So I watched it
Nov. 23rd, 2013 06:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jedi_of_urthI’ve managed to stick to my guns and apathy for two seasons of Doctor Who and refused to watch what the show has become. And while I’m not at all confident the special will earn my return, and am pretty sure it will end up pissing me off, I’m weak and feel like I have to watch it.
So to start with, Night of the Doctor.
That was pretty much a waste of time, and it was only 7 minutes. I wish McGann had been given more to really sink his teeth into because he was trying so hard and managed to elevate the material ever so slightly. But that was a truly stupid death and an OOC regeneration. Because the Doctor would totally only need four minutes to go from despising war to deciding he should join in it; yeah that’s the Doctor we all know right?
The episode needed at least double the time and not wasting so much of the beginning on setting up a really dumb ‘Doctor’ joke...not even a joke really just dumb wordplay if that. It could have just been the Doctor and companion of sorts crash on planet while running from the war and dealing with where the Doctor was internally with everything that was happening in the universe and why he would decide to take that turn, maybe because he was finally pushed to the brink with watching someone he actually knew and cared about die because of a war he wasn’t even fighting. There were ways to make this work, but this was just so shallow and meaningless in execution.
So, I’m already feeling kind of upset going in to Day of the Doctor.
Well, I didn’t hate it. I even passively liked it up until the last 15 minutes or so; some of it worked, some of it didn’t, it may not have been that great but it wasn’t that bad.
Then rewriting Time happened and I just can’t find it in me to get behind that. TEoT was an infinitely better episode with basically the exact opposite moral and I don’t think they can coexist so I’d be inclined to hate it just on that principle. I remember going in to EoT and a lot of us being worried RTD was going to undo his own story by bringing the Tome Lords back in the end, only for him to up the ante by revealing that the Time Lords were just that big of dicks that part of the reason for what the Doctor did to end the war was to stop them as much as the Daleks. And he chose to do it all over again.
This not only cuts against EoT’s lesson, but undermines the entire story that had been told about the Doctor during and after the Time War. And it would be one thing if it was just 11 that interceded, finally with a chance to undo the choice he’d made all those years ago (not undo actually, I maintain we needed to see 8.5 (because I refuse to renumber 9-11 at this point) press the damn button like he was always meant to) but to have all the Doctors stepping in but no memory of the event surviving...not, I don’t like it.
And while I did like having a moment where all the Doctors were involved in saving the day, I ended up thinking: seriously; they filmed a side special with Paul McGann, but then when they put him in the clips at the end it was curly haired 90s McGann, doesn’t that seem a little weird?
I do approve of Ten and Eleven’s reactions to the Bad Wolf mention. Ten’s being more pronounced than Eleven’s made sense, but it seemed like Eleven pulled up a moment too. I wanted more though, because there should have been more. I wanted Rose to actually be Rose for at least a small part of the story or baring that to at least get a reaction the real Rose deserved (I had desires for Ten addressing a corner where he couldn’t see her, but just about remembered her being and finally finishing the damn sentence). I find I wish they hadn’t put her as ‘Rose’ in the credit, because that wasn’t Rose.
That said, if this were RTD’s Who I would be the first to say that having her there as the Moment/Bad Wolf probably would have worked (if RTD had written it, because he would have had a much better handle on how to balance these things). Because Rose’s story was tied up in the Time War too, and so retroactively having her there (sort of) at the actual end made a certain amount of sense. That the Bad Wolf reached through Time and ended to Time War the first time round, that she was always part of that story, it could have worked if they’d actually ended the War that day. I really just don’t approve of this change to the story on any level.
I have a feeling, that as much as I don’t like it now, the more I think about it the more this change is going to piss me off. It made for a showy turn for this episode, a spectacle the way Moffat likes them, but it wasn’t good. It’s not thought through, it’s not done to make sense, it’s not weighty or character spectacle, it’s just spectacle for its own sake; and maybe a little to give the Doctor a mission going forward that will even further undo everything meaningful back in seasons when the show was about more than spectacle.
