The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Doctor Who
Those words were difficult to write but I don’t really have any choice.
This disaster in three parts is mostly unwatchable.
I’ve already covered the first part.
The second was a bottle episode where Donna and the Doctor get trapped with their evil doppelgangers on a space station and have to survive just long enough for the Tardis to repair itself. Which as typical luck would have it, worked out perfectly. The infamous Isaac Newton opening feels very much like something that was tacked on at the last second. There were two white people in that episode, and that was it which is completely unacceptable to the BBC, so the Doctor had to make a quick side trip to Bridgerton. Also, he has the Gay now.
Finally, we got to the third part of the 60th Anniversary Trilogy this weekend. Well, it wasn’t as bad as the first part, I have to give it that, but what it mostly was, was a wasted opportunity and a disappointment.
The plot is that the Toymaker, a villain from the Hartnell era, one with godlike powers and who rarely makes appearances is back. His plot for destroying the human race involves the ventriloquist’s dummy used in the very first television broadcast in 1925. Apparently, (*long tired sigh*) that dummy’s giggle has been in every single image on every screen ever since then.
Yeah, I know, I know. Don’t blame me, I didn’t come up with that.
It’s a retread of one of Davies’s old ideas. The Master and his Archangel Network.
Regardless, it functioned as a way for Boomer Davies to shake his cane at internet culture and anti-vaxxers.
Anyway, what the Toymaker wanted was a chance for him to lure the Doctor into playing another game with him.
The closest thing to enjoyable was watching Neil Patrick Harris’ Spice Girls cabaret number where he repeatedly hurls women into walls, brutally. I don’t think I was supposed to laugh but I did.
Finally came the climax where the Toymaker shoots the doctor with a death ray to make him regenerate. Instead, he splits into two incarnations. Tennent Doctor declares, “I’ve bi-generated!”
Get it? Bi-generated?
The godlike Toymaker is defeated by playing ball with him. Ncuti-Doctor (that name is giving my spellchecker a fit) makes a second TARDIS by hitting the first one with a clown hammer… NO, I’M NOT MAKING ANY OF THIS UP… Then he flies off into the depths of time and space. Tennent-Doctor moves in with Donna’s family. He’s apparently done traveling.
This was awful.
Russel T. Davies has committed one of the worst crimes against literature an artist can commit. He has defaced his own works. This honestly doesn’t feel at all like the kind of writing he was doing fifteen years ago. This indeed and truly feels like fanfic.
Donna Noble had a well-written end when Catherine Tate left the show. Donna Noble had become someone with an amazing life after she met the Doctor. Before then she was a woman who had pretty much given up on herself and then she became someone who helped save planets, defeat alien armies, and even rescue the universe. Then she had to have all that erased to save her life. She was begging the Doctor in tears not to do it. Now she gets her memories back and that whole Timelord big brain being fatale thing no longer applies because her kid is Trans-non-binary. So she can just “Give it up.”
Look, the truth is that your average Doctor Who fan can relate to Donna Noble, and having to give up memories of such a fantastic life and go back to being your old failed self would be painfully intolerable. I even get hating it so much that you write your own happier ending. My first piece of writing, ever, was one where Spiderman had managed the superheroing 101 trick of rescuing Gwen Stacy from her fall. I wasn’t wrong to do it but if my life had turned out drastically different and I was put in charge of Spiderman, then it would be absolutely appalling to insert that retcon.
Tennent’s Doctor himself had a nice little tragic ending. The actor was ready to move on but the Doctor himself didn’t want to. His last words were a pain filled, “I don’t want to go.” Again, it was an excellent way for a character to bow out and gave both the Tenth Doctor and Donna’s departure some serious emotional impact that was felt for years.
The ”I Don’t Want to Go” was recycled for the TV movie about the creation of Doctor Who and William Hartnell’s involuntary departure. That movie, Doctor Who an Adventure in Time and Space was part of the 50th anniversary celebration.
The anniversary episodes of Doctor Who have a long tradition of being respectful callbacks to previous incarnations of the Doctor. They have also always been reunion shows. The 10th anniversary was the Three Doctors, the 20th was the Five Doctors. The show wasn’t in production for the 30th and 40th anniversaries. It was however in production for the 50th and Stephen Moffat managed to insert a scene where all of the previous incarnations of the Doctor were briefly reunited.
There was no reunion scene during the entire three-hour run of this anniversary special.
Woke Boomer Russel T. Davies absolutely couldn’t do anything like that this time. Thanks to Chris Chibnall’s brutal rewrite, a canonical list of the Doctors’ previous incarnations is now impossible. As well as politically dicey, all but one of them has been men and every one of them has been white. That doesn’t include all of the various unknown Doctors that are canonical now.
Russel T. Davies is talented and isn’t old enough to have lost his chops this completely. So, why was this so bad?
There was something very telling in Davies’ excuse about Davros being out of his wheelchair now. Something other pundits have missed but which the Dark Herald did not:
“We had long conversations about bringing Davros back, because he’s a fantastic character, [but] time and society and culture and taste has moved on. And there’s a problem with the Davros of old in that he’s a wheelchair user, who is evil. And I had problems with that. And a lot of us on the production team had problems with that…”
This isn’t his old production team, the one that brought Doctor Who back from the abyss and made it a worldwide sensation in the ’00s. This is the team he inherited from Chris Chibnall. Davies now has to do business with the new BBC, the one where those higher on the totem pole of Diversity and Inclusivity than a well-to-do white, gay Boomer effectively have the power of veto over pretty much everything he wants to do. Since he has a Boomer’s grasp of the social issues his every instinct is to obey the dictates of his “production team.”
“Russel, we think Donna’s ending was too sad. Make us a new one where she gets everything and stays powerful.”
“Russel, we think you should give the Tenth Doctor a happy ending. Something where he doesn’t ‘have to go.”’
You can smell what’s going on now. People who have no talent but do have a chip on their shoulder are part of the production team now and can shut down any opposition to their zero-talent ideas with a sharp remark about sensitivity and privilege.
This was as good as Doctor Who will be allowed to get from now on. It’s got the Marvel-Star Wars disease on a Disney budget.
I’ll keep my ear to the ground for further developments but whatever they are, they won’t be very good.
In conclusion…
The Dark Herald Does Not Recommend Doctor Who
UPDATE: No regrets about leaving. None. At. All.
