The Name of the Doctor
Warning: spoilers.
So. The Name of the Doctor.
You know what? Fuck it. I keep trying to write this as a proper review-slash-blogrant, something structured and informative with little asides about my take on the rest of the season, but I just can’t muster the effort it would take to give a shit. I feel like I’m in a dysfunctional relationship with this goddamn show - one where I periodically threaten to leave forever and then storm out in a huff, only to be suckered back in by the seductive promise that maybe, just maybe, things will get better. And for a brief, shining moment, they always do - first with The Doctor’s Wife, then with Dinosaurs on a Spaceship and now with The Crimson Horror - but then the Wandering Hand of Moffat intervenes and everything goes pearshaped, and I end up hatewatching a show I used to love out of some demented loyalty to the underlying concept and also, I suspect, no small degree of masochism.
Juxtapose these two concepts:
- A flying emu.
- A flying sprunge.
Because we know what an emu is, a flying one is clearly anomalous. All by itself, the contrast is evocative: flying subverts emu, neither concept requires explanation, and so we can get straight to the business of showing how the subversion actually works without first explaining why it constitutes a subversion at all.
But a flying sprunge? What the hell is that? Do sprunges usually fly? If so, why? If not, why not? The emphasis here is on sprunge, not flying, because until we know what the former means, we can have no meaningful investment in its connection to the latter. Telling us that sprunges can’t fly mere minutes before depicting a sprunge in flight doesn’t subvert anything, because there was no existing knowledge to be subverted. Until we’re just as invested in the concept of a flightless sprunge as we are in the concept of a flightless emu, we’re not going to feel surprised to see one flying, because all you’ve done is presented us with two new and equally detached pieces of information.
Thus: when you tell us the Doctor can’t go to Trenzalore, then have him arrive there minutes later; when you show us the Doctor’s rip-in-space, dead-body-timeline and say it’s impossible to enter, then show two different people jumping through it almost instantly; when you say it’s super-double-impossible for the Doctor to travel through his own dead-body-timeline and that is literally the next thing he does? You are basically saying, “Sprunges can’t fly. Oh shit, a flying sprunge!” over and over again, until your audience falls insensible to the floor, crying for a scrap of meaningful tension.
And Moffat keeps on doing it. Instantaneous impossibilities are one of his standard writing tics, along with endlessly-reiterated catchphrases (Hello Sweetie Run You Clever Boy Silence Will Fall Doctor Who Geronimo Spoilers oh my god think of some new dialogue before I have an aneurysm), identical flocks of enemies with no proper consciousness who either don’t speak at all or else repeat the same phrase ad nauseum (This Is A Kindness Where’s My Mummy Who Turned Out The Lights You Are Unauthorised seriously dialogue is not that fucking difficult), legions of dopplegangers, female companions who meet the Doctor as a child and, for some inexplicable reason, crashed medical ships whose advanced technology has run amok and is manifesting as mysterious phenomena (three times. THREE. TIMES.).
And I’m drained by this ongoing fuckery, this terrible, repetitive plotting more full of holes than a cargo net, the danger so shallow and empty it’s like a wading pool billed as a shark tank, and the whole so bereft of cohesion that the worldbuilding and characterisation both have less structural integrity than a pyramid made out of pipecleaners. And threatening to tell the Doctor’s name? Congratulations, YOU HAVE OFFICIALLY MANAGED TO CHEAPEN THE ONE ENDURING QUIRK OF A FIFTY YEAR-OLD SHOW.*
GET. STEVEN. MOFFAT. OUT. OF. THERE.
Seriously. I do not care where you put him - a holding cell, the center of the sun, the 1am shift on Radio 2 - but get him the fuck away from Doctor Who.
AUGH.
*The problem with revealing the Doctor’s name is, it can’t matter to the audience unless it’s something we’ve heard of before, so we can sit there and go OH MY GOD, HE’S THAT GUY - but pretty much any name you picked would either be too big or too insignificant. So instead, it’ll probably just be yet another instantaneous impossibility that we’re only told about two scenes before it happens, and the whole thing will be awful. Or he’ll be Rassilon somehow, which doesn’t even make sense, but it’s the only Timelord name that could possibly work as a gotcha! moment.
(If he had to be someone we’d heard of on Earth, though, the only possible name I’d accept is Ulysses; anything else would be bullshit of the highest order. But that will never happen on Moffat’s watch, because it might actually make sense. Especially if it was tied in to Tennyson’s poem. Which it won’t be, because he won’t be Ulysses. But a girl can dream.)
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Sick of characters always lying about things being impossible? Moffat isn’t.
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My feelings about current Dr Who from someone else’s brainthoughts.
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