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secret-diary-of-an-fa · 10 months

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Doctor Who: The Star Beast- A Reasonably Watchable Mess

You may have noticed that, despite desperately positive, brittle reviews in the mainstream media, the last few years of Doctor Who went down like a lead balloon with actual fans and ordinary viewers. Turns out that a patronising gender-flip that served no plot purpose followed by a series of episodes in which the Doctor shilled for Space Amazon, murdered innocent giant spiders and delivered completely unearned straight-to-camera speeches like a fucking after-school special weren’t popular moves. The show’s viewing figures plummetted (despite contrary claims from the BBC that turned out, very simply, to be lies) and its review score aggregate on Rotten Tomatoes plunged, at one point, to literally 0%. Hilariously, the review aggregate from the mainstream media was around 90% at the time, once again demonstrating that the average critic can be bought for less than I spend assuring the silence of my past victims (the joke is that all my past victims are dead and I don’t spend a fucking thing on their silence). The abject failure of the Whitaker/Chibnall era was inevitable and any normal person could have predicted it. The BBC, however, didn’t and had a bit of a panic when they realised just how fucked their ratings were. Not that they admitted that, of course, but the fact they brought back the dream-team of showrunner Russell ‘The’ Davies and David Tennant for the 60th Anniversary Specials instead of letting the current incumbents stick around until after the anniversary kinda speaks volumes. So, now we’re getting three Anniversary specials, starring Tennant and helmed by Davies. The first one’s out, and it falls on me to review it as fairly as possible. So… how is it?

Well, put it this way: it’s not terrible, but it’s not the confident, unapologetic return to form I was hoping for either. It concerns a minor villain from the old DW comics called Beep the Meep who poses as a cute, furry critter while secretly plotting the genocide of the entire universe, a reunion with Catherine Tate’s always-delightful Donna Noble and a resolution to the Human/Time Lord meta-crisis that nearly straight-up killed her last time she was on-screen. And, in fairness, the stuff that works works pretty well. The jokes are funny, Tennant and Tate are excellent in their respective roles, the Meep is gloriously fucking psychotic (though the voice actor does sound like they’re phoning it in a bit) and Yasmin Finney, playing Donna’s trans daughter, is a lot less insufferable than she would have been if Chibnall had written her lines. I actually thought the bit where Donna threatens to “descend” on some kids who dead-name her in the street was well-handled and pretty accurately captured the protective instincts of a parent with a trans daughter. Mainly, she’s just there for the representation, though, and does the square root of bugger all to advance the plot. That’s probably a mercy, since I suspect the show would have had a hard time disguising the fact that this fifteen year old kid is being played by a twenty year old woman (who seems to have borrowed David Bowie’s cheekbones) if her part was any more prominent. But yeah- it’s a fun, knockabout adventure that doesn’t overstay its welcome and doesn’t try to outdo the entire show up to that point just because its been a completely arbitrary 60 years since the first episode. It’s basically fun and basically fine. It’s destined to be lauded to ludicrous excess by a mainstream media who are terrified of offering a proper critique because it’s got a trans person in it, while simultaneously being shat upon by online reviewers who know they can win easy points with the fans by challenging the suffocating ubiquity of the Standard Approved Opinion. In truth, though, it’s neither great nor awful- it’s just an hour of television that’s worth watching once but only once. It contains some good stuff… and some shite stuff.

Ah yes, the shite. That’s what you came to read about, isn’t it? Nobody in their right mind shows up at my blog-step for kind words and understanding: you come here because you know I have the pithiest insults and pissiest hot-takes. And yes: there’s some real fucking garbage to dunk on here. First of all, the Human/Time Lord meta-crisis gets resolved in the dumbest fucking way possible. For those of you who don’t remember, the ending of Modern Season 4 of DW was one of the most heartbreaking things ever attempted in a show designed for family viewing. Donna took on the consciousness of a Time Lord in order to save the universe but nearly burnt out her synapses in the processes. The Doctor wiped her mind to save her life, and then had to leave, because if she ever remembered him or the adventures they’d shared together, the crisis would reassert itself and her brain would overload, killing her. And the way they get around this, initially, is alright. Because Donna had a child, part of the meta-crisis got passed onto her, allowing two minds to take a strain that would kill just one. It’s a sweet and perfectly acceptable way of sorting a complex problem and something that legitimately wouldn’t have occurred to the Doctor at the time, because he had to come up with a solution that would work in the moment, not something that would require a nine month gestation period. But then, for some stupid fucking reason, they took it one step further and had Donna and her daughter simply relinquish the power of the meta-crisis, handwaving the obvious bullshit-ness of this move by claiming it just wouldn’t have occurred to a male-presenting Time Lord. The Doctor’s not an idiot. If that was an option, it would have occurred to him. Fuck, it did occur to him that one time Rose Tyler absorbed the Time Vortex and he had her give it up, channelling it into him to save her life at the cost of forcing a regeneration. It’s simultaneously contrived and slap-dash- a hasty right-on girl-power moment that fails miserably to play by the rules and cheapens the original story of the meta-crisis retroactively. It also brings us, neatly, to the phrase ‘male-presenting Time Lord’.

