Doctor Who Archives – Benjamin T. Milnes

Almost good; marred by nonsense; 5/10 – Doctor Who – The Star Beast – Review

Doctor Who is dead. That was very much the status of the show by series 13. The show had been declining in quality for years, but the disastrous writing of Chibnall and child-in-oversized-wellington-boots portrayal of the Doctor by Whittaker made it unwatchable. Like Star Wars and Star Trek before it, Doctor Who had been killed, and Chibnall et alii were the Salisbury assassins who did it.

I tried watching series 11, but found it so bad that there was no point watching the last few episodes. I gave the first episode of series 12 a chance, but it was dreadful, and didn’t watch any more. Series 13 – not even a full series – apparently even those commissioning it knew something was wrong – hardly even registered as a thing. I had completely abandoned the show, with no intention of ever watching any more.

But then something utterly bizarre. It was announced that Russell T. Davies was coming back to Doctor Who. I couldn’t have predicted that. It’s so rare for writers and showrunners to return to things they’ve given up. But this made me optimistic for the show – Davies got New Who going, and all of the works of his I’ve seen over the years – Queer As Folk, Cucumber, A Very English Scandal, It’s A Sin – were all very enjoyable to watch. He seems to be a very reliable showrunner.

Doctor Who needed to show that it was going to turn away from the Twitter misosophy that has dominated both it and Hollywood for years. Maybe the return of Davies was that. Maybe he was returning to undo all of the nonsense that has happened in the last few years? So this series (I’m counting these 2023 specials as series 14) gets a chance. I’ll give the show a chance of one whole series (unless it’s REALLY awful, in which case it’ll only get a few episodes). Maybe, like an actual Time Lord, the show will cheat death and regenerate.

(I.S.: In the unlikely event that Davies himself is reading this, if you really want to win fans like me back over, decanonise all of that Timeless Child bullshit. All it takes is a tweet.)

Everything in this post so far I have written before seeing this first of the 2023 specials – titled The Star Beast. I am now going to go and watch the episode.

Well, that was … almost good. To be more precise, that was a mostly enjoyable episode – fun, compelling, humorous (and not with that special new ‘Hollywood comedy’ that gets put into everything nowadays). But it was marred by these short fits of current-day nonsense. They were very, very distracting – I kept getting pulled out of the immersion.

The designs of the aliens were excellent – very contrasting with each other and very different to anything else we’ve seen in New Who. Using the appearance and sounds of the aliens to make the audience make assumptions about their benevolence or malevolence was excellent. I was unsure about Miriam Margolyes as the voice of The Meep at first, but she did the contrast between the good and evil Meep voices very well. The CGI of The Meep was also some of the best CGI we’ve ever seen in New Who.

The plot was compelling – crucial for Doctor Who. Dull plots was one of the main failings towards the end of the Moffat Era. The idea of a species turned mad by a sentient star is stupid – and that would have been so easy to change, given that it was just a line of dialogue – but it’s far from the stupidest thing that’s been in New Who. (I’m thinking of that star with an angry face – so fucking stupid.)

I VERY much enjoyed Davies bringing back some of his world-building elements: invoking the Shadow Proclamation, UNIT being made into something not-silly. The CGI for the time vortex is fun, but I wish they’d stick to one idea about what it actually looks like. The new TARDIS interior looks fantastic.

David Tennant and Catherine Tate jump right back into their roles almost as though no time has passed at all. (Almost. There is something slightly off about them – a missing vitality, or something – but it’s so slight you can ignore it.) Jacqueline King makes a flawless return as Sylvia Noble – her character is perfectly consistent.

Yasmin Finney, who plays the new character of Rose Noble, is a weak link. Finney was not the strongest actor in the cast of Heartstopper, and gives a similar performance here. Finney’s delivery lacks personality – compare it to Billie Piper as Rose Tyler and I think it’ll be obvious.

The thing that let this episode down was the gender-woo. I had assumed that they were only going to reference this in passing – if at all – but they made it the core of the story. Now, in fairness, they did put it with an interesting idea: the ‘Doctor-Donna’ metacrisis was a metacrisis between a male and female organism; part of the energy of the crisis was shared when the containing organism reproduced – i.e., Donna had a child – meaning that the energy was now not too much to overwhelm them, allowing both to escape its catastrophic effects; but because the metacrisis was between a male and female organism, the offspring carried some combination of ‘maleness’ and ‘femaleness’. That’s an interesting idea.

But the gender-woo interrupted the story every few minutes or so, and it breaks the immersion every time. One of the most egregious examples is Finney’s line of ‘You’re assuming “he” as a pronoun?!’, referring to the furry, gremlin-like alien known as The Meep.

