TV New Doctor Who theory. MaryAnn Johanson thinks (though she may be being facetious) that the convenience of the ad-hoc sensor array in The Hungry Earth is proof that "everything since (the Doctor) landed in Amelia Pond’s backyard -- perhaps everything since his regeneration -- is all in the Doctor’s head."
She times carefully how everything seems to fit into place in the meagre time that the Doctor and friends have before the Silurians turn up and the preparation can't literally, logically, happen within that short space of time. The series is replete with these kinds of time shifts, not least Amy's recording in The Beast Below and the construction of the space spitfires in Victory of the Daleks.
My current pet theory (which is somewhat developed by an infamous moment in Flesh and Stone) is that all of these conveniences are being contrived by a future version of the Doctor double backing on his own timeline and fixing things rather like Bill and Ted at the close of their Excellent Adventure.
In other words, I envisage a scene here were one of the characters finds a convenient stash of equipment somewhere which has been left by future Doctor and that the boy's picture MaryAnn talks about was aided by that same man. How that explains the apparent future versions of Amy & Rory here, I'm not sure.
But fans seem willing to believe that the Doctor is witholding information all over the shop anyway and/or flat out lying for some reason. As MaryAnn notes in the rest of her detailed blog post, the scanning of Amy also gives further evidence that there isn't something quite right about her either
These details show that the whole series is working at far higher narrative order than any of the first four and that includes the bees. But let's also not forget the detailed theories that spun out of Bad Wolf and what a shambles that turned out to be.
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Oh, I'd love to believe this theory - and I genuinely hope it's true. But given the fact that this week's Confidential says The Hungry Earth was a *big* editing job, with 15 minutes excised from the first cut, and given the habitual clumsiness of the episode's writer, I'm willing to bet it's just sloppy editing and/or writing.
Reading The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter recently, what struck me was a passage near the end where RTD discusses the manner in which he constructed his narratives. The conventional Chekhovian structure, with its gun on the mantelpiece, held no interest for him. When things came together, as random or as unprepared as they may have seemed to the audience, RTD wrote that the surprise was the point. It seemed that he was saying that we as the audience shouldn't have been able to put "Bad Wolf" together, we shouldn't have realized that Professor Yana was the Master until the moment "Utopia" whacked us over the head with a mallet, we shouldn't have reasoned why the stars were going out. (I'll be honest; I'm still unclear on that one.) RTD's narratives were designed to withhold information from an attentive audience. While he left interesting puzzle pieces on the table from which interesting theories could be built, RTD had little to no interest in using them. They weren't part of the breathless moment, that sense of "now."
I read a certain amount of defensiveness in RTD's explanation to Ben Cook about his narrative tricks, though maybe I wanted to read that defensiveness. Maybe in reading how the year of specials came together I realized how wide the gap was between the public perception of RTD as a man with a plan and the reality of RTD as a producer who was making it all up as he went along. His longer narratives were shambles because they had to hit the emotional setpieces he wanted, whether they made any narrative sense or not. That's what I got out of The Writer's Tale: The Final Chapter.
The problem with trying to evaluate Steven Moffat's Doctor Who mega-narrative is our familiarity with RTD's past. We've become deadened to narrative signposts because we're used to them not meaning anything, and we're used to each episode occurring largely in a vacuum. RTD gave the appearance of an overaching plotline in each of his seasons, but in reality perhaps only a quarter of each season was actually relevant to his arc.
If RTD's stories hit emotional buttons in me at times, Moffat's season thus far has been hitting narrative buttons. I come away from the episodes feeling, not that they're discrete stories on their own, but that they're chapters in a larger narrative. I find it gratifying that some people who dismissed my take on a scene in "The Eleventh Hour" — young Amelia on her luggage in the morning and the sound of the TARDIS materializing was taken online universally as a dream — have begun to entertain the possibility that this scene is significant in the wake of "Flesh and Stone." Moffat has said that a scene in "Victory of the Daleks" will have to be rewatched, though at this point I have no idea which scene that is. "Flesh and Stone" feels like the shift in plot a movie makes at roughly the one-third mark, where everything you thought you knew gets spun in a different direction, and I expect that sometime in the next two episodes everything will go to go to hell as we set up for the final act.
I like plot. I crave narrative. And I can feel the narrative gears turning with this season of Doctor Who. The narrative gears were there in the past, only they never amounted to anything. This year, it feels like they could have a genuine payoff. I'm trying to be cautious, in case they don't. Doctor Who has disappointed me in the past with its finales. Yet, I cannot help but think that Steven Moffat has decided to show Russell T. Davies — and fandom, for that matter — what a story arc really looks like.
Allyn's description of what Moffat might be up to here sounds thrilling to me and was exactly the kind of thing I was hoping for when Moffat got the showrunner job. His beautifully written episodes were the highlights of every RTD series for me.
And yet...I'm feeling a slight sense of deflation as the fifth series progresses. At its best, it's obviously magnificent: The Eleventh Hour ( a wonderful episode and the best opening episode for a new Doctor ever, in my view) has numerous various hidden "Easter egg" moments which were surely snap into focus later on and the Weeping Angels/River Song two-parter was supremely brilliant. Amy's Choice - with its dark spotlight on the Doctor's character - was scary, funny and surreal, probably my favourite story so far.