There’s a line in the excellent It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia wherein Charlie describes himself as “a straight man who poops transgender”. The phrase ‘male-presenting Time Lord’ sounds weirdly similar to me. It’s too specific and technical, while also including a wildly silly element (‘Time Lord’ is a vaguely ethereal, grandiose title that doesn’t gel with earthly, human discussions of gender identity). People just don’t talk like that. Sometimes people write like that, seeking an economy of phrasing that looks good on the page… but nobody actually talks like that. I mean, the context in which it’s used is stupid, but the phrasing itself is stupider. It’s also emblematic of a problem with the script as a whole. It feels like a first draught.

What do I mean by that? Well, there’s just a lot of instances where conversations feel slightly stilted or opportunities are missed. Case in point, there’s a bit where Donna’s discussing her kid growing up with her own mum, and it feels like it was meant to be a poignant discussion of the trials and tribulations of raising a child and then realising that they’re not what you were expecting but their own, completely separate person. What we get is just a placeholder where a couple of jokes occur but nothing of import is really said. Similarly, there’s a line where the Doctor muses that he doesn’t know who he is any more, which feels like it was meant to be developed into a meditation on his sense of identity after so many regenerations, metatextually addressing the show’s loss of a coherent, inter-regenerational identity for its lead character. Absolutely fucking nothing comes of it. There’s even a bit where a UNIT scientific advisor in a wheelchair encounters a flight of stairs and the way it’s shot makes it feel like there should have been a joke there. Maybe there could have been a really slow lift that she has to use while her soldiers rush up the stairs, or maybe she could have made one of them carry her. I’d have taken a lazy, low-hanging quip like “stairs…. My old nemesis” to be honest. But all we get is “sorry about the stairs,” and that’s it. My point is that there’s a superficiality to a lot of the scenes and lines that yells ‘PLACEHOLDER’, and areas that desperately need polish.

Speaking of polish: London is once again too fucking clean. I wish TV shows would stop doing that- making London look like the MCU’s version of fucking New York- all glass skyscrapers and clean streets. The real London is a bizarre, dystopian mix of impersonal steel monuments to capital, crumbling baroque architecture from the middling-glorious past and slumping, poverty-stricken housing from a fucking Dickens novel. The city has a really specific, slightly nightmarish character that most telly shows and films fail miserably to capture. It’s inexcusable in this case, because Doctor Who actually used to do a pretty good job of showing London as it is. Which is mental, since it used to be filmed in Swansea in cocking Wales.

But I digress. My final major issue is that the message of the show’s text is wildly at odds with the metatextual message of the specials’ mere existence. The whole reason the BBC re-hired Tennant and Davies onto the show was to announce a return of the Who everyone loved; a tacit admission than the last few years of lazy virtue-signalling and shoddy script-work had been a mistake that they were keen to move on from. There is literally no other reason to take such an obvious backward step in the show’s development. Yet the episode The Star Beast keeps bringing up Whitaker’s tenure as the Doctor as though it’s something to be celebrated. We get lines like “The Doctor’s a man and a woman. And both. And neither. And more,” (again, nobody fucking talks like that) that feel like an attempt to fold the previous three years into the acceptable canon, when the whole reason the specials are happening is to renounce them and leave them in the cold. Then again, that’s the Beeb for you- it's amazing if the left hand knows what the left hand's doing. If someone's bothered to inform the right hand, it's so surprising as to be frankly suspicious. Add to that the extra layer of complexity that comes from getting Disney to part-fund the show and you’re bound to end up with a confused mess. Also, why did they bother getting Disney to part-fund this? The Special Effects look like something a fourteen year-old could whip up in his bedroom. Which is fine- I never mind the sets wobbling in Who: I just can’t figure out where all the fucking money went.

