pubs
Bored is a good adjective for me and the Moffat years. Whereas I can hardly wait for the new season of Torchwood, with every episode of its parent show I feel less bothered. Given the writers in the second half (Gatiss, MacRae, Whithouse, Roberts), this autumn should be even less involving.
Even at its worst, with Davies’ Who I was always entertained. I nearly always felt that the stories were about something more than themselves. Even if the plots made no sense and the sentimentality was sometimes smothering, there was a certain minimum quantity of glee and love at play; optimism about everything constructive, balanced by cynicism about the things that need scrutiny.
I don’t feel that the show is about anything anymore, or that it serves much purpose. The plots don’t make any more sense than they did, the show has somehow become even more smug, and it just feels like it’s being done for posterity or fetish rather than because someone has something important to say through it. Worse than smug, the show has become glib, to the point where I wonder why I’m needed in the audience.
It’s not bad. It’s just… lifeless. This is the same problem I have with the ever-so-popular Hinchcliffe years and the early 1980s under Eric Saward. The former script editor was concerned mostly with pastiche of whatever horror film was popular in the cinema at that moment, and the latter just wanted to make a gritty space opera.
Although “The Rebel Flesh” is boring, and in plot and detail about as lazy as you can get, it is one of the few times in the past two years that it felt to me that the writer was trying to go a step beyond the obvious. Instead of just being about plotting and the mechanics of the show itself (which is as well, since the plot was so tedious), it made a small effort to examine the questions raised by the story’s premise. And then it shrugged and had the hothead charge in and move the story along again.
So we’re not at the level of Davies’ Who; more like the thinkier parts of Troughton’s run. But I did appreciate that. I guess it’s that which brings the rest of Moffat’s era into contrast. This is hardly hard-hitting stuff, yet thematically it feels so much more substantial than we’ve got since 2009.
I guess I just prefer a show to reward curiosity, rather than rote obsessiveness. And for that reward (however slight) to be a broader outlook on life (however slightly), rather than a cheap surprise twelve weeks down the road.
How might I apply the existence of a regenerating little girl to my life? Well, I guess it will make me wonder what will happen next in this particular TV show. How might I apply even so apparently fannish a moment as the Doctor’s restaurant conversation with Wilf, or the reactions of the passengers in “Midnight”, or the facile Dahlian satire of the Slitheen in Eccleston’s series? It’s commentary on identity, on mob mentality, and on the motivations of the people who we blithely assume are there to take care of us.
It’s all simplistic, and no, it doesn’t provide any answers — but it gets an audience accustomed to asking questions. It encourages one to look at the world with a healthy skepticism for the order and hierarchy presented to us through most culture. Aside from a few key eras, Doctor Who has always presented the audience that outsider’s view of life and its workings. It’s simple, clumsy, and in the end it has a narrative goal to reach, but in some small way it fosters an ongoing sense of wonder and attentiveness.
This is a right and a healthy message, and it’s a message that Davies both saw in and extrapolated from the show’s history, then developed into something much more pervasive and deliberate. That’s a part of who he is, I guess – Second Coming, Queer as Folk, and all. He can’t help tweaking people who he sees as intellectually or spiritually lazy. But that’s not really a priority anymore, and I miss it.