ifeelbetter (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ifeelbetter) wrote2011-09-25 04:11 pm
ifeelbetter) wrote2011-09-25 04:11 pm
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Doctor Who: can I have a word at Camera 3?
Am I the only one who feels like Moffat has absolutely no respect for his audience's intelligence with this season's arc? Let me break it down for you under a cut.
To begin at the beginning...
We have to discuss Moffat's tenure as showrunner in comparison to RTD, obvs. Series 5 and 6 do not exist in a vacuum, no matter how much Moffat may pretend they do with re-naming them 1 and 2 and more-or-less jettisoning companion-driven character development for the Doctor. I get that this is how a new showrunner and a new Doctor must behave, it's built into the fabric of the show, but we (the audience) have more capacity for memory than that and have the freedom to do bigger analysis.
So. RTD. I was not his biggest fan. I felt like he was catering to the lowest common denominator a lot of the time. I don't mean that he appealed to our worst instincts as fans--though he did at times--but that he actively chose fan service over artistic merit at just about every turn. And that can work as a creative choice when you counter that with subtle, clever artistically driven decisions. And Moffat played that role for RTD. For every ten-people-make-the-TARDIS-drive-steady moment of fan service, Moffat brought the pathos of a Madame de Pompadour. In other words, I was always glad when Moffat cut the sugary-pleasing quality of the overall RTD arcs with a slice of emo.
...and then the balance was gone...
But Moffat, as showrunner, has gone too far the other direction and hasn't found a yang to counter his yin. I love some of the individual moments of his two seasons so much. And I haven't been this attached to an entire cast of characters since...god, I don't even know. Maybe DS9 in my salad days? And these are emotional reactions he has elicited in me not from following patterns of easy fan satisfaction, but from real artistic choices. I had to be won over every time (except for Amy, I have always and will always love Amy), from Eleven to Rory to River and back again. And he won me by creating these multi-faceted characters that are obviously collaborative, ongoing projects in conjunction with actors and technical staff and other creative input. It's brilliant.
Brilliant, yes. But you've now taught us that you can be brilliant, that we've stopped being a show of easy gags (see the Master in the third series). I expect you to expect more from me now because that's what Moffat has taught me to expect from his show.
...and then he lets me down...
River being Amy's daughter is not clever. That's so obvious, I originally discounted it. I will forgive him that one because he hinted at more beneath that super obvious surface.
But River being in the astronaut suit? That's so obvious it's insulting.
I have assumed, since River first mentioned that she was in prison for killing someone and "the best man [she] ever knew" at that, that it would be too obvious to assume it was the Doctor she killed. It was like foreshadowing with an anvil if that was what was being foreshadowed, right? If you couldn't read that writing on the wall, you were blind. And probably deaf too.
If RTD had tried this storyline, I would have bought it. He liked to paint his pictures in neon, if you know what I mean. He never pretended he was better than that. He never pretended he was better than us like that. But Moffat has been issuing the challenge since he first started working on Who: I am the showrunner who will make impossible puzzles for plotlines, he says in every creative decision. It's so folded into his identity as a Who writer that we don't even feel the need to talk about it anymore. His name is shorthand for it.
...and you could have left it to the fans...
I have read theories about the Silence and the Cracks and River that are brilliant. It gores to show that if RTD had expected more from his fans, his fans could have brought more to the table. We are a highly literate group of television readers, we need no molly-coddling. Moffat raised the stakes on us and we met him head on.
Did we catch the jacket-on-jacket-off switch in Series 5? Hell, yes. Did we notice Ganger!Amy's repeated costume? Bet your ass, we did.
We are a clever group of people, is what I'm saying.
Here are a couple of theories I've read online:
- River is Madame Kovarian's earlier incarnation
- The Doctor has been doubled and is, in fact, in the space-suit to kill the second version of himself
- River is in jail for killing Rory, not the Doctor
- Series 6 has been one long alternative universe following the re-constitution of the universe at the end of Series 5 and it will require Rory's death to be un-written
- Amy and Rory's lack of concern about their own child being missing for so much of her life is a sign that they have been replaced by less-than-human copies
These are all brilliant alternatives. Very clever people have come up with incredibly creative, stunning ways to plot the show using any one of these alternatives. This is what we expect now, not a re-hash of the old stuff. And that's what the River-is-in-the-spacesuit reveal is. It's old.
...in conclusion...
So my point is this: fans don't want the easy option. It's incredibly fun to watch Donna have all the answers at the last minute and to have her typing skills be the thing that saves the universe, yes, but that's just fan service. We don't love that series finale because of that, though. We love it for the pathos of the moment when the Doctor has to leave Donna, for the heartbreaking dissolution of a beautiful friendship.
