No love lost
What follows is a collection of thoughts assembled based on a recent email exchange with a fellow Doctor Who fan. A lot of these thoughts have rattled around in my head for years, but this is perhaps among the most cohesively I have written them out, so I felt that it might be good to share some of my views. I don’t expect people to relate, but it’s nice to have something to refer people to when I rant about my hatred for the new series.
As most of you know, there is no love lost for the new series as far as I am concerned. Last of the Time Lords way back in 2007 was what finally killed it for me. Once that amount of damage was done, it was never able to come back for me. After that point I became wise to the fact that this beast masquerading as Doctor Who bore no resemblance to the show that captured my imagination as a child. (I suspect I knew it subconsciously, but did not allow myself to believe it.) After that point the new series became, more or less, a joke to me, but it was far worse than just a simple joke. In the public consciousness, this was Doctor Who now. I hear people I follow on the internet outside of the Doctor Who community talking about how they saw the latest episode, and it’s hard for me not to interrupt and tell them that what they’re watching is not Doctor Who. I miss the days prior to 2005 when I could tell people my favorite show was Doctor Who and have them look at me blankly, rather than having them identify that name with the abomination that has egregiously claimed its title.
And yet, for some reason, I continue watching it. It gnaws at my soul to see what they’re doing to it, but I live in the tiniest amount of hope that maybe, somehow, they will steer the show ever so slightly in a better direction. I had hoped that Steven Moffat’s takeover heralded such a change. His first two episodes, The Eleventh Hour and The Beast Below were a sign of a promising change in direction. So much so that I wonder if the BBC pushed back and asked him to return to the over-the-top fantasy-style show that RTD had churned out. The overall quality of the episodes deteriorates more and more with each passing episode and yet, like a train wreck, I can’t stop watching it, hoping that somehow it will turn the corner. (I don’t expect it at this point.) All I have left is the occasional one-off episode that harkens back to the feel of the classic series, which is what (to me) The God Complex was, and that is the reason I embarked on re-scoring it. Such a rare gem of an episode combined with a truly offensively bad score from Murray Gold, and I felt that it deserved better, so I set out to fix it (and I’m immensely proud of the job Chris and I did on it).
Doctor Who is so near and dear to my heart that I doubt I will ever be able to truly give up on it, though I have come closer to doing so this past season than I ever have before.
The impression I have always gotten from the new series and the people behind it is that their priorities are totally the antithesis of the priorities in place for classic Doctor Who. The strongest example is the lack of care put into the title sequence and theme and the lack of commentary on them for the DVD releases. These were things that were a big deal, and quite substantially groundbreaking for their time. On the new series, it’s just another damned TV show, and it’s about catering to a juvenile audience with explosions and cheap thrills. The pre-titles sequence of this latest Christmas special is among the most horrifying my brain is capable of processing. I won’t describe it, because any description would not adequately cover how terrible it was.