Will Doctor Who stop saving the Universe to claim Universal Credit?

With the exception of perhaps Oscar Wilde not many great artists can also pull off being great critics.  I am a terrible writer with a catalogue of failed projects to my name that can only come from a true lack of talent coupled with complete laziness.  Yet occasionally one has to address an important artistic question and this week it is …why is Doctor Who Series 12 so awful?  Fans aren't happy, the viewers aren't tuning in ...why has it all gone so pear shaped?

When I say it was awful I don’t mean to say I didn’t enjoy it.  I’m a diehard fan of Doctor Who.  I even struggled through Sylvester McCoy’s run – you think it was bad now?  Watch Time and the Rani.  Actually don’t.  30 years later I’m just trying to forget.  It pains me that it is available to buy on DVD when it could have been wiped…

But who am I to judge?  Oddly Sylvester McCoy remains more popular than Colin Baker and his career has gone from strength to strength since leaving the role… while Colin Baker complains that his Doctor is consistently rated the worst and it hurts him personally… Perhaps the coat was the problem…

So anyway I do admit that I enjoyed series 12.  I think perhaps I must be in a minority of 1 however as the ratings have fallen off a cliff and history tells us that when the viewers go to sleep Doctor Who goes to sleep.  Sometimes for as long as 15 years…  Of course there will be a plethora of excuses for the Doctor’s redundancy – classics include … We’re just giving it a rest, It needs a break, It’s becoming too violent, Audiences don’t identify with the new Doctor, We’re splitting up the season, We’re just cutting the episode length by 1 but we’ve made the episodes longer …but the result will be the same.  The only Universe the Doctor will be exploring in the near future will be Universal Credit.

I can’t put the decline of Doctor who on one specific thing but here are some thoughts…

First the big elephant in the room.  Retconning the Doctor to decide that before William Hartnell she/he was a black woman and then deciding that not only that but she isn’t from Gallifrey and not only that her mother experimented on her/him horribly to extract the secret of regeneration which gave birth to the whole of Time Lord society.  And not only 1 or 2 more of him exist but many more because his wicked stepmother kept killing him/her/they?  I think it was Mrs Moore who said "I do like mysteries but I dislike a muddle" and that's exactly the problem here ...instead of providing situations that cause the audience to speculate the audience is bombarded with weird conflicting information and the result is ...a muddle not a mystery.  Besides which isn't a protagonist who has had their mind wiped by a dystopian regime the plot of Blakes 7 rather than Doctor Who?

There are other plot problems created which are quite boring so feel free to skip this paragraph if you have a life...  The production teams of the past have made a big thing of the Doctor only being able to regenerate 12 times.  A huge plot arc was attached to Matt Smith getting a new regeneration cycle.  Now we learn the Doctor has infinite regenerations.  Was his ability to regenerate reset when he/she was regressed to a child or can he/she still regenerate endlessly?  Now you could say that this is picking holes... but it's the production teams that made a big thing of this plot point over decades.  Why is Ruth's Tardis a Police Box when Susan told us it only became a police box in Episode 1 and before that it used to change shape all the time?  Is it defaulting to what it was before?  That would be logical except that what we know is that the Doctor stole his Tardis (this has been shown on screen since the revival) so how did he chose the right one?  Why were none of the pre Hartnell Doctors seen when Clara and the Great Intelligence went back down the Doctor's timeline? There are solutions to all these questions but they're not given.  Is the plan to just ignore them or spend years trying to explain them...?  When the Master says "Everything you think you know is a lie"... It is like he is breaking the 4th wall to say to the audience "You know this is all nonsense, don't you?"  Well yes, but I'd rather you didn't point it out. 

Now none of this is necessarily a disaster in its self.  It’s always been hinted that the Doctor’s past is murkier than even he knows…  Way back in the 1980s Lady Peinforte was threatening that "I shall tell them of Gallifrey, tell them of the old time, the time of chaos."  Rassilon was seen to be both immortal and corrupt in the 5 Doctors – a story in which the recurring slimy Lord President Borusa glibly offers “the Master” a new full regeneration cycle like they grow on trees in order to manipulate him.  We’ve known that there was a Gallifreyan underglass “the Shobogans” since the Deadly Assassin when Robert Holmes wrote a story about how the all powerful ones were corrupt loosely modelled on the assassination of President Kennedy.  We’ve known these working classes are banished to live outside the citadel since the Invasion of Time … when Gallifrey was memorably invaded by pieces of tin foil for budgetary reasons and a lot of time was spent running round a disused NHS hospital because the studio staff were on strike… More ludicrous things have happened in Doctor Who.  And yet it is – like so many of the storylines – politically motivated in rather a crass way… Explaining this new back story of how a little black girl was oppressed by white explorer woman requires so much exposition that the Doctor has to be plugged into the Matrix for most of the episode to accommodate the huge info dump.  Instead of following the show don't tell rule of fiction writing... We're just told and it shows. 

