Doctor Who: The End of Time - Review
Jan. 4th, 2010 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiI want to add my voice to the great End of Time commentary. In general, I agree with many people: there were good things and bad things, and I agree with many about which things were which.
Spoilers follow:
Good:
* Everything with Wilf
* Doctor/Master (there very loose alliance felt plausible to me)
* Time Lady!
* The acting in general
Not Bad:
The visits to companions at the end. I agree it was overextended and unnecessary, but given it was there, it was done pretty well. Rose was not annoying; in fact, I agree with those who said that "going back to the beginning" was a nice capstone. Some have remarked that Jack seemed a bit OOC given his recent trauma, but I don't think so. Jack would respond to trauma by going to a bar and picking up some boys. And I thought Barrowman did a nice job of making his jocularity subdued.
The Unpopular That I Want to Defend:
Ten's demise. Many have commented that his extended whininess was annoying and made one relieved to see him go. I, too, was relieved and happy to see Eleven. I don't think that's a bad thing; in fact, it's rather a good trick to pull off, priming us so well for the next Doctor that by the time he arrives, we've already largely grieved and are glad to see him (as he is himself).
As for Ten, he was whiny, moping, and emo, yes. It got annoying, yes. But I think it's in character. Ten's life was sad. It was a story of decline. He started out on a high note: good death, chipper at being back, fun with Rose. Then, he lost Rose, in whom (I would argue) he was over-invested. He didn't know how to deal with that loss (couldn't connect with Martha), and I think it triggered more Time War grief. If Nine's grief was largely the initial shock of "OMG, I destroyed them all! What is this new universe I'm in?", Ten's was more like, "I really am never going to see my family/friends/home/culture again." And he suffered greatly under that weight. He found and lost the Master (more renewed Time War grief). Martha left him, Donna forgot him, and he lost Rose again (to himself, which is just weird). Finally, he ended up alone, which is not a good state for the Doctor. And in the end, it all left him unstable and not only lonely and unhappy but making bad moral decisions and seriously having to question himself.
Why would this guy want to hang on to this shitty regeneration? I think it makes sense. The Doctor is fundamentally not someone who gives up. He didn't want to give up on that life without figuring out what he'd got wrong. He wanted to have the chance to work through the psychological mess, not just draw the curtain and wake up "someone else." I think that makes sense, and it would make him whiny and resistant.
The Bad
* No feminism here. (I'll say no more; it's already been well expressed by many.)
* No productive racial discourse either. (I'll say no more.)
(Both of these areas could have been worse though.)
My big bugaboo is, as usual, that RTD is tone deaf at writing science fiction (or, I suspect, at writing any genre that is not daily world realism). With regard to genre fiction, he writes in a way that suggests two big misconceptions:
1) Bigger is more dramatic/better storytelling.
2) If it's not the "real world," you can do anything.
I could write a novel on these misconceptions show up in The End of the Time, but I don't want to, so I'll just give some examples.
* 6 billion Masters. (The current population is closer to 7 billion, BTW.) You'd have utter chaos. It would take them about 2 minutes to start fighting over which one of them was going to dominate the universe and what would be the best way to do it. Instead, we got everyone in his dutiful place. Maybe that was part of the technology, but if so, it wasn't well explained and to explain it properly would take at least an entire episode (probably more) focused on nothing else.
* Retconning the Time War. You really do have to assume that the Doctor did a lot of lying every time he said, "They're dead." If they weren't dead but just locked up (and apparently locked up conscious, sentient and eternally trapped in some sort of black void), the "dead" repetition becomes very creepy. In one fell swoop, we lost a lot of the pathos or, at best, we need to completely mentally reconfigure what 5 years of pathos have actually been about. It feels like retcon rather than revealing new dimensions.
* Retconning the Time Lords. Now, Gallifrey was never a utopia. Yes, the Time Lords did horrible things to the Doctor and were very morally problematic at many junctures. But it's a long way from that to "let's destroy creation while we alone ascend to some sort of god-like status." If anything, the Time Lords' traditional problem has been inaction. Destroying creation is not very plausible for them. Sitting on their asses while the Daleks take over until it's too late to effectively fight back without cataclysmic action on the Doctor's part was always plausible. Now the "you can do anything in sci fi" credo has effectively destroyed that nice, plausible, culturally trenchant narrative.