It would take several long blog posts to fully explain why this line is stupid. Every assumption that goes into it is incorrect, and there are A LOT of assumptions that go into it. I don’t have the time to go through it all – either you already know why it’s stupid or you don’t. It stops the show dead for a few moments in order to show deference to a very recently-created ideology from Tumblr. It rips the story out of its setting and places it firmly on 2023 TikTok.

Towards the end, when Donna and Rose are about to release their extra metacrisis energy, we’re given the lines ‘It’s a shame you’re not a woman anymore, ‘cause she’d’ve understood.’ and ‘Something a male-presenting Time Lord will never understand.’. I am disappointed, though perhaps not surprised, to see such rabid sexism in Doctor Who. If the sexes had been reversed for this scene and these lines, every media outlet in the western world would be screaming bloody murder.

Every time there’s a moment like that, it just pulls you out of the show, and you are agonisingly aware that you are watching actors read lines. The audience seeing an actor as an actor and not as the character they’re playing should be an actor’s worst nightmare.

If it hadn’t had all that nonsense in it, this episode would have been a solid 8/10. As it is, it drags it down to a 5/10. As long as they don’t keep doing this stuff, the series may well be worth watching.

Dramatic Dissonance

In my reviews of Star Trek Picard, I’ve started using the term ‘dramatic dissonance’ to describe something that we’re seeing on-screen. This particular phenomenon or quality may already have a term to describe it – if it does, I don’t know what it is, so for now I’m going to use ‘dramatic dissonance’ (to mimic the phrase ‘dramatic irony’). And while I’ve started using this term in my Star Trek Picard reviews, it’s something I’ve seen in lots of other shows too – like Star Trek Discovery and recent Doctor Who – so I thought I’d write a blog post about it in order to define it more clearly.

Dramatic dissonance is when the reactions of the characters to each other, or to the events of the story, are different to the audience’s reaction to the characters or to the events of the story.

Here’s an example of this: one character says something, and several other characters around them consider it a very awkward thing to say, or a faux pas, but the audience doesn’t think that it’s an awkward thing to say.

Here’s another: one character does something (it could be anything), and all of the characters around them think that this character is a genius for doing it, but the audience isn’t impressed by it at all.

This second example is one we’ve seen a lot in both Star Trek Picard and Star Trek Discovery – in fact this second example is often a way of determining whether a character is a Mary Sue. (Other characters will just think that they’re brilliant no matter what they do.)

Dramatic dissonance is a bad quality for a show to have. It is, by its very definition, unrealistic, and if a show has it, the audience will sense something is amiss, even if they can’t quite put it into words. The audience can sense it because things in the show don’t seem to make sense.

I’m not sure I could exactly say what the origins of dramatic dissonance in a show actually are, but I don’t think it’s an acting problem – I think it comes from the writing. It may come from writers thinking too much about ‘How do I want this character to react?’ rather than ‘How would they react?’.

Doctor Who – Series 12 Episode 1 – Dull, dull, ever so dull

Gosh it doesn’t seem all that long since series 11. After series 11 had aired, I had intended to make a video for my YouTube channel reviewing the series as a whole. I never got round to that in the end (as is the case with many, many videos), so I will just summarise what I thought of series 11 here.

I did not like series 11. The series had many problems, and I could have spent a long time describing them, either in blog posts or videos, but the main problem with the series was that it was deathly dull. It was unendingly boring; I tried to watch every episode of the series, but by the end I just didn’t give a shit anymore, so didn’t watch the last two or three episodes.

This followed on from many years of decline of Doctor Who. Peter Capaldi is an outstanding actor – one of the best living actors – but his series’ as The Doctor were increasingly dull. I can’t really remember the stories of any of the episodes he was in – there were no memorable moments. Getting rid of Peter Capaldi and Steven Moffat and bringing in Jodie Whittaker and Chris Chibnall was an attempt at revitalising the show. I watched series 11 optimistic that this would work, but it didn’t.

As a result of all of this, I had not intended on watching series 12 – once a show declines below a certain level of quality, one should stop watching it – how else will the showrunners learn? However, I’ve heard mixed things about series 12 so far, about half of which has aired, so I thought I’d watch this series (at least, start watching it – I may not make it to the end), to see for myself. I tend to tolerate one bad series of a show, but not two – that’s what I did with Star Trek Discovery.

So I watched episode 1 of series 12, optimistic that they would begin to solve some of the problems from the last series. But they didn’t.

I have four pages of notes on this episode, and each note could probably become two or three whole paragraphs in this review. If I were to try to fully describe what was bad about this episode, this review would become enormous, and I really don’t want to have to write and edit a giant piece of text – that takes a lot of time – considering this is just one episode. And I think it would be rather dull to read too. So instead I’m just going to give my overall thoughts on this episode – what the main problems with it are – and then chuck in a list of quick thoughts I had while watching the episode, to give the sense of just how many things are wrong with it.

