Dr. Who’s eighth series is like a pop song with inane lyrics but catchy hooks. It’s like a pastry that’s all sugar and no dough. As Texans might say, it’s all hat and no cattle. And yes, yes, while we’re piling on: that’s one heckuva naked emperor.
At this stage, that it compels watching at all is entirely due to Peter Capaldi. His fashion sense obviously suggests a return of Jon Pertwee, but his manner is a notable departure from the debonair third doctor’s gentlemen adventurer persona. (The eyebrows help a great deal, and I submit they’d be great representatives for Movember.) Some ado has been made about returning the Doctor to an older, more parental figure, but more interesting is his brooding and brusque antisocial persona. If Matt Smith’s doctor was a fizzy Alka-Seltzer masking the heartburn of morally-ambiguous anguish, Capaldi is the rending of the veil. Here’s a Doctor who more sharply expresses his isolation from fellow Time Lords and is acutely distressed by a preoccupation with his morality. The question he asks himself in the series opener, Deep Breath, is a worthwhile one: is he a good man? Considering the New Who Doctor has been responsible for large-scale destruction, it even rates as ironic. (And if you’re the type, like me, to point out that the Doctor is not a man from a human culture but, rather, an alien Time Lord, then join me in remembering that Dr. Who has never succeeded in presenting Time Lords as anything other than a haughty technocratic image of humanity.)
But asking serious questions is not New Who’s strength, so it’s no surprise that Clara is made to offer a reasonable noncommittal answer that sucks the air out of the question, leaving only a terrible gasping sound throughout the rest of the series. The lesson: never offer an answer to a brawny question without first roasting it in the crucible. Let it heat up. Let it blister. Just don’t serve it liked warmed-up leftover pudding before even offering the main course. The Doctor’s moral introspection falls apart by default, having never meaningfully coalesced. (At most, the Doctor’s so-called darker turn adds sizzle to the speculated return of the Valeyard, that distillation of the Doctor’s evil impulses supposed to manifest somewhere between the 12th and 13th regenerations. However, the only certainty is that if the Valeyard does make an appearance, it will be just as botched as everything else imported from Who’s classic era.)
The failure to extract any genuine drama from a provocative moral question is a predictable result from a show that consistently engages in the fiction writer’s version of yellow journalism – yellow storytelling, in which the sensational is achieved at the expense of integrity. Events, whether plot twists or character developments, are chosen for their energetic impact in a given moment, regardless of how they fit in the narrative whole. Other yellow elements in play: death that means nothing because it is frequently reversed, incoherent world-building, characters whose personalities change according to the momentary needs of the plot. This isn’t merely a judgment on my part. Showrunner Steve Moffat acknowledged it, having once said "a television series which embraces both the ideas of parallel universes and the concept of changing time can't have a continuity error—it's impossible for Doctor Who to get it wrong, because we can just say 'he changed time—it's a time ripple from the Time War.'" In other words: they make shit up as they go along, continuity be flushed.
Despite being a clever writer, Steven Moffat is all ideas and no execution. How insulting is it, then, that even Series 8’s ideas feel warmed over? Amy’s shabby treatment of Rory (on account of her fascination with the Doctor)? It’s back as Clara’s awful treatment of Danny, a soldier-turned-math-teacher with saintly patience and a sensitivity delivered with grating mushiness. The notion of the Earth cocooning an alien spaceship (
The Runaway Bride) is conceptually revisited in Kill the Moon, which presents our lunar companion as a giant alien egg. The Doctor criticized as a mirror-image of the Dalek? That’s in there too. The sense of familiarity compounds a catalog of howlers, from frankly stupid plot ideas (
Forest of the Night, in which magic fireflies make a forest magically appear to stave off a solar flare, and the smug self-congratulatory
Robots of Sherwood which pits Robin Hood against the Sheriff of Nottingham’s robot army) to jarring implausibilities that mock the willing suspension of disbelief. “If only he had a time machine to fix this or that plot twist” is a frequent thought.
Kill the Moon is an astonishing example of telling a story in bad faith, willfully breaking the pact between storyteller and audience that makes possible the willing suspension of disbelief. Here’s the climax: the alien baby breaks out of its moon shell and immediately lays a new egg, without disturbing even a single blade of grass on our dear old Earth. I mean, c’mon. Really, Moffat? Really? Failing to consider gravity seems entirely appropriate for a show that is determined to be as weightless as possible. Then there’s the moral dilemma, thinly veiled as an abortion allegory, which is as manipulative as it is false: the choice between destroying the alien baby and preserving the moon, or allowing the earth and its population to be devastated by the moon’s destruction (and subsequent absence). Of course, this is a show that presents mental illness in children, or the potential of it, as something charming and whimsical rather than worth of serious reflection, so in retrospect it seems pointless to get in a huff for something so dumbly pretentious as Kill the Moon.
Even the series-long mystery, little more than brief disconnected codas to some episodes culminating in a two-part finale, is inert. It’s like a murder-mystery in which the detectives don’t even know there’s been a murder until the very end, when the villain starts chasing them. Randomly throw in cybermen, forget characters emphasized in those little codas, and voila – a narrative arc utterly without suspense. As for the return of the Master: right twist, wrong character.
Only two and 4/5ths episodes stand out – the bank robbery-themed
Time Heist and
Flatline, about an invasion by two-dimensional beings that boasts some most startling fun seen in a Dr. Who story in some time. A third, Mummy on the Orient Express, is a vintage fun kind of story, the monster in an enclosed environment, but suffers when it attempts to “explore” the drama between Clara and the Doctor.
There is no redemption for the show to be found in the Doctor’s relationship with a character who was more interesting when abstractly conceived as the Impossible Girl. This time around, she’s given a dual identity of teacher and adventurer, but with a singular personality that becomes increasingly shrill and repellant. For example, when the boyfriend she’s been lying to all series long is killed in a car accident, she strives to get the Doctor to reverse it not by asking as any normal person might, but by heading straight for a rather vile attempt at blackmail. We’ve seen variations in the Doctor-Companion relationship, but with a finale that ends with everyone lying to each other, we may very have a new dynamic: the need for therapy. Worse of all, series 8 is oversaturated with Clara, sidelining the Doctor to the role of eccentric deus ex machina. Series 9, I believe, will be called Doctor Clara.
Bad writing, bad characterizations, arbitrary world-building, fantasy masquerading poorly as science-fiction (the TARDIS is not an incredible machine, but rather a “magic box”) - it’s enough to envision David Tennant’s Doctor cozying up to some BBC executive and asking, while pointing to Moffat, “Don’t you think he looks tired?”
But just as I recovered my appreciation for Star Trek by viewing everything post-Rodenberry as fan fiction, sometimes for the better but usually for the worse, I’m comfortable relegating the entirely disposable New Who to the same status.
Also,
this and
this.