I think the root problem is two-fold. First, as much as I loved Russell T. Davies’ original time as showrunner, it’s really obvious he’s gotten old. It’s only been fifteen years since his time in charge ended, but sometimes, the ageing process kicks a guy’s arse really suddenly (ask me about waking up one day to discover I now have man-boobs sometime). There’s this interview he did recently about how Davros represents an offensive portrayal of wheelchair users, and it’s clearly just the ramblings of a confused old man. Nobody looks at Davros, creator of the Daleks, and thinks ‘yup- there goes a typical wheelchair user’. Part of the point of his character is that he’s kind of admirable on paper, overcoming age and sickness to achieve the impossible… but he perverts and subverts those expectations by doing something fucking appalling. It’s a nuanced, complex take on the way pain and suffering can make a person sympathetic without necessarily redeeming them. And Russel T. Davies, a once-talented writer who should understand this stuff, just doesn’t get it any more. He’s well-meaning, but he’s clearly just not up to the job any more. I mean, he still has talent- his renewed tenure will be better than Chibnall’s… but maybe it would have been a better idea to let the poor schmuck retire on a high note.

The other problem is deeper and more intractable. The world has changed since Doctor Who was the best thing on television, and it might be that it just can’t work any more. The modern era of Who was born from a place of hope yet, also, a place of marginalisation. It was 2005. The government of the day had dome some pretty fucked up things, but they were nowhere near as evil as the governments who were to succeed them. Sci-fi was still a niche thing allowing for experimentation and weirdness. There were definite good guys and bad guys on the world stage and in domestic politics: there were genuine victims on one side and hateful bigots on the other, and it seemed like it might actually be possible for the underdogs to win for a change. 2023 is a different world. We’ve seen the worst UK governments since Thatcher in the 80s (and people kept voting for them) and the worst US President in history (a Savaloy-orange freak with the hair of a sexually-confused Nazi). On the cultural level, the lines between victims and villains have blurred, with the arrival of the never-ending Oppression Olympics birthing a generation of dead-eyed bullies who hide behind nominal ‘oppressed’ status in order to tear down genuinely nice people (like that time a load of wankers piled onto a scientist who landed a probe on a moving comet FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY because he did while wearing a T-shirt with a stylised naked lady on it). Identity has replaced solidarity as the go-to discussion in progressive (or allegedly progressive) circles. The sci-fi genre itself has become popular- meaning it’s infested with normies who don’t understand it but do want to own it. Doctor Who was never built for this world. The change in culture and society over the last just-under-twenty years is more significant, in some ways, than the changes that occurred between its original outing in the 60s and its reboot in 2005, and I don’t know if it can survive those changes. We inhabit a world where actual heroism and even basic decency seem less important than the performance of those qualities in ways that a mass audience can understand and where nuanced solutions, informed by kindness, are verboten because everyone’s supposed to pick a side. There’s no room for a genteel, British/Alien gadabout with two hearts and a silly sonic screwdriver in a world where the battle-lines are drawn and performative virtue has become a universal aspiration. In order to fit our tawdry world, Doctor Who would have to stop being Doctor Who. And, to be blunt, our culture doesn’t really deserve any form of Doctor Who at the moment.

So yes, The Star Beast is pretty good. It’s a nice slice of television that fails on many fronts, but still manages to entertain. But what next? Where can we possibly go from here? Personally, I intend to watch the specials and- if they’re okay- Ncuti Gatwa’s era after that. Then I think I’m done. By rights, the show should face cancellation while it’s still strong enough to bow out gracefully, but if that doesn’t happen, I’ll still have to pick a point to stop watching. Sooner or later, all good things must come to an end, and if the BBC isn’t big enough to admit that, at least I am. I suggest you pick somewhere to draw a line, too.

#Doctor Who #The Star Beast #Review #TV review #Secret Diary of a Fat Admirer #Secret-Diary-of-an-FA

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anotheruserwithnoname · 2 years

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I got a PM asking my opinions on the Who finale tonight. Didn’t watch it; preferred to play Grand Theft Auto Online with my dad who lives by himself 700 km away, and one of the cable nets is running an Austin Powers marathon. Both those were of more interest to me, tbh. I have read detailed spoiler synopses and the like, so I do have a few comments (naturally after a spoiler break, and it’s wordy):

* Many of us predicted the outcome of the regeneration, including Tennant doing his signature “What what what?”

* Gatwa gets a brief appearance in the trailer for an episode that may not air for more than a year. I stand by my Matt Smith vibes assessment.

* There’s quite a bit of buzz about the return of Tennant, especially those who never saw all the media reports in the spring and were caught by surprise. Or assumed it would be Gatwa, with Tennant’s ep being a flashback or something. Not all of it is positive, but whatever. I’d prefer to have seen this announced as the Christmas 2022 special, rather than in November 2023.