Moreover, having them make this ridiculously megalomaniacal decision as some sort of corporate organism, "the Time Lords," with only two voices dissenting is just insulting. This is an entire planet of people. (A big planet; if its gravity is about 1G, is it not very dense?) This would be a complicated social negotiation, even among a people dominated by group think.
* Rassilon? I know, maybe it's like "John" over there. But I doubt it. And that reads as either an absolutely wild and bizarre plot that, again, would take at least a whole episode to explain or a really unforgivable lack of familiarity with the canon of the show you're producing.
* "The end of creation/time itself." If I may invoke The Tick: it's too big; I can't wrap my mind around it. The Waters on Mars was more effective because its narrative was comprehensible: the fate of a few people, a lone outpost, and more broadly, a vague sense of the patterns of future possibility. "The end of time" as a place holder for "something big that's at stake," without any exploration of what that actually means, without any interest in how time functions or how "ascended" consciousness would function without it is just sloppy (and using "sci fi" as an excuse to make sloppiness acceptable).
The end result was a lot of grasping at straws of plots without going deeply into any full, coherent story. I mean, here are some plots that could have been powerful ways to send off Ten (again, I repeat what many others have said):
* Donna's memory
* The dangerous, time damaging ramifications of Jack's immortality and how Rose is to blame.
* The Master's return (just one of him)
* Saving Adelaide really did change the course of history.
* Any other (single) Time Lord comes back
Still, to end on a happy note...
So who was the Time Lady? I think she was Susan. I agree that RTD's mind doesn't seem to function that way. If I try to think the way I imagine (perhaps erroneously) RTD to think, I figure she is an OC, mother, wife/lover, or Rose. However, until the fond hope is beaten out of me, I'm going to imagine she's Susan because of her juxtaposition with the visual image of Wilf and his granddaughter at Donna's wedding.
On an emotional level, of course, nothing makes dramatic sense except her being Susan. Of all the Time Lords the Doctor had to bury, the one likely to still be alive who would be most difficult to turn on would be Susan, his child. It would, further, be entirely plausible for her to be his ally. And casting her with a woman older than her "grandfather" is a nice reminder that among Time Lords physical appearance does not indicate real age. I hope we see her again and that my hunch shall be born out.
Spoilers follow:
Good:
* Everything with Wilf
* Doctor/Master (there very loose alliance felt plausible to me)
* Time Lady!
* The acting in general
Not Bad:
The visits to companions at the end. I agree it was overextended and unnecessary, but given it was there, it was done pretty well. Rose was not annoying; in fact, I agree with those who said that "going back to the beginning" was a nice capstone. Some have remarked that Jack seemed a bit OOC given his recent trauma, but I don't think so. Jack would respond to trauma by going to a bar and picking up some boys. And I thought Barrowman did a nice job of making his jocularity subdued.
The Unpopular That I Want to Defend:
Ten's demise. Many have commented that his extended whininess was annoying and made one relieved to see him go. I, too, was relieved and happy to see Eleven. I don't think that's a bad thing; in fact, it's rather a good trick to pull off, priming us so well for the next Doctor that by the time he arrives, we've already largely grieved and are glad to see him (as he is himself).
As for Ten, he was whiny, moping, and emo, yes. It got annoying, yes. But I think it's in character. Ten's life was sad. It was a story of decline. He started out on a high note: good death, chipper at being back, fun with Rose. Then, he lost Rose, in whom (I would argue) he was over-invested. He didn't know how to deal with that loss (couldn't connect with Martha), and I think it triggered more Time War grief. If Nine's grief was largely the initial shock of "OMG, I destroyed them all! What is this new universe I'm in?", Ten's was more like, "I really am never going to see my family/friends/home/culture again." And he suffered greatly under that weight. He found and lost the Master (more renewed Time War grief). Martha left him, Donna forgot him, and he lost Rose again (to himself, which is just weird). Finally, he ended up alone, which is not a good state for the Doctor. And in the end, it all left him unstable and not only lonely and unhappy but making bad moral decisions and seriously having to question himself.
Why would this guy want to hang on to this shitty regeneration? I think it makes sense. The Doctor is fundamentally not someone who gives up. He didn't want to give up on that life without figuring out what he'd got wrong. He wanted to have the chance to work through the psychological mess, not just draw the curtain and wake up "someone else." I think that makes sense, and it would make him whiny and resistant.