I wish showrunners would give us credit for that discernment.
To illustrate my point, watch this fan video.
To begin at the beginning...
We have to discuss Moffat's tenure as showrunner in comparison to RTD, obvs. Series 5 and 6 do not exist in a vacuum, no matter how much Moffat may pretend they do with re-naming them 1 and 2 and more-or-less jettisoning companion-driven character development for the Doctor. I get that this is how a new showrunner and a new Doctor must behave, it's built into the fabric of the show, but we (the audience) have more capacity for memory than that and have the freedom to do bigger analysis.
So. RTD. I was not his biggest fan. I felt like he was catering to the lowest common denominator a lot of the time. I don't mean that he appealed to our worst instincts as fans--though he did at times--but that he actively chose fan service over artistic merit at just about every turn. And that can work as a creative choice when you counter that with subtle, clever artistically driven decisions. And Moffat played that role for RTD. For every ten-people-make-the-TARDIS-drive-steady moment of fan service, Moffat brought the pathos of a Madame de Pompadour. In other words, I was always glad when Moffat cut the sugary-pleasing quality of the overall RTD arcs with a slice of emo.
...and then the balance was gone...
But Moffat, as showrunner, has gone too far the other direction and hasn't found a yang to counter his yin. I love some of the individual moments of his two seasons so much. And I haven't been this attached to an entire cast of characters since...god, I don't even know. Maybe DS9 in my salad days? And these are emotional reactions he has elicited in me not from following patterns of easy fan satisfaction, but from real artistic choices. I had to be won over every time (except for Amy, I have always and will always love Amy), from Eleven to Rory to River and back again. And he won me by creating these multi-faceted characters that are obviously collaborative, ongoing projects in conjunction with actors and technical staff and other creative input. It's brilliant.
Brilliant, yes. But you've now taught us that you can be brilliant, that we've stopped being a show of easy gags (see the Master in the third series). I expect you to expect more from me now because that's what Moffat has taught me to expect from his show.
...and then he lets me down...
River being Amy's daughter is not clever. That's so obvious, I originally discounted it. I will forgive him that one because he hinted at more beneath that super obvious surface.
But River being in the astronaut suit? That's so obvious it's insulting.
I have assumed, since River first mentioned that she was in prison for killing someone and "the best man [she] ever knew" at that, that it would be too obvious to assume it was the Doctor she killed. It was like foreshadowing with an anvil if that was what was being foreshadowed, right? If you couldn't read that writing on the wall, you were blind. And probably deaf too.
If RTD had tried this storyline, I would have bought it. He liked to paint his pictures in neon, if you know what I mean. He never pretended he was better than that. He never pretended he was better than us like that. But Moffat has been issuing the challenge since he first started working on Who: I am the showrunner who will make impossible puzzles for plotlines, he says in every creative decision. It's so folded into his identity as a Who writer that we don't even feel the need to talk about it anymore. His name is shorthand for it.
...and you could have left it to the fans...
I have read theories about the Silence and the Cracks and River that are brilliant. It gores to show that if RTD had expected more from his fans, his fans could have brought more to the table. We are a highly literate group of television readers, we need no molly-coddling. Moffat raised the stakes on us and we met him head on.
Did we catch the jacket-on-jacket-off switch in Series 5? Hell, yes. Did we notice Ganger!Amy's repeated costume? Bet your ass, we did.
We are a clever group of people, is what I'm saying.
Here are a couple of theories I've read online:
- River is Madame Kovarian's earlier incarnation
- The Doctor has been doubled and is, in fact, in the space-suit to kill the second version of himself
- River is in jail for killing Rory, not the Doctor
- Series 6 has been one long alternative universe following the re-constitution of the universe at the end of Series 5 and it will require Rory's death to be un-written
- Amy and Rory's lack of concern about their own child being missing for so much of her life is a sign that they have been replaced by less-than-human copies
These are all brilliant alternatives. Very clever people have come up with incredibly creative, stunning ways to plot the show using any one of these alternatives. This is what we expect now, not a re-hash of the old stuff. And that's what the River-is-in-the-spacesuit reveal is. It's old.
...in conclusion...
So my point is this: fans don't want the easy option. It's incredibly fun to watch Donna have all the answers at the last minute and to have her typing skills be the thing that saves the universe, yes, but that's just fan service. We don't love that series finale because of that, though. We love it for the pathos of the moment when the Doctor has to leave Donna, for the heartbreaking dissolution of a beautiful friendship.
I wish showrunners would give us credit for that discernment.
To illustrate my point, watch this fan video.