And So, It Ends
In which I stop babbling about social and political issues, and focus on something that's actually important for a change.
So David Tennant is no longer The Doctor, and has been replaced by a kid doing a David Tennant impression. Whatever your opinion about Doctor Who, you'd be hard-pushed to argue that the series hasn't changed massively since Eccleston burst on to the scene in 2005. It's difficult to remain anti-establishment while being immensely successful; if Doctor Who's first season was a subversive tract dressed up as a family drama, David Tennant has left behind a commercial juggernaut, firmly esconced among the detritus of showbizness.
This isn't to say it's been rubbish, although the overall quality has generally been on the slide since Eccleston's glorious début. This isn't surprising; all power corrupts, and Russell T. Davies is now one of the most powerful men in television. When Davies started out, he was paranoid that the press were out to get Doctor Who at the first sign of weakness; now he basks in the glow of Heat Magazine and tabloid approval, and appears to produce the sort of thing he knows these people will like. Dramatic revelations accompanied by whooshing noises, flashbacks whenever a character remembers anything from the past, and a look that's as shiny and colourful as an episode of Hustle. It doesn't matter; Davies leaves as the genius who reinvented Doctor Who.
But... did he reinvent it, exactly? Certainly, many of the things Davies is credited with "transforming" about Doctor Who, by that tedious, uninformed, know-sod-all-about-Who-but-like-to-pretend-otherwise body known as the national media, were firmly in place beforehand. Even if you ignore those poxy, rubbish, Just For Geeks spin-off novels*, the new series followed-on almost seamlessly from the 1989 version. The last ever story from the old series** featured a working-class companion whose development was at the heart of the series, housing estates, council-flats and the companions' group of friends; weirdly, the last person we saw the Doctor meet in the old series was indistinguishable from Jackie Tyler***. The real difference between the two was that Doctor Who 2005 had an experienced and competent production team, a stable background, a decent budget and superb leads. This wasn't the case in 1989.
If anything, then, Russell T. Davies got credit where he warranted none, and missed out on the kudos he deserved. His simple decision to dress the Doctor in a leather jacket and prattle on in a Manchester accent seems an obvious call now - it was done with a great lightness of touch - but everyone assumed that Eccleston would be using his posh voice and dressed in Victorian clothing. Similarly, the notion that we'd make return journeys to the Powell Estate, and that Rose's Mum would feature in over half the season's episodes, seemed bonkers before it went and happened. If Davies' tweaks were tiny, their effects were huge. It wasn't that the show became "savvy" or "sexy" or (heaven help us) "glossy", it was that he rooted it in the real world. The final episode featured, at the core of the story, a scene in which Rose ate chips with her Mum and boyfriend, desperately fretting about what she could do to help the Doctor, stuck in the year 200,000. Jackie's response, that it was a long way from here, was gloriously fatuous and exactly what we tell ourselves every day.
Hence, the show became - as it always had been - massively important. A friend of mine - not a fan, I hasten to add - once said that "it teaches children about love and rebellion", and I can't really put it any better than that.
So let's skip forward, to David Tennant bowing out, and look at why the disappointment is so keenly felt.
Now, let's just ignore "plot mechanics" and "structure" here. The main issue with The End of Time, particularly Part 2, is that it's really boring; it features Time Lords sitting around a table, talking, forever. There's a place for that analysis, but that can happen elsewhere. The gap between mainstream cheerleaders and SF fans is now so big that, if I mention that the Doctor shooting the Master-copying machine makes no fucking sense whatsoever, then I'll be lumped in with the dullards who complained that the radiation-proof cupboards have gaps at the bottom of the doors, or complaining that Tennant's fall through the roof is further than Tom Baker fell at the end of Logopolis. The ethos of new-era Who has always been that anything can happen, provided it's cool; this was made windolene-clear from the moment Eccleston waved his sonic screwdriver around and saved the day with a test-tube of anti-plastic. The science isn't important, so let's accept that it isn't and engage with The End of Time in its own terms. This is a show about Love and Rebellion, not science.
And yet it still, patently, doesn't work. At times it misses the mark by such a long way that it's actually offensive.
Just as Eccleston's Doctor was a rude, capricious vigilante who was genuinely dangerous, Eccleston's episodes were rooted in the real world. The End of Time, though, never once seems real. There's a brief mention of Barack Obama and the economic crisis, but this doesn't go anywhere. The only real, substantial characters we meet are the regulars; the villain, Mr Naismith, is supposed to be Very Very Sinister before we've even met him, and we learn nothing more about him. No, we're in SF netherworld; where rich people find alien technology and have private armies of scientists, and two figures facing each other down a dark alley is "dramatic" rather than "utterly hackneyed and shit". It doesn't relate to the real world, because it doesn't take place in anything like the real world.