The rest? Rather less impressive. The Beast Below is fine for the first 25 minutes then simply falls apart at the end. Amy Pond becomes a kind of super-problem-solving genius (which requires the Doctor to suddenly become quite stupid) and the (repeated) mantra that the Doctor is very old, very kind - and only interferes if he hears a child crying is just WRONG for a character who told Donna to put down the crying children and let them die in Pompeii, killed all the children on Gallifrey (including his own?) and, crucially, who interferes every week or else there wouldn't be a series. Indeed, a man who stole his Tardis and ran away in the first place because his own people wouldn't let him do what he most wanted to do: interfere.
I'd go as far as to say that The Beast Below misreads the Doctor's character more than any other in the series' entire history and I'm astonished that it was written by Steven Moffat.
Even worse, the Dalek story relies on both the Daleks and the Doctor acting *very* stupidly on every available occasion (the Doctor is either doing exactly what the Daleks want him to do, or failing to stop them doing it, for the entire story, right up until the point where he nearly loses the bloody Tardis to Winston Churchill, only to be saved - again! - by the "brilliant" Amy Pond) and the episode's dramatic and logical bankruptcy is exposed when none of the humans seem able to cope with the Daleks' fiendish evil plan to...er, switch all the lights on (a point illustrated by having a character repeatedly flicking a light switch and saying he can't switch the generator off - in the sealed bunker of the *Cabinet War Rooms* which rely on the lights being on all the time anyway).
Plot holes (Spitfires in space? Just give us ten seconds!) abound. My least favourite point is when the Doctor abandons Amy in the bunker with Churchill to go and face the Daleks and the script completely fails to notice that every previous time she's seen the Tardis dematerialise the Doctor's been leaving her behind for *years*. The abandonment issues are the only real clue we have to Amy's character - after eight episodes! - and this slapdash, careless characterisation is one of the reasons why I find the companion so difficult to warm to this series.
Continuing...I'd go as far as to say that The Beast Below misreads the Doctor's character more than any other in the series' entire history and I'm astonished that it was written by Steven Moffat.
Even worse, the Dalek story relies on both the Daleks and the Doctor acting *very* stupidly on every available occasion (the Doctor is either doing exactly what the Daleks want him to do, or failing to stop them doing it, for the entire story, right up until the point where he nearly loses the bloody Tardis to Winston Churchill, only to be saved - again! - by the "brilliant" Amy Pond) and the episode's dramatic and logical bankruptcy is exposed when none of the humans seem able to cope with the Daleks' fiendish evil plan to...er, switch all the lights on (a point illustrated by having a character repeatedly flicking a light switch and saying he can't switch the generator off - in the sealed bunker of the *Cabinet War Rooms* which rely on the lights being on all the time anyway).
Plot holes (Spitfires in space? Just give us ten seconds!) abound. My least favourite point is when the Doctor abandons Amy in the bunker with Churchill to go and face the Daleks and the script completely fails to notice that every previous time she's seen the Tardis dematerialise the Doctor's been leaving her behind for *years*. The abandonment issues are the only real clue we have to Amy's character - after eight episodes! - and this slapdash, careless characterisation is one of the reasons why I find the companion so difficult to warm to this series.
It may well be that all these plotholes will be "solved" in the finale. But that will still leave us with 11 or 12 standalone episodes, some of which will forever seem lacking individually and require knowledge of the series conclusion to properly decode. I'm not sure if I like that for a series like Doctor Who which Moffat himself says needs to stand alone every single week.
Finally, Bad Wolf WAS a shambles. But it wasn't really the arc of Series One. That was the gradual return of the Doctor's humanity, love of life, self belief and general competence, catalysed by arrival of Rose Tyler. From the bloke who couldn't beat the Autons on his own in Rose ("You were useless in there....") and who needed Dickens and Gwyneth to do the heavy lifting in The Unquiet Dead, he becomes the man who spectacularly solves the problems of The Empty Child, who, in the process of sacrificing himself for Rose, quite literally becomes a new man.
The rest, Bad Wolf included, is just window dressing and, in retrospect, shows a deft grasp of character which the current run of episodes sorely lacks.
Thanks for these comments/essays.
I'm in Allyn's camp but I do think this season as with all Doctor Who actually will be unloved by some because actually it would be wrong if Doctor Who worked for all of us.
On The Doctor and Amy. He's clearly holding something back. He clearly suspects something more about Amy than he's telling her and there's clearly something more about her than meets the eye.
On his fallibility: assuming it is just carelessness or not seeing wood for trees it's new personality trait and actually follows the same pattern as 4th and 5th the latter being far clumsier than the former. And 7th into 8th for that matter.
On standalones: again, that's a matter of taste though it's rather a reaction to what's expected in new tv in this genre, a way of keeping the audience interested week on week, especially with so many single episode stories. Personally I love it especially when it's working with the complexity that this is.
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