I watched the New Year Doctor Who with trepidation. The last few series have not impressed me, and although Tennant was a hard act to follow, I’d been perennially disappointed.
Let’s work through the story together: a sly politician tips off an unscrupulous hustler about top secret alien technology. He has employed a naïve but genuinely intelligent scientist (is there ever any other sort on television?) to convert the stolen item to security drones, but he goes too far, resurrects the Daleks from traces of them in the technology and then more Daleks are summoned to exterminate the impure, resurrected Daleks and then get eliminated themselves by all getting trapped in a spare TARDIS.
It started well. Some stories just have hijacks of supposedly secret goods without any acknowledgement that the thing was secret; the plot needs override the rules of the world. That’s lazy and destroys immersion for me. I can swallow some pretty extreme world-building, but if anything can happen if it furthers the plot, I can’t get invested in the triumphs and setbacks of the story: anything can happen, so it’s all a bit pointless. It’s not the old saw of ‘subverting expectations’; expectations about how the world works are legitimate. It’s expectations about standard plotlines that writers are welcome to subvert.
This episode soon explained that there had been a tip-off from the corrupt Home Secretary. All well and good. It’s just sad I was relieved by this, rather than being able to assume that I’d be told about how it happened soon enough.
The triumph of the writer’s needs over the rules or characters that have already been established is an overwhelming facet of a lot of modern screenplays… or maybe I only watched well-written things when I was a child, or maybe only the good ones have survived. But it’s still a recurring problem that seems to have grown.
In Doctor Who, the problem is characterisation, and a great example begins with the very next scene, showing the Doctor in prison. There have been many variations of the Doctor: a prim, fussy old man who knows everything and has a plan; a scatty, friendly middle-aged man who knows everything and has a plan; a principled, hardened young-looking man who still takes delight in fun when he forgets himself, who also knows everything and always has a plan… you get the idea. The core features of the Doctor are knowledge and finding solutions. It’s not a programme about fighting your way out, soldiers and explosions. The doctor has had many plans foiled or has had to think up plans on the fly, but that pre-eminent mind always has another idea to try.
This 19-year prison sentence, however, directly contradicts who the Doctor used to be. The Doctor has no plan and is merely marking time on a wall. The Doctor is friendly towards the menagerie of other inmates, a selection of past enemies, building a different aspect of the doctor’s character. There’s no problem with that, I suppose. But next time we see her, it’s clear she’s supposed to be giving up. From muttering the self-reinforcing ‘stay strong’, implying that doing so is in doubt, to the changed tone of greetings, the Doctor is giving up clearly enough that a child could see it (and presumably that’s why it’s laid on so thick).
Why do the writers want the doctor to give up? It seems it’s just about creating a bigger dramatic swing when Jack shows up to rescue her. Nothing else in the plot is served by this character destruction: we lose characterisation established over decades in the service of enhancing one split-second moment. Not that it was enhanced, because it doesn’t seem like the Doctor any more, so it’s harder to care whether she’s rescued or not.
It could so easily have been different: the Doctor could have been working on a long-term plan to escape. After all, a nigh-immortal time traveller can afford to invest time on escapes. Perhaps one such attempt has just failed and the doctor is disappointed and hasn’t yet concocted a new one when Jack arrives: we and she can then be appropriately despondent, ready for the contrasting joy of his arrival. I’ll forgive his amazingly appropriate escape widget: let’s assume that with 19 years to plan to break her out of that prison he was able to create a tailor-made, one-off solution.
This haphazard characterisation, prioritizing cheap drama or plot convenience over storytelling coherence, admirable role-modelling or thoughtful plot creation, really annoys me.
Example 2 is our stereotype of a hopelessly naïve but brilliant scientist. I haven’t ever come across someone close to such a character in real life. Most scientists enjoy thinking about the ethical implications of their work and the risks associated with it and have at least some knowledge of them, even if the need to get paid and earn a living overcomes their doubts. So much for subverting audience expectations and creating unique characters: lazy stereotypes are fine for things I care about, like scientists and intelligence.
This man has been given alien technology by an obviously dodgy funder. Does he ask more about the aliens? How come the alien object has been melted into oblivion? Doesn’t that imply it needed to be destroyed? Despite months in which to ponder the obvious questions, the plot requires him to have recreated a Dalek from a few cells. This, by the way, is a technology expert who is great at drone hardware, but also seems to run an advanced biological research facility all by himself.
