I think Dr. Who is great (as an institution). My personal tastes are yes to sci-fi and yes to British and Dr. Who is both. It's a really British piece of work and that should be celebrated. A jammy dodger that's a button but that's also not a button but is actually just a jammy dodger? Sure, biscuits, I'm all for biscuits.
I say this, so that the die hard, non-regenerating fans of this show, are aware that this is not an attack on Dr. Who or them, which, if I know Dr. Who fans, which I do, is how they might interpret an article that is largely unimpressed with the 50th anniversary episode that the BBC churned out like a chocolate bar in a vending machine; kaplunk.
It was very clear by the end of the programme that it was purely made for hard-core fan appeasement - but surely that is too easy a bullseye to aim for, for a franchise so large & celebrated. To be frank, the quantity of doctors, does not make up for a lack of quality in the episode; that is, unless you are someone who likes to quote Dr. Who in your Facebook status. Go on, go and put on whatever wacky hat is in this month & go and quote one of its many, trite, sickly lines. Because otherwise, more doctors, doesn't mean a better show. Maybe the 'Thick of It' would have been better with ten 'Malcom Tuckers'? Or 'Battle Star Galactica' with sixteen 'Starbucks'? The fact is, we will never know, because they didn't do it.
Let's go through this step by step. Firstly, the casting of the episode was atrocious. Jenna Coleman as 'Clara', is and always has been, awful. Is it just me, or are the companions getting stupider & prettier? It's as if Moffat animated a Bratz-doll with some licence-fee black magic and sent her on screen, where she spends most of her time making her eyes as big as possible and being sassy. I bet they used the word 'sassy' in her character synopsis as well, the bastards. It's a "positive" word that translates as "annoying"; she is a poorly acted, poorly written character.
Conversely however, John Hurt is of course, a very good actor. However, he too was miscast. The costume department opted for a 'mid-life crisis' doctor and shoved a leather jacket on the poor bugger, but where I think they were looking for perhaps a grizzled, war-weary doctor, we ended up with just a weary man, who might well have needed a doctor. I appreciate the idea of regeneration, but it felt very much as if a big 'name' was needed for the episode, as opposed to someone appropriate to the role of an early Dr. Who character. John Hurts presence seemed there almost apologetically, in order to address very loosely in the story, the contemporary series' unabashed desire for youth, youth and more youth.
And even Team Tardis have to agree that Joanna Page as Queen Elizabeth the I, was an appalling piece of casting, perhaps some of the worst I have ever seen in anything. First of all… she's Welsh. That's great, but Queen Elizabeth wasn't Welsh and Page did nothing to hide her accent. Is that bad acting, lazy directing, or what? She was playing exactly the same character that she plays when she's advertising Super Drug. Famously, Queen Elizabeth always loved a bargain when it came to her cod-liver oil supplements.
Secondly, she does not have, shall we say, the build of anybody remotely like Queen Elizabeth. Thirdly, the character was not written nor performed, with anything remotely near regality. And alright, maybe we don't need regality, but does she have to have a quip every other second? Is there not some middle ground available somewhere? I think maybe there was some excess-sass left over from Clara that they tipped all over her head maybe. Are you a women in Dr. Who? Chances are, you're sassy! Good stuff; original that.
Now, for just a moment, can you please stop shouting this at the screen:
"But Charlie, it's supposed to be a bit of fun, you're not supposed to take it seriously!"
Oh? Oh aren't I? Well could you tell the BBC that please? Because there was an awful lot of bloody fanfare before the episode that was contrary to those kind of remarks. Big, computerised letters that turned mightily out towards the viewer reading: "ORIGINAL, BRITISH, DRAMA". That word again; drama. In fact the only accurate word there is British, as evidenced from the dodgy make-up jobs & cheap locations. What kind of original drama opens with a character expressing themselves by hanging over London going "weeroah! weeeroah!" If Matt Smith had fallen out of the Tardis at the beginning, I wouldn't have been surprised if someone had blown a flute whistle as he fell. 'Wacky' doesn't even cover it. He should walk in one day chewing his sonic screwdriver and go "nyaar, whatsup Doc?" - it would be super ironic, because he himself is a Doctor and we'd all get a bloody good laugh out of it, I don't expect.
No dramatic writing practises were observed throughout this episode of Dr. Who. It was a farce, but it wasn't supposed to be. The writing was rife with exposition & had all the subtlety of a punch on the nose. Are we really lacking writers who can't think of anything better than: "…I can see it in your eyes", when they think they know something about a character? No you can't see anything in his eyes, don't talk bollocks. What next, "I believe in you" or, I don't know, someone writing "NO MORE", with a gun, in the middle of a war!? What? Oh.
I mean really Doctor, you're not fucking Banksy. No More? Is that really all Doctor Who, a man of hundreds of years of experience & presumably education, could think to write in a wall during a war to end all wars? I can see the writing team really sat down and spent time thinking about that one. Do you know what that was? That was profound.
And to tap into that really original writing again - the painting has two titles that amount to "Gallifrey falls, no more"… is that the cleverest thing that the writers could muster for this supposedly important, highly viewed episode; an incomplete sentence? Surely we, the viewer, deserve more than that? It was the kind of clever twist that even by Dr. Who standards, was poor, one that displayed all the sharp, writing nous of a clue in the Readers Digest crossword.
I want Dr. Who to be good and it has, at times, been good. But frankly, the anniversary episode treated the audience like they were a bunch of plebs. Even by the series own standards, the plot made no sense. It was derivative, infantile & insulting, particularly towards those who have invested so much in the series & its protagonist.
I understand entirely the need to suspend my disbelief before engaging with a programme like this, of course I do; but even in the sci-fi or fantasy genre, a programme must obey the laws of the world that it creates. These laws can be as far-fetched as the creator likes, but one thing is for sure, those laws must be consistent. The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy is entirely ridiculous, but the logic it employs is consistent throughout all its episodes. The things that happen to the crew in Joss Whedon's Firefly are wholly unrealistic, but the show always followed a set of self-imposed universal rules that helped the viewer invest more truthfully in what they were seeing; and it is vital to a show like Dr. Who, that the viewer is able to do this.
However, in the 50th anniversary episode, Dr. Who betrayed its was and in doing so, watched like an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch, where the convenience of the writer, maybe the constraints of the channel, over-took the process of structuring an intelligent plot line.
The series has spent so long building up a version of Dr. Who that is troubled by his past and have succeeded in part, in creating a much deeper character than we began with in its modern iteration. But now, how can I as a viewer, possibly care about or invest in the characters or events of the show, when they might not count or have happened in the future? Who's to say everything I know won't get erased on the loose whim of a lazy writer again and a mass audience who want something easy to swallow, something nice, shallow and unthought-out. The plot of this episode, was akin to how a child writes a story at school. They write something vivid & elaborate and then the bell for break-time goes; quickly, they scrawl down at the end of the page, "And it was aaaall a dream". Dr. Who is cheap.
Dr. Who deserves much better than this episode. It's a brilliant, globally recognisable, sci-fi institution, that is getting increasingly watered down & whored out. At no time has this been more evident, than in the actual presentation of the new Doctor recently and the painful BBC Three 'after party' that occurred with X-Factor-esque pomp, following the showing.
Ultimately, the gravitas that Dr. Who so painstakingly & increasingly strives for (and that its audience so horribly craves) is undermined. None of it means anything and so all the tension and all the drama in particular, is immediately & entirely lost. And anyone with any semblance of what a good TV programme is, comes away from it entirely unmoved by it, having a consumed a shallow husk, that had a bright outer-shell, a lot of promotion, an old reputation - and very little else.
