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

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

The Logic Gaps of (New) Doctor Who

The Logic Gaps of (New) Doctor Who 

by Cynthianna 

***Spoiler Alert! You might want to watch the show first.***

I apologize if this is a bit late, but we’re in between two sci-fi cons and life keeps getting in the way. We hope to see you this weekend at Conclave in Dearborn, Michigan. 

After seeing this week’s episode, Under the Lake, I am in two minds about it. First off, the special effects and sets are superb. When the Doctor and Clara walk out of the TARDIS and into the underwater base it looked like the real deal and had that “lived-in” look. Very nicely done! Secondly, the viewer has to check his/her brain in at the door when trying to explain the plot to another person because the logic gaps in the story are bigger than a sinkhole after a flood. 

Since I live with a British person, I usually go to him for explanation about the setting. He informs me that the town in Scotland isn’t on a lake but lies along the North Sea, so the title seems a bit misleading. Even if it’s one hundred years into the future and climate change has raised the ocean levels, this town in Scotland probably isn’t going under he assures me since Scotland is actually rising up as the southern part of Great Britain tilts down and will receive the worse of the sea inundation. So, are they in “fresh water” or “salt water” in this story? Confusing. 

Another confusing story detail—why would they be drilling for oil in Scotland a century from now? Sure, it could be used for plastics and the like, but wouldn’t they still be pumping the petroleum from the North Sea platforms and using the sideways drilling techniques the fracking industry espouses? And why would you go underwater and live in an underwater base to drill in the first place? It’s pretty costly. Once again, geography and geology don’t quite jive. Doctor Who has traveled a long way from its original premise of being a family friendly show that tries to teach science and history to its audience. 

The “ghosts” haunting the underwater base were creepy, but I also found them somewhat confusing. They could lift and carry solid objects of size, but then they couldn’t take them through walls with them. Usually, ghosts can’t touch or manipulate solid matter, so perhaps next week we’ll find out what they really are? Aliens? Here’s hoping! The casting of a deaf actress (one assumes) as leader of the group was a pleasant surprise. It’s nice to know the Doctor can read sign language even if he can’t figure out the alien runes on the inside of the spaceship. 

But what really had us scratching our heads was the idea that the “ghosts” were sending out a message to a rescue mission somewhere in the vicinity of the constellation of Orion. Somehow, by killing more and more humans, it makes a stronger “signal” to broadcast to the alien rescuers. Huh? Last time I checked, usually you needed a device such as a radio dish to send out a message across interstellar space. Maybe this bit of confusion will also be solved by next week’s episode? 

I found Peter Capaldi channeling Tom Baker throughout Under the Lake intriguing. He’s slightly more lovable this season so far, even when he’s acting arrogant and ill-mannered. Clara’s personality has all the clarity of a cipher, however. No flashbacks to her horrible experiences losing her boyfriend at all? It’s like she’s a completely different young woman. Odd, really. Whenever most people lose a loved one it leaves a lasting mark on the psyche that’s noticeable by their words and actions. 

Creepy baddies and a cool set are nice, but a story and characters that aren’t as full of holes as Swiss cheese would be welcome.