Maybe I’ll go watch the End of Time now, I haven’t watched it in years because it was never really my favorite episode, but I still remember it mattering so much more than this.
So to start with, Night of the Doctor.
That was pretty much a waste of time, and it was only 7 minutes. I wish McGann had been given more to really sink his teeth into because he was trying so hard and managed to elevate the material ever so slightly. But that was a truly stupid death and an OOC regeneration. Because the Doctor would totally only need four minutes to go from despising war to deciding he should join in it; yeah that’s the Doctor we all know right?
The episode needed at least double the time and not wasting so much of the beginning on setting up a really dumb ‘Doctor’ joke...not even a joke really just dumb wordplay if that. It could have just been the Doctor and companion of sorts crash on planet while running from the war and dealing with where the Doctor was internally with everything that was happening in the universe and why he would decide to take that turn, maybe because he was finally pushed to the brink with watching someone he actually knew and cared about die because of a war he wasn’t even fighting. There were ways to make this work, but this was just so shallow and meaningless in execution.
So, I’m already feeling kind of upset going in to Day of the Doctor.
Well, I didn’t hate it. I even passively liked it up until the last 15 minutes or so; some of it worked, some of it didn’t, it may not have been that great but it wasn’t that bad.
Then rewriting Time happened and I just can’t find it in me to get behind that. TEoT was an infinitely better episode with basically the exact opposite moral and I don’t think they can coexist so I’d be inclined to hate it just on that principle. I remember going in to EoT and a lot of us being worried RTD was going to undo his own story by bringing the Tome Lords back in the end, only for him to up the ante by revealing that the Time Lords were just that big of dicks that part of the reason for what the Doctor did to end the war was to stop them as much as the Daleks. And he chose to do it all over again.
This not only cuts against EoT’s lesson, but undermines the entire story that had been told about the Doctor during and after the Time War. And it would be one thing if it was just 11 that interceded, finally with a chance to undo the choice he’d made all those years ago (not undo actually, I maintain we needed to see 8.5 (because I refuse to renumber 9-11 at this point) press the damn button like he was always meant to) but to have all the Doctors stepping in but no memory of the event surviving...not, I don’t like it.
And while I did like having a moment where all the Doctors were involved in saving the day, I ended up thinking: seriously; they filmed a side special with Paul McGann, but then when they put him in the clips at the end it was curly haired 90s McGann, doesn’t that seem a little weird?
I do approve of Ten and Eleven’s reactions to the Bad Wolf mention. Ten’s being more pronounced than Eleven’s made sense, but it seemed like Eleven pulled up a moment too. I wanted more though, because there should have been more. I wanted Rose to actually be Rose for at least a small part of the story or baring that to at least get a reaction the real Rose deserved (I had desires for Ten addressing a corner where he couldn’t see her, but just about remembered her being and finally finishing the damn sentence). I find I wish they hadn’t put her as ‘Rose’ in the credit, because that wasn’t Rose.
That said, if this were RTD’s Who I would be the first to say that having her there as the Moment/Bad Wolf probably would have worked (if RTD had written it, because he would have had a much better handle on how to balance these things). Because Rose’s story was tied up in the Time War too, and so retroactively having her there (sort of) at the actual end made a certain amount of sense. That the Bad Wolf reached through Time and ended to Time War the first time round, that she was always part of that story, it could have worked if they’d actually ended the War that day. I really just don’t approve of this change to the story on any level.
I have a feeling, that as much as I don’t like it now, the more I think about it the more this change is going to piss me off. It made for a showy turn for this episode, a spectacle the way Moffat likes them, but it wasn’t good. It’s not thought through, it’s not done to make sense, it’s not weighty or character spectacle, it’s just spectacle for its own sake; and maybe a little to give the Doctor a mission going forward that will even further undo everything meaningful back in seasons when the show was about more than spectacle.
Maybe I’ll go watch the End of Time now, I haven’t watched it in years because it was never really my favorite episode, but I still remember it mattering so much more than this.
