New Doctor Who, obligatory review
Jan. 17th, 2020 02:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
evening_tsarJust watched the latest Doctor Who, and hey! I'm going to bed happy.
A preview of the review (BlogSpot still belonging to Neil Peart)
(*ahem)
Orphan 55 - 7/10
Okie Doke, the new season continues its upward trajectory, without quite landing a slam-dunk. Orphan 55 delivers a terse, fast paced, adventure story, which collapses under any amount scrutiny. Fortunately, it moves too quickly to allow for any major scrutiny.
There is evidence of good story-world building here – nice little background details about the fictional history and politics, of the sort that the Classic Who did so well and the New Who usually ignores (though some seemed more for laughs than that any such world would actually include them). And I gotta say, the technobabble sounded great for the first time in I don’t know HOW long; the Doctor doesn’t just wave her magic screwdriver and fix everything – she actually has find the right components and build things here. I definitely missed that.
These were quite nice to see, but the main strength here is Jodie Whitaker, who gives her most Doctorish performance yet. It seems she’s finally finding the right balance between quirky absent mindedness and ingenuity, and even hinting at something a little more severe, which all Doctors need to do every now and then. She’s very good as a detective, demanding answers and seeking out facts, and when she’s spitting out words here at a million miles an hour, it sounds like she’s actually thinking about stuff (relevant stuff) and not just spouting baloney for the comedic effect. Most importantly of all, she is allowed to project some degree of gravity over events. Gone is the insufferable optimism that belittled even the Dalek threat, the Doctor is concerned about things here, even scarred in some scenes, and no longer sugar coats everything like the most saccharine of Hallmark scratch and sniff Valentines Day cards. Her final soliloquy was very nearly brilliant.
This being New Who Season 12, it wasn’t. It was drawn out long past its moment of maximum impact, watered down with extra verbiage spelling out what they didn’t trust the audience to pick up on. Again, they overplayed their hand. This is where I think the debate about “preachiness” misses the point. A show (or book or film or whatever) doesn’t get “preachy” – or “didactic” as I prefer – when it has a message or a strong moral or becomes an allegory for something else. It becomes didactic when it relieves the audience of its responsibilities. A message is its most powerful when the audience comes to it themselves. For this, there needs to be the possibility, at least a small one, for misinterpretation. That’s a risk the writer has to take because any message delivered too blatantly will have no impact. Then it becomes a lecture, and no one likes being lectured because it is inherently condescending; “lectures” tend to imply incompetence, innocence or idiocy, which people tend to resent, even if they if agree with the subject.
Let the words sink in. Let the eyes tell the story. Let the audience digest. We are not as stupid as you think.
The plot is best ignored. Otherwise you might start to wonder why they wandered out into the wilderness to chase after an old man long after it was obvious the monsters got ‘im, only to head back on foot. Do laser guns hurt the Drax or not? Is a neglectful mother really enough to drive Trixabel to blow everyone up? (By which logic, shouldn’t Ryan have done that a long time ago?) Is a kid smart enough to fix every machine on the planet really dumb enough to run out into monster infested corridor in a tantrum? Couldn’t the Doctor go back in the TARDIS to get the last two? Just don’t go there. All that self sacrifice is a cloying cliché, the big reveal has already been done. . . see what I mean? Just don’t go there.
At the end of the day, I still give this a positive rating, because there are things in here which I’m glad to see. The pace is better, the monsters are scarier, the technobabble’s more convincing, there was no sense of deus-ex-machina. Whitaker is really sinking into the role. Most of all, the show seems to be shedding the insufferable Panglosianism of the last season, and embracing cautionary science fiction. Imperfectly to be sure. But this is a good place to be going, and I can forgive a lot to get there.
A preview of the review (BlogSpot still belonging to Neil Peart)
(*ahem)
Orphan 55 - 7/10
Okie Doke, the new season continues its upward trajectory, without quite landing a slam-dunk. Orphan 55 delivers a terse, fast paced, adventure story, which collapses under any amount scrutiny. Fortunately, it moves too quickly to allow for any major scrutiny.
There is evidence of good story-world building here – nice little background details about the fictional history and politics, of the sort that the Classic Who did so well and the New Who usually ignores (though some seemed more for laughs than that any such world would actually include them). And I gotta say, the technobabble sounded great for the first time in I don’t know HOW long; the Doctor doesn’t just wave her magic screwdriver and fix everything – she actually has find the right components and build things here. I definitely missed that.
These were quite nice to see, but the main strength here is Jodie Whitaker, who gives her most Doctorish performance yet. It seems she’s finally finding the right balance between quirky absent mindedness and ingenuity, and even hinting at something a little more severe, which all Doctors need to do every now and then. She’s very good as a detective, demanding answers and seeking out facts, and when she’s spitting out words here at a million miles an hour, it sounds like she’s actually thinking about stuff (relevant stuff) and not just spouting baloney for the comedic effect. Most importantly of all, she is allowed to project some degree of gravity over events. Gone is the insufferable optimism that belittled even the Dalek threat, the Doctor is concerned about things here, even scarred in some scenes, and no longer sugar coats everything like the most saccharine of Hallmark scratch and sniff Valentines Day cards. Her final soliloquy was very nearly brilliant.
This being New Who Season 12, it wasn’t. It was drawn out long past its moment of maximum impact, watered down with extra verbiage spelling out what they didn’t trust the audience to pick up on. Again, they overplayed their hand. This is where I think the debate about “preachiness” misses the point. A show (or book or film or whatever) doesn’t get “preachy” – or “didactic” as I prefer – when it has a message or a strong moral or becomes an allegory for something else. It becomes didactic when it relieves the audience of its responsibilities. A message is its most powerful when the audience comes to it themselves. For this, there needs to be the possibility, at least a small one, for misinterpretation. That’s a risk the writer has to take because any message delivered too blatantly will have no impact. Then it becomes a lecture, and no one likes being lectured because it is inherently condescending; “lectures” tend to imply incompetence, innocence or idiocy, which people tend to resent, even if they if agree with the subject.
Let the words sink in. Let the eyes tell the story. Let the audience digest. We are not as stupid as you think.
The plot is best ignored. Otherwise you might start to wonder why they wandered out into the wilderness to chase after an old man long after it was obvious the monsters got ‘im, only to head back on foot. Do laser guns hurt the Drax or not? Is a neglectful mother really enough to drive Trixabel to blow everyone up? (By which logic, shouldn’t Ryan have done that a long time ago?) Is a kid smart enough to fix every machine on the planet really dumb enough to run out into monster infested corridor in a tantrum? Couldn’t the Doctor go back in the TARDIS to get the last two? Just don’t go there. All that self sacrifice is a cloying cliché, the big reveal has already been done. . . see what I mean? Just don’t go there.
At the end of the day, I still give this a positive rating, because there are things in here which I’m glad to see. The pace is better, the monsters are scarier, the technobabble’s more convincing, there was no sense of deus-ex-machina. Whitaker is really sinking into the role. Most of all, the show seems to be shedding the insufferable Panglosianism of the last season, and embracing cautionary science fiction. Imperfectly to be sure. But this is a good place to be going, and I can forgive a lot to get there.