* Some people are outraged over an apparent retcon in the episode (The Timeless Children stands in the corner, pointing at itself and grinning like Jerry Lewis on speed; oh, we will get to you in a moment, Skippy). The retcon is allegedly that there was a romance between Tegan and Nyssa. Uh ... it’s only a retcon really if it actually happened on screen. I remember the Peter Davison era vividly and there was nothing of the sort; if anything, it more strongly implied that Nyssa and Five were soft on each other (something I think was reflected in some Big Finish audios). Maybe something happened in a novel or a Big Finish I’m unaware of, but TV canon still takes precedence so I really can’t see people being worked up about something that didn’t happen on screen. Especially given Nyssa doesn’t even appear (and they apparently never bother explaining how Ace and Tegan teamed up, and they probably had forgotten about A Charitable Earth from Sarah Jane Adventures).

* Apparently a bunch of old companions and even Classic Era Doctors (but notably, not modern era - Tennant notwithstanding) appeared in cameos, including 97-year-old William Russell reprising Ian (unavoidably in the process retconning another Sarah Jane Adventures story that said he hadn’t aged a day since the 60s, assuming they didn’t de-age William). That’s all cool, but it should have been saved for the 60th. I’ve seen a few people say now that it smacked of dangling memberberries to try and win people back, and I can’t disagree. Mind you, the exact same thing can be said for the return of Tennant, so...

* Apparently at one point in the special the Master (played again by Sacha Dhawan) does something that results in him briefly becoming the Doctor. There’s apparently a charged moment between him and one of the outgoing companions that had some folks saying HE should have played the actual Doctor. I’ve been saying that since he played pioneering DW director Waris Hussein in An Adventure in Space and Time.

* As a result of that plot twist, it’ll be interesting to see how the numbering works out - is the Master!Doctor the true 14th? Is Tennant playing the 14th, making Gatwa the 15th? Or will he be the 16th? Or because of Timeless Children (I see you still grinning in the corner, Skippy) will RTD abandon the notion of counting altogether and every Doctor going forward will be officially unnumbered like the War Doctor (and the Journey’s End-regenerated 10th Doctor who technically was the 11th but has never been called that)?

* Not sure where they’re getting it from but I’ve heard some people suggest there are clues within the Next Time trailer hinting at some sort of retcon of The Timeless Child (which is still standing in a corner, but with its grin fast fading, now; run along now, Skippy; if an official retcon doesn’t get you, fanon will). There will never be consensus on the 2017 casting decision, and if the stories of the now-ended era sucked, well, other eras had stories that did, too (Season 22 nearly killed DW back in 1985, and Series 10 in 2017 was far from Moffat at his best either). Timeless Children is one of only a few things of this era that cannot be left to stand. Apparently they screwed around with how regeneration works too in this episode.

Anyway, I hear there are a lot of people upset tonight, either because certain agenda items were skipped over on the to-do list, or they aren’t fond of the 2022 casting decision (Tennant and/or Gatwa), or because the story was just ... there. Fact is, the era has ended. Some fans will exit now, and others will join or rejoin. That’s how it always happens, though the sense was the quit/join ratio was a bit out of whack this past era, with substantial attrition. The challenge Russell T Davies faces now is winning back those who jumped ship in 2017 or (more profoundly) after the Timeless Children episode, which marked the point where the show’s ratings really fell into a sinkhole, while also trying to keep as many fans as possible who came on for the now-ended era. That may be a bit of a trick; I saw a tweet from someone calling the casting of Tennant “misogyny.” It’s funny, if people had used terms like “misandry” back in July 2017, they’d have been run off the Internet on a rail.

Whatever, it’s done and over with. I remain undecided if I will be among those who RTD is able to win back. The return of Tennant has piqued interest, but I really don’t want to just nibble on the memberberries only to get indigestion later. I want to see a) what Gatwa brings to the table; b) how RTD handles the Doctor - does he still have the touch or will he crash and burn? (Note I’m talking RTD here; Gatwa, as with his predecessors, will work with what he’s given to work with - far as we know he’s not writing for the show); c) and the quality of the stories RTD and his team come up with. It may be a case of me watching the season after it airs. (So it could be 2 years before I get around to seeing it.) Lots can happen in 2 years.

But the memories I take away from the past 5 years are pretty negative. I went from loving the Who franchise to the point where I compiled a 2,000-page chronology of the show’s history and wrote some 75 fanfics, to the point where I had no interest in watching an era’s finale, have saved thousands of dollars in merch I have not bought over the past half-decade (not a negative - that money had other uses), and even the fanfic writing has become something I’m less enthused about than I used to be. Maybe RTD and Tennant/Gatwa will be able to rekindle that spirit (even if Timeless Child - who right now has left that corner and is running down the block at a cheetah’s pace - isn’t retconned away). Time will tell, a wise man once said. It always does.

#doctor who 60th speculation #doctor who future speculation #doctor who bbc centenery spoilers #doctor who spoilers #certain names and episode titles are omitted from these tags per blog policy

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