Now there’s nothing wrong with crass politics in drama and fiction … read any novel by Dickens.  Certainly in his early novels like Oliver Twist the satire is laid on with a trowel.  And who can forget Dickens’s subtle anagrammatic names such as Dotheboys Hall?  What Dickens has to do with it I'm not sure...

That said ...it seems that all this retconning has no other purpose than to rile the fans.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that.  I love the fact that one of the most hated David Tennant episodes is Love and Monsters.  Hated precisely because it skewers the fans themselves.  And what was the Time War except a coded satire on the 15 years Doctor Who was off air?  The war wasn’t really between the Time Lords and the Daleks – it was between the Licence Payers and the BBC.  But the thing is this …it’s okay to send up or mock your fans if you’re winning a broader audience.  But these days Doctor Who now seems to alienate everybody ...it is neither mainstream nor niche…

Why?  

Is it the Doctor breaking the fourth wall once too often to lecture us in pollution?  Well, Doctor Who was lecturing us in pollution as far back as the Green Death in the 70s but at least they dressed it up with horror and some genuine comedy – who can forget Jon Pertwee in drag?

Is it too predictable?  Possibly … the Master and the Cybermen team up for what must be their third season finale now.  When the Master says to the Doctor “haven’t you worked it out yet – you are the Timeless Child?” I have to say as an audience member I thought “Yes, we got that 10 episodes ago … catch up, Doctor?”  Destroying Galifrey again is like putting the Doctor on trial again was in 86 ...it's all been done before...?

Is it that Jo Martin’s Doctor who is the true enigma steals every scene from Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor …? 

Is it Jodie’s acting?  It’s easy to say it’s not her acting … and I’m not an expert in acting method but she doesn’t seem to add anything.  The Doctor talking rapidly to him/herself has been done to death…?  I'm not sure why she talks so much but I realised after a while that the companions no longer ask as many questions any more.  Perhaps the thinking behind this is to give them more agency but actually the reverse happens.  They come over as wooden and a bit dim and the Doctor no longer has that teacher/student relationship with them... 

Is it the stories?  One had high hopes with the season opener which teamed the Doctor up with MI6 (UNIT having been closed down for reasons that are still not properly explained) and it was all going very well with Stephen Fry explaining how lots of the world’s spies were being murdered but not by each other until someone shot Stephen.  And that was the end of that.  Although we learned that the Master had infiltrated MI6 I am still at a complete loss as to why … in the second part we went back to meet Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage and then forward in time to Nazi occupied France for no adequately explained reason.  Meanwhile the white shaped outline monsters while impressive when first seen after a while started to remind me of the tin foil monsters from Invasion of Time?  Invasion of Time was written in 4 days and this story felt like it may as well have been written in four days for all the sense it made.  The reveal of Sacha Dhawan’s Master was really well done but hasn’t the same trick been used before when they introduced Missy?  Maybe we just need another 15 year gap to forget all the tricks…

Is it the politics?  Byron is portrayed as a coward who hides behind women.  While one could criticise Byron for many things in his personal life he’s not a Greek national hero for his cowardice.  Most of the time Doctor Who’s political agenda just washes over me in a “what are they on about now…” way but this one stuck out like a sore thumb because it didn’t fit facts.  A shame – they did such a good job in the previous series with James I.  Perhaps why the last series which sold its self on its star actors rather than its monsters was a ratings smash and…

Is it the characters?  Since grandstepfather Graham and grandstepson Ryan became best friends again in the previous series and since Graham has got over his bereavement what is the point of them anymore?  Depression was explored in a storyline that was so depressing I started to wonder if it was to do with homosexuality as that might make it more interesting… but no it was just boring. 