This is why Catherine Tate is the worst thing ever to happen to the programme, not because she's a terrible actress (which she was, early on, but she's quite good in her later stories), but because she's a comedy chav in a programme that's supposed to be about ordinary people. The best thing about Who, when it came back, was its firm conviction that Average Anybodies were as noble and important as nice Guardian reader types. Bring in Tate, and the immediate subtext is that ordinary people can, at best, hope to be amusingly loud and stupid. And so you end up where we're expected to be excited by Time Lords narrating the plot around a table, simply because we're told they're important. And Wilfred Mott is presented as wonderful and marvellous, more or less because he unwaveringly believes in the Doctor's magnificence.
They almost get away with this, largely because Bernard Cribbins is a superb actor and could make you like anyone... until we're done with that plot, and we have to watch Tennant deign to save Wilfred's life. Dear God, it's a horrible scene; Tennant throwing a tantrum, complaining about Wilfred blundering around endangering himself, shouting that it isn't fair. And there, really, we have the true heart of the programme; the nice intelligent people might act to save the ordinary folk, but only after they've made them feel well and truly shit about it, and made it clear that they're doing it out of superhuman niceness. Ordinary people, they're wonderful. Stupid, but noble and cute and faithful. You know, like a pet dog. Tennant may tell Wilfred "it's an honour", but we're left in no doubt who's on the higher plane of existence.
(At this point, it's worth comparing this with Peter Davison's regeneration in The Caves of Androzani. Davison stumbles into a war zone, and he and his companion get themselves infected with a killer poison. Davison undergoes torture, fights off his own death through sheer willpower, gives Peri - who he's only just met - the antidote ahead of himself, and dies not knowing whether he's going to regenerate or not. No-one can claim that Caves isn't emotional; when the Doctor dies, he's clearly terrified and alone. And yet Davison's Doctor doesn't ever stop and tell us all what a heroic thing he's doing, because he's too concerned about his friend to even consider it. I watched The Caves of Androzani a few days before Part 2 of The End of Time, so no wonder it seemed so cheap.)
And so we're left with a show that eulogises humans, but treats them with contempt****; a show so busy telling us how brilliant we all are, that it never has to show a human doing anything worthwhile. A show that shows us Donna's wedding day as a valedictory moment of happiness, even though we were already told she's "making do"; and the Doctor brings her a lottery ticket, because millions of quid is as close to happiness as stupid people can get. A show whose valedictory farewell to Cap'n Jack is the Doctor helping him to score someone in a bar, which might be the most crass scene in Doctor Who history.
And so, Russell T. Davies has bowed out. Worth your time, ladies and gentlemen; the man who not only brought Doctor Who back, but had the courage to make it mean something. And yet, the thing he set up has become exactly what it set out to attack; navel-gazing, self-satisfied, elitist, contemptuous.
Tennant's last words were "I don't want to go." It was more than time he did; a fine actor, sure, but for too long now he's been making things easy for the writers. Eccleston's Doctor wasn't charming, or irreverent, or a hearthrob; he blew up buildings, called you a stupid ape, and couldn't be bothered telling you whether your boyfriend was alive or dead. Eccleston forced the writers to work hard, and automatically gave the show an edge. With Tennant, too many writers have happily churned out scenes where he talks very fast and / or looks intense 'n' broody.
So he regenerates, at a time when the programme desperately needs regeneration. This is one of the great things about Doctor Who; it is, ultimately, self-renewing. The only difficulty is that the programme has become so hyped, so much the product of drooling backslappery, that it may not change until the public realise how bored they've become. The End of Time is all noise and spectacle, but it's rudderless and goes nowhere; a perfect symbol of the show itself. A wholesale reinvigoration could make it matter again.
*One of which was written by Russell T. Davies, so the fact that they introduced a shaven-headed leather-coat wearing Doctor and an all-encompassing Time War which destroyed Gallifrey isn't exactly irrelevant.
**I should mention that it's called Survival and was mostly set in the London suburb of Perivale, just in case there's any non-fans reading this. No, seriously.
***To the extent that I'll bet someone's written fanfic in which they're related. She complains about "flippin' cats", mostly.
****Which, interestingly, is almost exactly the opposite of how the Eccleston season worked.
So David Tennant is no longer The Doctor, and has been replaced by a kid doing a David Tennant impression. Whatever your opinion about Doctor Who, you'd be hard-pushed to argue that the series hasn't changed massively since Eccleston burst on to the scene in 2005. It's difficult to remain anti-establishment while being immensely successful; if Doctor Who's first season was a subversive tract dressed up as a family drama, David Tennant has left behind a commercial juggernaut, firmly esconced among the detritus of showbizness.
