cyphomandra (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
cyphomandra) wrote2006-10-24 10:25 am
cyphomandra) wrote2006-10-24 10:25 am
Entry tags:
You need execution as well as set-up
The Ninth Doctor series gave me back my love of Doctor Who. The Tenth Doctor, so far, drove me back to classic Doctor Who, because I'd much rather deal with shoddy special effects and an overfondness for eyeliner (yes, I am watching the Peter Davidson eps) than lazy, gap-filled plotting and an insistence on overtelegraphed emotional moments. We all have our personal quirks.
But I did like the ninth doctor episodes, and even bits of the tenth, and I liked Captain Jack Harkness when I wasn't expecting to ("oh god, it's an American"), and I wanted to see what Russell Davies would do with a series where he might not feel an obligation to make statements, and instead explore the story. So here we go.
Hmm. There's enough here to keep my interest, but there are also the weaknesses I object to in the new Doctor Who. Good things first. I really like the overhead views of Cardiff (it sounds petty, but it looks great, and it is nice to see a place that's distinctive without being a familar cliche). I like the allusion to multiple Torchwoods, run in different styles. I like Gwen's tracking them by trying the local pizza shop ("Who orders pizzas under Torchwood?" and Owen waving a hand). I like that when you're driven to mate and kill by an energy sucking alien, you drop in on your heartless ex-boyfriend. I like Owen, Toshiko and Ianto. I like Jack. I am prepared to like Gwen - I did, after the first episode, but then in the second ep she said "You've [referring to the team] forgotten what it means to be human," and I groaned, and paused it, and went off to make myself a smoothie. Just once, I'd like the viewpoint character not to be the throbbing bloody emotional conscience and raw humanity of the series. Maybe they could get carried away with all the nifty technology and start slaughtering people in a cold-blooded fashion, just because they could.
And so we get to the bits I didn't like so much.
It's not enough just to have exciting gadgets and nifty characters; your story has to, on some level, make sense. And although Gwen's arc works, and there are a lot of nice little bits, the story with the glove that brings back the dead and Suzie, the team member who kills people to test it, makes no sense at all. You want recently dead, you hang around a hospital. Hell, if you can wait for the body to be discovered and the police called, you can wait for the body to get to a morgue. And, if she's killing them in secret, and sneaking the glove home to practice on flies (after killing three people?) why doesn't she use the glove when she kills them, not afterwards when she's surrounded by the team? And, if she's such a hardened killer, why can't she shoot Gwen?
My problem with this is less that it's nonsensical than that it's easy to fix. Maybe the glove only works when worn by the killer. Maybe Suzie is operating under orders (and I would have liked this, the hint that Torchwood is darker and more brutally pragmatic than we'd like to think) from someone other than Jack. Maybe Suzie thought she could bring them back completely, not just for two minutes. Maybe Suzie selected people she thought deserved killing, for some reason or another.
And, for a show that bangs on about humanity in soft-focus cliches (lasagne, boyfriend, chips etc), there's a complete lack of any recognition of Suzie's death afterwards. She's a member of a small, dedicated team with no external lives, and no-one even mentions this in the next episode, when Gwen joins them? No-one's even slightly traumatised when they go to make the tea and there's a spare cup? There're also at least six dead in the next episode, and although Gwen goes on about the first one the significance of the others seems to desert her when it comes to saving Carys. And again, plot holes that could have been patched - the alien can make it from the crash site to a night club alive, but not across a living room, the exploding rat time clock that, really, is unbelievably silly.
Privileging visuals over content is responsible for much of this. There's also a fondness for big emotional moments - for Gwen, for Carys - that I'd really much rather were acted than emoted, as the obviousness of it all drives me to smoothies. I also think that Russell Davies, in a broader context, doesn't always distinguish between a science fiction trope as metaphor (we're driven to have sex, but the high wears off without a longer lasting connection) and a science fiction trope that also works as metaphor. The alien in this episode is really only comprehensible as metaphor, and that isn't good science fiction.
But I did like the ninth doctor episodes, and even bits of the tenth, and I liked Captain Jack Harkness when I wasn't expecting to ("oh god, it's an American"), and I wanted to see what Russell Davies would do with a series where he might not feel an obligation to make statements, and instead explore the story. So here we go.
Hmm. There's enough here to keep my interest, but there are also the weaknesses I object to in the new Doctor Who. Good things first. I really like the overhead views of Cardiff (it sounds petty, but it looks great, and it is nice to see a place that's distinctive without being a familar cliche). I like the allusion to multiple Torchwoods, run in different styles. I like Gwen's tracking them by trying the local pizza shop ("Who orders pizzas under Torchwood?" and Owen waving a hand). I like that when you're driven to mate and kill by an energy sucking alien, you drop in on your heartless ex-boyfriend. I like Owen, Toshiko and Ianto. I like Jack. I am prepared to like Gwen - I did, after the first episode, but then in the second ep she said "You've [referring to the team] forgotten what it means to be human," and I groaned, and paused it, and went off to make myself a smoothie. Just once, I'd like the viewpoint character not to be the throbbing bloody emotional conscience and raw humanity of the series. Maybe they could get carried away with all the nifty technology and start slaughtering people in a cold-blooded fashion, just because they could.
And so we get to the bits I didn't like so much.
It's not enough just to have exciting gadgets and nifty characters; your story has to, on some level, make sense. And although Gwen's arc works, and there are a lot of nice little bits, the story with the glove that brings back the dead and Suzie, the team member who kills people to test it, makes no sense at all. You want recently dead, you hang around a hospital. Hell, if you can wait for the body to be discovered and the police called, you can wait for the body to get to a morgue. And, if she's killing them in secret, and sneaking the glove home to practice on flies (after killing three people?) why doesn't she use the glove when she kills them, not afterwards when she's surrounded by the team? And, if she's such a hardened killer, why can't she shoot Gwen?
My problem with this is less that it's nonsensical than that it's easy to fix. Maybe the glove only works when worn by the killer. Maybe Suzie is operating under orders (and I would have liked this, the hint that Torchwood is darker and more brutally pragmatic than we'd like to think) from someone other than Jack. Maybe Suzie thought she could bring them back completely, not just for two minutes. Maybe Suzie selected people she thought deserved killing, for some reason or another.
And, for a show that bangs on about humanity in soft-focus cliches (lasagne, boyfriend, chips etc), there's a complete lack of any recognition of Suzie's death afterwards. She's a member of a small, dedicated team with no external lives, and no-one even mentions this in the next episode, when Gwen joins them? No-one's even slightly traumatised when they go to make the tea and there's a spare cup? There're also at least six dead in the next episode, and although Gwen goes on about the first one the significance of the others seems to desert her when it comes to saving Carys. And again, plot holes that could have been patched - the alien can make it from the crash site to a night club alive, but not across a living room, the exploding rat time clock that, really, is unbelievably silly.
Privileging visuals over content is responsible for much of this. There's also a fondness for big emotional moments - for Gwen, for Carys - that I'd really much rather were acted than emoted, as the obviousness of it all drives me to smoothies. I also think that Russell Davies, in a broader context, doesn't always distinguish between a science fiction trope as metaphor (we're driven to have sex, but the high wears off without a longer lasting connection) and a science fiction trope that also works as metaphor. The alien in this episode is really only comprehensible as metaphor, and that isn't good science fiction.