Could he have had a partner/junior who cultivated the cells and was another layer removed from knowing where they came from? Of course, but why bother paying for another extra when you can instead have plot holes, which are far cheaper?
Fine, we’ll allow that he grew a Dalek in a sealed chamber. He even allowed it access to the company’s neural net and the internet, because why not? A small re-write of those lines could have added something about how it had broken through his firewalls but there seemed to have been no damage. Or maybe he could assert he’d had it firewalled off, but he find out later it had used its alien genius to circumvent such protections.
But no, the genius scientist just plugged in an alien to his most precious systems with no protection at all.
To cap it all off, the idiot genius attempts to incinerate something that has just aroused fear and anger in the person who might know more about it by releasing it from its sealed container. He has been told, almost as clearly as possible, that this is dangerous and needs to be destroyed. So he tries to cuddle it.
This man is not a genius; everything he does demonstrates that he’s a moron. Even the children watching this show will see how foolish he’s being. It seems to be yet another example of our culture’s anti-intellectualism. He’s intelligent, we’re told, but he’s actually a disgrace of a human being. Intelligence is some abstract concept that we shouldn’t bother aspiring to, because it makes no difference to how someone behaves and intelligent characters are usually absurd or pathetic.
Yet again, a couple of extras could have made this part of the story much more believable, and taught a far more serious and important lesson about clarity in chains of command. It doesn’t have to be this man whose body is commandeered by the Dalek; someone reasonably senior in his company could recite all the lines as believably. So why can’t we have him ask a technician to incinerate the alien entity, and then show the technician observe what seems to be a hunk of goo, grab a spoon or spatula along with a gown and face mask, but have the Dalek turn out to be a fully active organism, break out and circumvent his protective gear by taking it off or going underneath?
Maybe the scriptwriters wanted some lazy, done-to-death moralising about Icarus-like scientists who care too much about the doing and not the consequences, but given that that’s been done to death and barely represented anything real anyway, my version, with its nuances about following instructions, information loss over many nodes of communication, and being cautious even when things genuinely seem ok would be a much more mature and interesting way of writing the story.
That’s that: by the end, when the Dalek kills him, I didn’t really care. It was also an obvious repeat of the very impressive line from a previous series, when the Daleks killed someone, were told “You didn’t need to kill him,” and replied “Neither did we need him alive”. Back then it had the desired effect of reminding you about the default assumption of preserving life, which the Daleks reverse. This time it just seemed spiteful.
Example 3 returns us to the doctor and the fam. She leaps out of the TARDIS all smiles and explains that she was in space gaol. Seems like a legitimate explanation, really. If you’re imprisoned you can’t go out and about to see people: that’s the nature of imprisonment.
But no, our cohort of soap opera rejects has no interest in being fair. Yas retorts, very angrily “We were worried about yer”. This could have been a sorrowful line, merely regretting her absence and noting the pain of worry, or a joyful line, expressing happiness that the worry is gone, both of which would be perfect messages for children to absorb.
Instead we have misdirected anger at someone who is not responsible for the pain. This sort of emotionally-stunted toddler-level soap opera drivel is an immediate bum note that pops any immersion or sympathy for the characters.
The following dialogue, in which they explain to her that she was away for 10 months, and remind her that her machine isn’t perfect at hitting exactly the right date (an established feature of the Doctor’s piloting/the TARDIS), doesn’t really justify their anger either. The root cause of her absence was either being imprisoned by someone else, or an uncontrollable lack of precision in the TARDIS. Neither is the Doctor’s fault.
Still, she apologises to them, which I would interpret as the ‘sorry’ that expresses regret, not the ‘sorry’ that accepts responsibility. And even then, Ryan sulkily replies “Yeah well it’s done now so…” before looking half stern and half disgusted as if struggling to forgive her.
This is what we’re modelling to the children watching: emotionally blackmailing someone by using your negative emotions as a weapon to make them feel bad too. ‘We feel bad, and you don’t want us to, so if you were a better person we’d not feel bad’. This immature, emotionally-stunted script-writing/characterisation creates conflict between people where anyone with an ounce of wisdom, insight, self-control or genuine fondness for a long-lost friend would be overjoyed. But every scriptwriter nowadays seems to love dramatic conflict and they gratuitously shoehorn it into everything, not just the rubbishly soap-operas where it belongs.
Maybe we’re supposed to learn something about how selfish the fam are, and how self-sacrificing the Doctor is, when no-one bothers to mention that she’s been trapped for 19 years, making their 10 months seem pathetic. But I don’t think so, given how obviously telegraphed most of the show’s messages are. Everyone is just too self-absorbed in either unjust anger or emotional restitution even to think about the Doctor’s suffering in prison.
