 |
| Hey, look! It's the Cybermen. Yay. |
So, here we are, at the finale of the Twelfth Doctor's first season, and we start with a bit of a sucker punch when Danny Pink is killed in a car accident. This leads Clara to try to force the Doctor to change history, but instead he takes her to the Nethersphere that we have been seeing throughout the series. Here they find the dead maintained, but apparently in conscious contact with their bodies.
In fact, the dead are merely personalities uploaded into a fragment of the Gallifreyan Matrix by Missy, the Mistress; she who was once the Master. As part of her master plan, as it were, she intends to download the dead back into their Cyber-upgraded original bodies and, dare I say it, take over the Earth.
Now it is down to the Doctor and Clara, with a little help from UNIT, to prevent the Cyber-zombie apocalypse and the destruction of humanity as we know it.
The Good
The Bad
So, now we have a whole series to judge by, and... I'm not enamoured of the Twelfth Doctor. I don't dislike him as much as I did at the start, but I still don't like him. On some level I think that the audience always needs to be rooting for the Doctor, and with this guy we haven't really been able to, because when it comes to the crunch, he's never been any better than anyone else, and often worse.
No Doctor; you are not just an idiot in a blue box. You are a good man, because you have to be a good man, other wise what's the point? You are one abnegation of moral responsibility away from being a supervillain, which is why you are never just the blood-soaked general. If you make the hard choices, you feel them; you have to feel them and we have to see you feel them, or what's the point. I'm as much a fan of deconstructed hero myths as the next man, but when the myth deconstructs itself then the narrative is admitting defeat, and how can you keep on backing it when that happens?
Of course, it hasn't helped that he's been saddled with the appalling false conflict of the Doctor vs Soldier dynamic (also, it was heavily implied in 'Closing Time' that the Eleventh Doctor used to visit Sir Alistair all the time and his PhD was in affably saluting) and the horrible, horrible devolution of Clara into the most egregious singularity of selfishness since Rose Tyler.
- The set up in 'Dark Water' is eerie, building on the hints set up though the series.
- The basic scenario of Cybermen painstakingly prepared and waiting in graves is exceptionally creepy, building on the Frankenstein aspects of the original Cybermen.
- Brigadier!
- Santa! Man, this could go either way and I don't mean slightly.
- I would give points for the female incarnation of the Master, but in the context of the blatant manipulation elsewhere in the episode, it feels more like 'here, we've done it now, aren't we brave' than being progressive, or just a way to conceal the Master's identity a little.
- "Cybermen from cyberspace; I wonder why no-on's ever thought of that before?" Well, because it basically adds nothing to the concept. Indeed, you can say what you like about the connection between mind and body, but downloading the electronically lobotomised personality back into the separately upgraded body lessens the essential horror of the Cyberman.
- President Doctor? Not loving this concept.
- If she was good enough to work out who the Mistress really was, Osgood should have been tasering her halfway through her 'secret', never mind the countdown. She didn't because it was a shortcut to killing someone we could be made to care about.
- Love conquers cybertech was hokey when they played it in 'Closing Time', and Clara and Danny haven't earned it. Despite some attempts to really big up the relationship in 'Dark Water', the series doesn't earn the payoff in 'Death in Heaven'.
- Next season, how about a big bad who isn't in some way trying to get into the Doctor's pants?
- There's a lot of really cynical emotional manipulation in this two-parter. From the attempts to make Clara/Danny the great love of our age within a few lines to the heart-breakingly transparent set-up of Osgood's token death (yes, alright; I liked her. I like Ingrid Oliver as an actor and have done since The Penny Dreadfuls, I actually liked the character - even in Day of the Doctor, but especially with some of the nerdy edges rubbed off - so fuck you and your cynical willingness to kill off a recurring character. well done. You got me; I didn't want her to die and I hated every minute of watching you string it out by building her up so you could pretend that the Mistress was oh so terribly clever. It's not as bad as what RTD did to Donna, but that's damning with faint praise, so fuck you.)
- And here it is, the payoff of the whole 'soldier' subplot; just as horribly clunky as the set up. "Sometimes all you have are bad choices, but you still have to choose," the Doctor reminded us in 'Mummy on the Orient Express', but the conflict between the Doctor and Danny in the graveyard is just a horrible clash between two ugly, unlovable characters. Danny declares what he wants, then rounds on the Doctor when he makes him want it to, because Danny can't bear for the Doctor not to be wrong and apparently nor can Steven Moffat at times.
- In fact, this episode brought home a problem with this series for me: I didn't like any of the main characters. Come 'Death in Heaven' I wasn't rooting for anyone.
- I have, I think, explained before how much I hate it when UNIT are painted not just as inadequate, but incompetent, right? Especially if you're going to hate on your main character all the time, please give the support a chance to shine instead of having the Doctor insult them without comeback before throwing them out of an aeroplane.
- "Permission to SQUEE!" Please, stop being impressed by your own cleverness/audacity; it's not cute.
- Clara: "You told me once what it would take to destroy a TARDIS key. That's what's so good about lava."
- CyberDanny: "This is a promise! The promise of a soldier! You will sleep safe tonight." (This is what the soldier thing has been building up to; it wasn't needed.)
So, now we have a whole series to judge by, and... I'm not enamoured of the Twelfth Doctor. I don't dislike him as much as I did at the start, but I still don't like him. On some level I think that the audience always needs to be rooting for the Doctor, and with this guy we haven't really been able to, because when it comes to the crunch, he's never been any better than anyone else, and often worse.
No Doctor; you are not just an idiot in a blue box. You are a good man, because you have to be a good man, other wise what's the point? You are one abnegation of moral responsibility away from being a supervillain, which is why you are never just the blood-soaked general. If you make the hard choices, you feel them; you have to feel them and we have to see you feel them, or what's the point. I'm as much a fan of deconstructed hero myths as the next man, but when the myth deconstructs itself then the narrative is admitting defeat, and how can you keep on backing it when that happens?
Of course, it hasn't helped that he's been saddled with the appalling false conflict of the Doctor vs Soldier dynamic (also, it was heavily implied in 'Closing Time' that the Eleventh Doctor used to visit Sir Alistair all the time and his PhD was in affably saluting) and the horrible, horrible devolution of Clara into the most egregious singularity of selfishness since Rose Tyler.
The Verdict
'Dark Water' was a really solid set up, but 'Death in Heaven' was a pompous, manipulative and cynical pay off. I could live with pompous and manipulative, but Doctor Who is at its core escapist fantasy and escapist fantasy can't be cynical.
Overall, this season scores reasonably well, mostly thanks to strong individual episodes like 'Mummy on the Orient Express'.
'Dark Water' - 5/10
'Death in Heaven' - 3/10
Overall Score - 6.8/10
No comments:
Post a Comment