This isn't to say it's been rubbish, although the overall quality has generally been on the slide since Eccleston's glorious début. This isn't surprising; all power corrupts, and Russell T. Davies is now one of the most powerful men in television. When Davies started out, he was paranoid that the press were out to get Doctor Who at the first sign of weakness; now he basks in the glow of Heat Magazine and tabloid approval, and appears to produce the sort of thing he knows these people will like. Dramatic revelations accompanied by whooshing noises, flashbacks whenever a character remembers anything from the past, and a look that's as shiny and colourful as an episode of Hustle. It doesn't matter; Davies leaves as the genius who reinvented Doctor Who.
But... did he reinvent it, exactly? Certainly, many of the things Davies is credited with "transforming" about Doctor Who, by that tedious, uninformed, know-sod-all-about-Who-but-like-to-pretend-otherwise body known as the national media, were firmly in place beforehand. Even if you ignore those poxy, rubbish, Just For Geeks spin-off novels*, the new series followed-on almost seamlessly from the 1989 version. The last ever story from the old series** featured a working-class companion whose development was at the heart of the series, housing estates, council-flats and the companions' group of friends; weirdly, the last person we saw the Doctor meet in the old series was indistinguishable from Jackie Tyler***. The real difference between the two was that Doctor Who 2005 had an experienced and competent production team, a stable background, a decent budget and superb leads. This wasn't the case in 1989.
If anything, then, Russell T. Davies got credit where he warranted none, and missed out on the kudos he deserved. His simple decision to dress the Doctor in a leather jacket and prattle on in a Manchester accent seems an obvious call now - it was done with a great lightness of touch - but everyone assumed that Eccleston would be using his posh voice and dressed in Victorian clothing. Similarly, the notion that we'd make return journeys to the Powell Estate, and that Rose's Mum would feature in over half the season's episodes, seemed bonkers before it went and happened. If Davies' tweaks were tiny, their effects were huge. It wasn't that the show became "savvy" or "sexy" or (heaven help us) "glossy", it was that he rooted it in the real world. The final episode featured, at the core of the story, a scene in which Rose ate chips with her Mum and boyfriend, desperately fretting about what she could do to help the Doctor, stuck in the year 200,000. Jackie's response, that it was a long way from here, was gloriously fatuous and exactly what we tell ourselves every day.
Hence, the show became - as it always had been - massively important. A friend of mine - not a fan, I hasten to add - once said that "it teaches children about love and rebellion", and I can't really put it any better than that.
So let's skip forward, to David Tennant bowing out, and look at why the disappointment is so keenly felt.
Now, let's just ignore "plot mechanics" and "structure" here. The main issue with The End of Time, particularly Part 2, is that it's really boring; it features Time Lords sitting around a table, talking, forever. There's a place for that analysis, but that can happen elsewhere. The gap between mainstream cheerleaders and SF fans is now so big that, if I mention that the Doctor shooting the Master-copying machine makes no fucking sense whatsoever, then I'll be lumped in with the dullards who complained that the radiation-proof cupboards have gaps at the bottom of the doors, or complaining that Tennant's fall through the roof is further than Tom Baker fell at the end of Logopolis. The ethos of new-era Who has always been that anything can happen, provided it's cool; this was made windolene-clear from the moment Eccleston waved his sonic screwdriver around and saved the day with a test-tube of anti-plastic. The science isn't important, so let's accept that it isn't and engage with The End of Time in its own terms. This is a show about Love and Rebellion, not science.
And yet it still, patently, doesn't work. At times it misses the mark by such a long way that it's actually offensive.
Just as Eccleston's Doctor was a rude, capricious vigilante who was genuinely dangerous, Eccleston's episodes were rooted in the real world. The End of Time, though, never once seems real. There's a brief mention of Barack Obama and the economic crisis, but this doesn't go anywhere. The only real, substantial characters we meet are the regulars; the villain, Mr Naismith, is supposed to be Very Very Sinister before we've even met him, and we learn nothing more about him. No, we're in SF netherworld; where rich people find alien technology and have private armies of scientists, and two figures facing each other down a dark alley is "dramatic" rather than "utterly hackneyed and shit". It doesn't relate to the real world, because it doesn't take place in anything like the real world.
This is why Catherine Tate is the worst thing ever to happen to the programme, not because she's a terrible actress (which she was, early on, but she's quite good in her later stories), but because she's a comedy chav in a programme that's supposed to be about ordinary people. The best thing about Who, when it came back, was its firm conviction that Average Anybodies were as noble and important as nice Guardian reader types. Bring in Tate, and the immediate subtext is that ordinary people can, at best, hope to be amusingly loud and stupid. And so you end up where we're expected to be excited by Time Lords narrating the plot around a table, simply because we're told they're important. And Wilfred Mott is presented as wonderful and marvellous, more or less because he unwaveringly believes in the Doctor's magnificence.