This conflict crops up again later when Ryan is still sulking, like a toddler left with a babysitter by his mother. The script is clearly trying to convey a message about acknowledging people’s inner lives and needs, as many stories ham-fistedly try to do, but it oversteps into condoning emotional manipulation and maladjustment… as many stories also achieve. It role-models immaturity whilst obvious attempting to be a good role model, and if you can’t be a good role model, just get on with telling a story and forget any social messaging.
It seems that anyone can do exciting things, but they must all (and especially anyone supposedly intelligent) have the emotional IQ of an abused puppy. Moments such as Ryan saying of the 10-month absence “Maybe it was what I needed” with a disappointed look on the Doctor’s face just reinforce the awful message. She is disappointed that her friend might have got some good out of it because she’s so egomaniacal that she is actually enjoying his emotional meltdown caused by her absence? It’s actually her ego and need to be needed that drives her?
We’ve explored such issues before in Doctor Who: why did he take companions? Was it just loneliness? Was it just selfish to show lesser beings the excitement of godhood that they could only experience through him? But these questions were explored not through the Doctor visibly discovering his own hurt ego but through honest self-reflection in which his self-knowledge trumped a previous Dalek’s attempt to undermine his motivation. The difference is self-awareness: he knew there was an element of selfishness, but rather than merely experiencing that as an emotional reaction that he couldn’t anticipate or deal with, he had grappled with the issues.
Yes, we heard a bit about how she didn’t know who she is. But on the other hand, she’s had 19 years to ponder that by this point.
It’s hard to act inner awareness or self-control. If nothing emerges in your behaviour, there’s no way for the audience to detect that any control is being exerted. It has to be implied, subtly, through word choice, dialogue and open reflection. It’s hard to write, but that doesn’t mean people shouldn’t bother. Emotional intelligence isn’t just in experiencing that pang of hurt ego when someone doesn’t need you: it’s in knowing all about your ego needs already, but also knowing that you care about others’ wellbeing, either from previous self-reflection and experience or from doing it right there. Displaying bad emotional reactions that ‘everyone’ experiences but which are rarely acknowledged isn’t good role-modelling: displaying them being dealt with properly is.
When the Doctor confides “I’m not who I was: lives I’ve lived have been hidden from me”, Ryan, the emotionally stunted sulker, responds with “And how do you feel about that?” I found this unbelievable. There’s so much to say; questions about those lives, who she was, who she is now, how things were hidden, what’s happened to reveal them now… but no, we get an expository line in which one of our emotionally stunted characters behaves like a stereotypical (bad) therapist. The scriptwriter wanted us to think about how she feels about that, and couldn’t rely on good acting to catch our focus, or subtle implications that we might only think back to later. So we get a weird, clunky bit of dialogue instead.
The Doctor, our hugely old, intelligent, wise alien protagonist, then gets a pep talk from Ryan. She has no plan, or even a façade, just open need. Our script-writers, while trying to present good role models, have presented a child in adult form. This isn’t a heroine we can admire and support; she’s a lost, scatty nothing who, like many modern heroes, triumphs through luck and deus ex machina rather than consistent competence. What a way to present the first female Doctor!
Example 4 reinforces this last point. During the big reveal the doctor is bugged by something but notices too late. Her knowledge about the changing light becomes mere exposition: she tells us what is happening, but was too incompetent to do anything about it until it’s too late to do anything but exposit. And it was Yas who this time was the observant one, not that I’ve got any impression that this is part of her character: it feels like the good things are shared between the fam evenly, with strengths and weaknesses appearing with no consistency, as the plot requires.
I found myself wanting this band of fools to win not because I really cared for them, but because they’re all we’ve got: the threat to humanity needed to be stopped, and they were all there was. I suppose that’s a novel way of making children’s programmes scary: with the realism of portraying the fate of the world in the hands of incompetents.
Example 5 is a slightly different complaint. The Daleks are evil; we’ve established them as the biggest baddie in the Doctor Who universe. We could simply have had pure Daleks invited to exterminate impure ones, but the scriptwriters craved more shock value. So we have the power-creep of introducing ‘exterminator Daleks’ who are like the SS of Daleks. There’s no need for this; it’s destroying previous aspects of world-building for a cheap, momentary ‘wow’ moment. And as with any form of power creep, it devalues everything that has gone before: everything that the fans love and treasure. Cheap and lazy plot thrills over thoughtful writing is the order of the day, so we shouldn’t be surprised.
