the sucker-covered aliens and the brave fighting men and women of UNIT. Nada.

Now, picture this—literally picture this in your mind. What if, instead of having the Doctor harangue evil Clara and Ms. Lethbridge-Stewart for fifteen minutes, he took them in his TARDIS and showed them what life would be like if they started an inter-species war on Earth? He could show them the devastation of another similar world’s conflict or take them backward or forward in time and show them Earth after a devastating war. There could be explosions and battles and lots of colorful images and provocative sounds and smells and other appeals to both the viewers’ and the characters’ senses. Think how well this sort of sense-filled demonstration would illustrate his point without the need for long-winded speeches. Think how exciting this would be for the viewers! (It might have been fun for the actors to perform, too.)

Even the devil showed Jesus from atop the mountain all the riches, the kingdoms and power he’d have if he’d do as the devil asked instead of what God asked. The devil tempted Jesus with food when he was starving, appealing to his senses of smell and taste. Matthew 4:1-11 is a very visceral Bible story, and it makes a lasting impact precisely because it appeals to the senses. Would Jesus passing up all that power, wealth and food have made the same impact on the reader if the devil had simply told Jesus what all he was passing on and hadn’t given Jesus the chance to see and experience what all he was missing? When you experience something it’s much harder to give it up, right? Obviously, the writer Matthew knew this and didn’t let up on the appeal to the senses or action.

I know I looked at the time more than once while the Doctor scolded evil Clara and Lethbridge-Stewart and delivered a diatribe on how naughty they were. I kept wondering how and when an action sequence was going to fit in. After all, in a science fiction adventure television series viewers expect to experience some excitement and action around every corner, especially at the climax. Unfortunately, this episode was “pear shaped” and had no corners to turn. 

No big battles of Zygons vs. humans, instead we were treated to another “Osgood” in the seventh Doctor’s famous question mark knitwear. Cute in a stereotypically nerd girl way.  I think Osgood would make a great companion some day, but only if she actually does something active instead of function merely as a model to push sales of classic Who DVDs to the younger crowd. 

Of course, how well she and other characters function is up to the series’ writers and script editor. Let’s hope they hit the books and study up on how write a stronger script next time.

What do you think? Please leave your comments below. And check out my reviews of earlier episodes of this season of Doctor Who:

The Zygon Invasion

The Woman Who Lived

The Girl Who Died    
Before the Flood

Under the Lake

The Witch's Familiar

The Magician's Apprentice

Classic Who on Retro TV

Style Over Substance in (New) Doctor Who

Style Over Substance in (New) Doctor Who

By Cynthianna

***Spoiler Alert! You may want to watch the episode first before reading this review.***

Which came first—the chicken or the egg? In Steven Moffat’s Doctor Who universe the answer is of course “both.”

Before the Flood starts out with a scene in which we see the Doctor by himself in the TARDIS. He breaks the “fourth wall” by talking directly to the viewer as he peers directly into the camera lens. In spite of Peter Capaldi’s engaging performance, this is still considered a very poor writing technique. Dumping information into the viewer’s lap upfront means the writer doesn’t trust that the viewer is intelligent enough to discern it for himself or herself simply by watching the episode. 

As in all strong writing, the principle of “show not tell” should be adhered to. The “wink-wink” of actors talking knowingly into a camera should be avoided, as it indicates to the viewer that the character of the Doctor realizes he’s a fictional construct and the episode is all just so much make-believe. Instantly, all tension and wonder at how the Doctor will survive this week’s dilemma evaporates. Why should we continue watching if we know how it’s all going to end?

But under the current producer’s guidelines it seems that the series protocol is to write down to the lowest common denominator of viewer intelligence. So, the Doctor starts out by telling us all that he believes in time paradoxes (even though this form of time travel has been forbidden in the past). He, essentially, is going to rewrite his own history, and he knows full well that he’s going to do it. Okay, this paradox of time travel was used to great comic effect on Futurama when Fry goes back in time and accidentally sleeps with his own grandmother, impregnates her and becomes his own grandfather. But why does Doctor Who feel it needs to repeat this particular sci-fi cliché?

With a thin plot about a time paradox that’s been done many times before (and often to provide comedy), there’s not much else to enjoy in Before the Flood other than the very nice underwater base set and the very interesting Cold War 1980s military training village the Doctor and two others travel back to in order to save Clara. Of course, he has to save Clara at the cost of the others’ lives. Saving other characters isn’t important, as their function is to serve as cannon fodder to create “tension” in an episode that has no inherent tension. (And why do they travel in time to the Soviet-style village in Britain anyway? Couldn’t it have been just a normal Scottish village built near a massive dam? No explanation is given, and it’s a shame, as it looked like a very unique place to set a Ten Little Indians type of tale.)

To sum up, we’re given the entire episode’s plot premise in the first few minutes, and to fill in the remaining 45 minutes we have lots of running around on well-constructed sets and a few explosions and SFX. Well done. A couple of the survivor side characters express love and admiration for each other. Nice enough. The handsome Peter Capaldi smiles some at the camera and shows off his awesome guitar-playing skills. Fan girl “squee!” 

All of these things are done well, but you're left with a hollow feeling inside. You feel that nothing really has happened of any consequence for the Doctor, and nothing was ever at risk since we know how it all will end in the first scene. A true triumph of style over substance. If we know the “punch line” from the start, why tell the joke at all?

Which came first—the chicken or the egg? Does it really matter if they’re both cracked?

What do you think? Please leave your comments below. And check out my reviews of earlier episodes of this series of Doctor Who:

Under the Lake

The Witch's Familiar

The Magician's Apprentice

Classic Who on Retro TV