They almost get away with this, largely because Bernard Cribbins is a superb actor and could make you like anyone... until we're done with that plot, and we have to watch Tennant deign to save Wilfred's life. Dear God, it's a horrible scene; Tennant throwing a tantrum, complaining about Wilfred blundering around endangering himself, shouting that it isn't fair. And there, really, we have the true heart of the programme; the nice intelligent people might act to save the ordinary folk, but only after they've made them feel well and truly shit about it, and made it clear that they're doing it out of superhuman niceness. Ordinary people, they're wonderful. Stupid, but noble and cute and faithful. You know, like a pet dog. Tennant may tell Wilfred "it's an honour", but we're left in no doubt who's on the higher plane of existence.
(At this point, it's worth comparing this with Peter Davison's regeneration in The Caves of Androzani. Davison stumbles into a war zone, and he and his companion get themselves infected with a killer poison. Davison undergoes torture, fights off his own death through sheer willpower, gives Peri - who he's only just met - the antidote ahead of himself, and dies not knowing whether he's going to regenerate or not. No-one can claim that Caves isn't emotional; when the Doctor dies, he's clearly terrified and alone. And yet Davison's Doctor doesn't ever stop and tell us all what a heroic thing he's doing, because he's too concerned about his friend to even consider it. I watched The Caves of Androzani a few days before Part 2 of The End of Time, so no wonder it seemed so cheap.)
And so we're left with a show that eulogises humans, but treats them with contempt****; a show so busy telling us how brilliant we all are, that it never has to show a human doing anything worthwhile. A show that shows us Donna's wedding day as a valedictory moment of happiness, even though we were already told she's "making do"; and the Doctor brings her a lottery ticket, because millions of quid is as close to happiness as stupid people can get. A show whose valedictory farewell to Cap'n Jack is the Doctor helping him to score someone in a bar, which might be the most crass scene in Doctor Who history.
And so, Russell T. Davies has bowed out. Worth your time, ladies and gentlemen; the man who not only brought Doctor Who back, but had the courage to make it mean something. And yet, the thing he set up has become exactly what it set out to attack; navel-gazing, self-satisfied, elitist, contemptuous.
Tennant's last words were "I don't want to go." It was more than time he did; a fine actor, sure, but for too long now he's been making things easy for the writers. Eccleston's Doctor wasn't charming, or irreverent, or a hearthrob; he blew up buildings, called you a stupid ape, and couldn't be bothered telling you whether your boyfriend was alive or dead. Eccleston forced the writers to work hard, and automatically gave the show an edge. With Tennant, too many writers have happily churned out scenes where he talks very fast and / or looks intense 'n' broody.
So he regenerates, at a time when the programme desperately needs regeneration. This is one of the great things about Doctor Who; it is, ultimately, self-renewing. The only difficulty is that the programme has become so hyped, so much the product of drooling backslappery, that it may not change until the public realise how bored they've become. The End of Time is all noise and spectacle, but it's rudderless and goes nowhere; a perfect symbol of the show itself. A wholesale reinvigoration could make it matter again.
*One of which was written by Russell T. Davies, so the fact that they introduced a shaven-headed leather-coat wearing Doctor and an all-encompassing Time War which destroyed Gallifrey isn't exactly irrelevant.
**I should mention that it's called Survival and was mostly set in the London suburb of Perivale, just in case there's any non-fans reading this. No, seriously.
***To the extent that I'll bet someone's written fanfic in which they're related. She complains about "flippin' cats", mostly.
****Which, interestingly, is almost exactly the opposite of how the Eccleston season worked.
posted by Nyder O'Leary at
19:02
3 Comments:
You have pretty much hit the nail on the head here. Not sure if it has occurred to you that RTD is trying again to reinvent the Jesus story. Star in the sky, temptation by the devil, the scene with Wilf is essential the agony in the garden, and of course death and resurrection. I wish he'd stop doing it's not smart and it's not clever; now that he's left the series I suppose he will.
By the way the someone in the bar is the sailor from Voyage of the damned.
Funny you should mention 'Survival' the scene between the Doctor and the Master in the industrial wasteland reminded me a little of it.
ohoras - the enemy of allegory. I never would have believed it...
Good call. I didn't actually track the Jesus allegories on this one, possibly because I've trained myself to ignore them; they annoyed me too much. To be honest, I don't mind ripping off plotlines from the bible - not a bad source of material - it's the blunt portrayal of the Doc as a god-figure that bores me. As in, Donna becoming a Good And Worthy Person (in theory) because she realises the importance of the Doctor. I like the idea of the Doc as a fallen being from a race of gods, I just wish it wasn't so relentlessly Christian in its mythology.
Oh, and I know who the bloke in the bar was. Who do you think you're talking to? To Jack, though, he's still just some guy.
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