The main problem with this episode is that it is dull – very, very dull. Throughout most of the episode I was just waiting for it to end, so that I could get on with other stuff. I just don’t give a shit about the mystery they are trying to solve or the villain they are trying to defeat.

And I think this says something important about writing mystery – something actually quite fundamental. The best mysteries are ones where the audience has a chance of figuring out the mystery before the characters do. We the audience should be given clues about the mystery throughout the story, and we can use these clues to solve the mystery, in the same way that the characters do. The problem with Doctor Who recently is the same problem that Steven Moffat’s Sherlock series had: we the audience have no way of figuring out the mystery ourselves, and so all we can do is watch the protagonist use their brilliance and genius to figure out the mystery using knowledge that we the audience don’t have. This is dull.

A very similar principle is true about ‘defeat the bad guy’ stories too. We the audience should be able to figure out how the bad guy can be defeated based on what we know of the rules of the world that the story is set in and the resources that the protagonists have access to. This is why world-building is so important. Part of world-building is establishing what the rules of your fictional world are, and once set, they should not be broken. The audience then knows what the rules of your world are, and can use that knowledge to figure out how to defeat the villain. The problem with Doctor Who is that it is one giant festival of deus ex machina. New rules and possibilities are introduced all the time, and old rules are disregarded. This means that all we can do as the audience is just sit back and bask in the genius of the protagonist as, once again, the protagonist uses knowledge of what’s possible and what isn’t, that we the audience don’t have, to defeat the antagonist. This is dull.

Doctor Who has had both of these problems for a long time, and this episode epitomised them. I simply don’t care how or why all of these people are being killed, because I have no way of figuring it out. Nor do I care about how The Master will be defeated – he’s always defeated. There is no threat; there is no suspense; there is no mystery.

That is the biggest problem with the episode (and I anticipate it will be the biggest problem with the whole series); that’s why it’s dull.

And now for a selection of random thoughts from throughout the episode:

Weird fucking dialogue right from the fucking outset. This was a problem in the last series too – for some reason the writers aren’t able to write realistic dialogue – the dialogue in this show just comes across as creepy, patronising, passive-aggressive, forced, and ultimately fake.
The side-kicks continue to have zero charisma. They have no personality – no character traits whatsoever. This isn’t a problem with the actors – this is a problem with the writers.
‘Worst Uber ever!’ – y’know I think this line might epitomise the problem with Doctor Who at the moment. This line is played as a joke, but it’s not a joke – it’s a half-joke – a thing that is said that may be ever-so-slightly amusing, but which does not have the actual structure of a joke (yes jokes do have analysable structure). Half-jokes should never, ever make it into your writing, unless you are trying to mock the person who makes the half-joke.
MI6 seems a bit weak-sauce compared to U.N.I.T.
‘I’ve read the files; The Doctor is a man.’ says Stephen Fry. ‘I’ve had an upgrade.’ says Jodie Whittaker. This is a bit of a fuck you to the people who didn’t like this change.
Even Stephen Fry can’t make the dialogue good. Normally a great actor can make shit dialogue good, but here the dialogue is just too shit.
I hate all of this walking and talking stuff – it prevents the suspense from building. Leave pauses in your scenes – you don’t have to have characters talking all the time. Suspense builds when we sense something ominous – little is more ominous than silence.
‘Is she gonna die Doc?’ says one of the side-kicks. Once again, the side-kicks are just used as props for The Doctor. This was a problem last series too.
‘MI6 has never countenanced the possibility of extra-terrestrial life.’ – I’m guessing all of those times aliens were seen by lots of people around Earth have been retconned then.
Stephen Fry’s character’s death has no impact.
The line ‘No-one’s mocking you now.’ is weirdly hilarious, though it’s not supposed to be.
Lenny Henry is thin now.
The show desperately wants to examine the big issues – like corporate data gathering and people being shits on Twitter – but it has no idea how to do it.
This was another fucking ‘end of the universe’ story. Stop it. This carries no weight in a series with world-building and characters as flimsy as this.
Fake-out deaths – these kill the tension – avoid them.
Jodie Whittaker plays The Doctor like a children’s television presenter. You’re not on fucking Blue Peter.
This is another episode that has characters talk about technology that’s been written by people who know nothing about how that technology works. If you’re not going to have any techie people write your show, at least get a fucking technology adviser so that your characters don’t say stupid things.
Lenny Henry is shit at aiming.
Lenny Henry does not make for a threatening villain. (This is actually a writing problem – as is the above point. Lenny Henry actually does very well with what he is given – it’s just that what he is given to perform is shit.)

That was one episode, and it had that much wrong with it. That episode was a complete disaster, and it doesn’t bode well for the rest of the series.