And pity poor Yazmin Khan who no matter what the Doctor gives her to do seems to be the new Nyssa ... as with Peter Davison's 1st series 3 companions means there's never enough screen time for any character development and someone is always left out.  She’s a policewoman apparently but we never see her at work hardly ever…  One can't help feeling Jodie has been given as many companions as Davison for the same reasons either.  Okay Hartnell had 3 but that was when Doctor Who ran 50 weeks a year and he needed holidays scheduling.  It doesn’t help that Bradley Walsh steals every scene he’s in even when he has nothing to say. 

Odd too that when Doctor Who came back in 2005 he couldn’t stop hitting on the ladies to a level where Rose’s mum had to give him a slap but now it’s as if the Doctor on becoming a woman has remembered at last that she was asexual for the first 26 years of the show …if you discount whatever Tom Baker was up to with Romana…?

Is it that Mr Chibnall has no experience of writing Sci Fi …?  Well, he ran Torchwood for the first two series so that explanation doesn’t wash either.

Is it that it is just in bad taste?  Well, what could be in worse taste than Amy having a baby that’s immediately abducted by aliens and managing to get over it really quickly?

Is it that it doesn’t make sense?  The Underwater menace… Here's one of the more cogent analyses of the retconning problems floating over twitter...

Mr Chibnall says the show is not a democracy and he ignores the fans …so then why bring back the Master, the Cybermen and the Daleks…?  Now even the Radio Times is turning on the show while the Guardian complains it is not “woke enough”…? Urgh I hate that word ...and everyone who uses it.  But ... Something is off.  My theory is they just have ideas like “what if the Doctor joined MI6 that would be cool” but then don’t know how to resolve them?  Who does know how to resolve things though?   I can’t even resolve this post…

Well, actually perhaps examining resolutions in fiction might be a good ending.  And since Mr Chibnall decided to parody James Bond perhaps we can look to the James Bond franchise for some solutions to this.  For the fact is that writing James Bond is hard.  Really hard.  There are elements that must be re-used and elements that the audience expect and there must be a plot but at the same time not much must change ... a bit like Doctor Who.  At the end of Spyfall part 1 the Doctor is teleported away while his companions are left trapped on a plane with no cockpit.  How do you resolve this?  The solution presented is the Doctor goes back in time and leaves clues on the plane and somehow the plane's automatics can land the plane despite the cockpit being blown up.  This really isn't very satisfying...

Now on the DVD for Diamonds Are Forever legendary Hollywood screenwriter Richard Maibaum goes into exactly this problem which he describes as resolving the "snake pit situation".  He admits that he and Tom Mankiewicz had terrible probems with such scenes.  What they'd do is think of terrible situations that James Bond could possibly get into and then try and figure out really inventive resolutions to them.

For example in this scene (left)  James Bond has smuggled diamonds into the USA inside a body and has taken them to a crematorium where he's arranged for the diamonds to be removed from the body and placed in an urn.  However, when Bond goes to collect the urn from the garden of rest he gets bumped on the head by Mr Wint and Mr Kidd and popped inside a coffin which they then deposit in the crematorium oven which they then switch on?  How does Bond get out the coffin and out of the oven which has now been turned on?

Well, Richard Maibaum says it took literally months just to solve this narrative problem and for months they would work on nothing else bashing their heads against a brick wall trying to come up with solutions.  The solution they came up with is that Bond can't escape on his own - it's impossible - but what he has done is taken the precaution of hiding the diamonds somewhere else and the "diamonds" inside the body are in fact a decoy.  The gangsters then have to get Bond out of the coffin in order for him to tell them where the real diamonds are.  Satisfying?  Well, it's not bad...  Bond can't fight his way out or talk his way out but he's thought his way out before getting himself into the situation but...

...the point is (as Richard Maibaum says) these kind of snakepit situations are really hard to write because by definition the premise is easy - the escape has to be something the audience would never have thought of.

All resolutions are hard to write.  Sometimes - Indiana Jones and the Fridge - someone can think up a really logical resolution only to find the audience doesn't accept it.

It's easy to parody James Bond but could Chibnall actually write James Bond?  Then again it's easier to write this than to end the unfinished novel on the hard drive ... but it's so much more fun ...

No wonder Rassilon took to eternal sleep...

...perhaps he's trying to work out the resolution to the next snake pit situation...