The Bad
* No feminism here. (I'll say no more; it's already been well expressed by many.)
* No productive racial discourse either. (I'll say no more.)
(Both of these areas could have been worse though.)
My big bugaboo is, as usual, that RTD is tone deaf at writing science fiction (or, I suspect, at writing any genre that is not daily world realism). With regard to genre fiction, he writes in a way that suggests two big misconceptions:
1) Bigger is more dramatic/better storytelling.
2) If it's not the "real world," you can do anything.
I could write a novel on these misconceptions show up in The End of the Time, but I don't want to, so I'll just give some examples.
* 6 billion Masters. (The current population is closer to 7 billion, BTW.) You'd have utter chaos. It would take them about 2 minutes to start fighting over which one of them was going to dominate the universe and what would be the best way to do it. Instead, we got everyone in his dutiful place. Maybe that was part of the technology, but if so, it wasn't well explained and to explain it properly would take at least an entire episode (probably more) focused on nothing else.
* Retconning the Time War. You really do have to assume that the Doctor did a lot of lying every time he said, "They're dead." If they weren't dead but just locked up (and apparently locked up conscious, sentient and eternally trapped in some sort of black void), the "dead" repetition becomes very creepy. In one fell swoop, we lost a lot of the pathos or, at best, we need to completely mentally reconfigure what 5 years of pathos have actually been about. It feels like retcon rather than revealing new dimensions.
* Retconning the Time Lords. Now, Gallifrey was never a utopia. Yes, the Time Lords did horrible things to the Doctor and were very morally problematic at many junctures. But it's a long way from that to "let's destroy creation while we alone ascend to some sort of god-like status." If anything, the Time Lords' traditional problem has been inaction. Destroying creation is not very plausible for them. Sitting on their asses while the Daleks take over until it's too late to effectively fight back without cataclysmic action on the Doctor's part was always plausible. Now the "you can do anything in sci fi" credo has effectively destroyed that nice, plausible, culturally trenchant narrative.
Moreover, having them make this ridiculously megalomaniacal decision as some sort of corporate organism, "the Time Lords," with only two voices dissenting is just insulting. This is an entire planet of people. (A big planet; if its gravity is about 1G, is it not very dense?) This would be a complicated social negotiation, even among a people dominated by group think.
* Rassilon? I know, maybe it's like "John" over there. But I doubt it. And that reads as either an absolutely wild and bizarre plot that, again, would take at least a whole episode to explain or a really unforgivable lack of familiarity with the canon of the show you're producing.
* "The end of creation/time itself." If I may invoke The Tick: it's too big; I can't wrap my mind around it. The Waters on Mars was more effective because its narrative was comprehensible: the fate of a few people, a lone outpost, and more broadly, a vague sense of the patterns of future possibility. "The end of time" as a place holder for "something big that's at stake," without any exploration of what that actually means, without any interest in how time functions or how "ascended" consciousness would function without it is just sloppy (and using "sci fi" as an excuse to make sloppiness acceptable).
The end result was a lot of grasping at straws of plots without going deeply into any full, coherent story. I mean, here are some plots that could have been powerful ways to send off Ten (again, I repeat what many others have said):
* Donna's memory
* The dangerous, time damaging ramifications of Jack's immortality and how Rose is to blame.
* The Master's return (just one of him)
* Saving Adelaide really did change the course of history.
* Any other (single) Time Lord comes back
Still, to end on a happy note...
So who was the Time Lady? I think she was Susan. I agree that RTD's mind doesn't seem to function that way. If I try to think the way I imagine (perhaps erroneously) RTD to think, I figure she is an OC, mother, wife/lover, or Rose. However, until the fond hope is beaten out of me, I'm going to imagine she's Susan because of her juxtaposition with the visual image of Wilf and his granddaughter at Donna's wedding.
On an emotional level, of course, nothing makes dramatic sense except her being Susan. Of all the Time Lords the Doctor had to bury, the one likely to still be alive who would be most difficult to turn on would be Susan, his child. It would, further, be entirely plausible for her to be his ally. And casting her with a woman older than her "grandfather" is a nice reminder that among Time Lords physical appearance does not indicate real age. I hope we see her again and that my hunch shall be born out.