Example 6 is when Graham and Ryan want to go on the Dalek ship and look stubborn. The Doctor seems to respond to this as if overpowered. We’ve seen situations like this before, in which brave and determined people convince a Doctor to allow their bravery. Somehow this scene is different. It seems as though the Doctor is intimidated by their stern faces, rather than being convinced by their determination or knowing them well enough to accept it. Something about the scene seems to imply a power relationship, and that they are asserting power over the Doctor, rather than a normal relationship, based on emotional ties, mutual knowledge and principles.
Example 7: Having boarded the Dalek exterminator ship, Graham mutters something jolly to Ryan, who holds him up and tells him off. Not for being noisy when sneaking around an enemy ship; no, nothing plot-related. It’s for the dramatic conflict of Ryan putting him down for trying to be hip and/or pally (I think). It’s bullying: knowing someone’s need for belonging and deliberately using it to get at them. It’s supposed to demonstrate that Ryan is still working through his issues, and set up his acceptance of his Grandad at the end of the episode, but it’s a despicable way to behave and serves no plot purpose. He’s already rejected and accepted his Grandad a few times, so it’s just inconsistent and incoherent emotion.
I understand that the scriptwriters believe that this is how people really are, and are trying to convey the overarching message that we should support each other and that, as one line puts it, ‘it’s ok to feel bad’. I don’t think it’s how people should be. There is a world of self-improvement out there involving emotional intelligence and self-control, not wild flailing around based on the uncontrollable whims of your subconscious. If we’re going to be heavy-handed about showing how people should behave, let’s go for Star Trek Discovery, Sense8 or even Umbrella Academy, in which people learn not to indulge their emotions, but to reflect, analyse and eventually calm their emotional storms, and are supported in doing so, rather than merely tolerated as they demonstrate these storms.
Example 8 should be a familiar situation by now. The Doctor asks Yas “When have I ever let you down?” From an early Doctor it’d be a valid argument; a moment of reflection would lead to renewed vigour, because it was possible to trust him. This Doctor seems to be a litany of supposedly comedic or action-packed failures. The question itself might be intended to make us laugh, as we see the Doctor’s embarrassingly misplaced self-confidence. It’s just cringeworthy, as it reminds us that a character we once loved for not letting people down can’t legitimately roll this line out any more.
And, of course, this is an opportunity for the scriptwriters to indulge in some revolting interpersonal conflict once again. Yas is angry about being left alone; there’s no happiness that something she spent 10 months trying to find has arrived, no acknowledgement of the Doctor’s pain, or rational recognition that the Doctor isn’t responsible. Saving the world is not the priority: it’s more important to express oneself, 7 billion people be damned! Something like “We’ll talk about this later. I don’t have a better plan,” would show something admirable in her. But no, strength of character is not what this show is about any more.
Example 9 is right at the end, after the evil baddie has somehow taken credit for the heroism, despite this seeming extremely unlikely (a good message for children, I suppose, about believing in billionaire businessmen). Ryan has given a surprisingly mature speech about leaving and Graham has decided to stay with him. The Doctor cried out that she could cross the timelines: something previous Doctors have held firm against despite massive pressure and incentive to do so, as it could destroy the universe if it’s doable at all. And it is Yas who has to comfort this pathetic creature by saying “It’s ok to be sad.”
The wisdom, knowledge and intelligence is gone. A sci-fi hero who was genuinely about intelligence, rather than the usual physical prowess or sheer dumb luck, has been reduced to a mewling man-child (or womanchild, but we seem not to have a female equivalent to ‘manchild’).
Sheer dumb luck is a convenient way of solving the plot when you’ve successfully set up the overwhelming odds that need to be overcome. Interpersonal conflict clearly entertains a lot of people. This must be why both of these are very common, even in action, fantasy and sci-fi genres that are defined by other things. But I find them deeply unsatisfying, especially because of the inconsistency they create. If a character is intelligent, this character should not engage in conflict; if a character is a successful leader, there should be no conflict; if a character has strengths, these should remain throughout the story, and if the show is based on a hero with prowess, whether martial, physical, magical or mental, this prowess should be featured and should make a difference to the plot.
I don’t want my heroes to be ‘everymen’, which to modern writers seems to mean everytoddlers. I want them to be heroes. That would be the best way to teach children who to be.
