Doctor Who Season 4: "The Poison Sky"
May. 5th, 2008 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Well, that was lame. There were a few points, but overall I thought it was awfully silly, and not in a good way. And normally I don't post on it, but since the majority of people seemed to enjoy the ep, I felt the need to rant.
(Spoilers)
Okay, let me get this straight. The Sontarans plan was to get in good with a local kid genius. Get him to 'invent' a device that they somehow get onto half of every single car in the world, that not only does what it's supposed to do, clean all the pollution out of the exhaust, but also is somehow able to control the car completely. Despite it getting in four hundred million cars, nobody notices that it can control your car (I can buy the nobody noticing it spews poison gas thingie, it's magic alien tech that can be hidden in the supposedly magic human tech that's supposed to do chemical changes to the air anyway).
They do this to turn the atmosphere of the Earth into something suitable for a clone farm.
Their plan hinges on making this boy genius think he's going to get his crew of geniuses to go to a new world that has to be terraformed, and so they either tell him enough to build, or build themselves and provide to him (it wasn't entirely clear which was the case) a device which is capable of undoing all of their ATMOSpheric poisoning in an instant and coincidentally can blow up the Sontaran ship). Which raises two different problems: If they gave it to him, why not just use that magic device to magically change the atmosphere the way they wanted it, and if Rattigan's group built it themselves, why didn't somebody at the genius academy think, "hey, why don't we use this to clean up the atmosphere and not have need for Atmos?" (or, conversely, Rattigan think, "Hey, why not use this to convert the atmosphere into Sontarian Green). Now, despite having no furthur use for the boy or his people once he had ATMOS out and running on as many cars as possible, they keep him alive and provide him a teleport to their base. This is all apparently because they want to give him a big screw you and shoot him and his genius kids when they beam up in the middle of the master plan's unveiling, just for kicks.
Oh, but wait, there's more. The Sontarans also have a secret facility in Unit, which they use to make a clone of someone with Level 1 clearance, something Martha has, and which apparently allows someone to control all of the Earth's nuclear arsenal. Oh, remember those days when bureaucracy prevented UNIT from acting when it was important? Well, those days are over. Now a doctor who works with them has a high enough security clearance to single-handedly determine whether they nuke or not. No rogue nations, either.
And let's not forget that the Sontarans need to land troops on the ground to protect their 'asset', who, to all appearances, was _only_ needed to _keep_ pushing a "No please do not launch the weapons" button on a regular basis. All of this leaving aside that apparently the weapons are useless against the Sontarans anyway, according to the Doctor, and the only reason they prevented it was so a nuclear detonation, in space, wouldn't 'affect the atmospheric conversion'. But then "useless against the Sontarans" in this episode turned out to be as big a hyperbole as 'nothing will ever be the same again' is in comics. Remember the 'only weakness' of the Sontarans? Apparently it's the 'only weakness' if you don't have the right kind of bullets. Now, I love that Unit was able to improvise once they learned how the anti-bullet technology works, but come on, this is Who. You shouldn't have guns being able to destroy a legion of armored Sontarans from the _front_.
So, the Sontarans show up and get slaughtered once their anti-bullet-ray is defeated, and with Donna's help the Doctor reactivates their teleportation and uses it to go to Rattigan, to grab the magic device which _lights the sky on fire_ with apparently no ill effects to anyone or anything on Earth and saves the day. Yes, wave the magic wand some more, please, it's really not done enough in this series. Not to mention the doctor isn't at all deceived by fake Martha, of course. One mustn't let the Doctor be fooled or upstaged for one moment, he's so perfect and can do everything. In fact, even if he seems fooled, it's really just a brilliant stratagem of his own and you're doing what _he_ wants! Meh. Magic Doctor Syndrome strikes again. And what the hell was up with Martha's conversation with clone-Martha. What, _after_ they unhook her from Martha's memories the clone suddenly gets enough self-awareness to decide "hmm, destroying the human race is wrong, maybe I should help the Doctor." Man, that Martha must hate people, since while her memories were hooked up she was a perfectly willing soldier.
Of course Rattigan does the expected thing and saves the Doctor at his own expense. Like I said, expected. Not particularly well set up, but it was a decent moment with the Sontar-Ha thing.
Ross died, which is annoying, as he was one of the few enjoyable things in the episode. I would have loved if his 'death' was a fakeout, and he faked dying so the Sontarans would move past him and he could strike from behind, remembering what the Doctor said about their only weakness. Even if he died after that, it would be preferable to just going out like a chump.
All in all I did not care for the episode, bringing in most of the elements I dislike about the episodes that are set in the 'present day', putting the entire world in angsty danger (that is, danger that the whole world _knows_ its in and where people are dying all over while the Doctor tries to solve it), magic wand type solutions and just generally sloppy plotting. It also reminded me too much about Helen Raynor's last two part effort, which started okay but the plot became sloppy and nonsensical when the two parter started. Ms. Raynor, you do decent work with character interaction, but please get somebody else to write your _plots_ for you?
It does get bonus points for mentioning the Brig, and I did like how Rattigan's child soldiers just did a "Uh... yeah, whatever, you're nuts" and left him when he revealed his master plan, but those things only polish a turd so much.
Edit: I've decided to attach some quotes from an article about "Why Doctor Who Sucks right Now" that sum up how I feel. No spoilers for future episodes in my segments, though the original essay has a few. I just wanted to quote it here because of a big, MAN I AGREE (not specifically that it sucks, just that it could and should be so much better).
...
This surprise-free version of the series should come as no surprise. Looking back on it, the clue was there two whole years ago, in the Confidential that accompanied "The Girl in the Fireplace". You may recall an interview with Julie Gardner, in which she expressed her surprise that a script which begins with monsters on eighteenth-century Earth should then cut to a space-station in the fifty-first century, and said that this clearly wasn't business as usual. Now, this puzzled me at the time. Since Doctor Who is capable of going anywhere, anywhen and anyhow, and has the ability to change its methods with every episode, I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I consider a time-shift between the 1700s and the 5000s to be pretty much par for the course. At the very least, it's no big deal. Yet as far as the programme-makers are concerned, standard practice is to (A) find a historical setting or a modern-day "topical" issue, (B) attach a monster to it, and (C) arrange the set-pieces around the result. To me, a script that stretches our attention between Mme de Pompadour and clockwork droids in the far future is surprising, but it's only a background-radiation level of surprise. To a producer who doesn't even realise that surprise is a minimum expectation, on the other hand… yes, it must seem spectacular.
This point became even more obvious when Russell T. Davies announced that he considers Steven Moffat to be a genius, and to have neural pathways made of gold (or something like that… I forget the exact quote). Well, Moffat is certainly competent, which is a novelty these days. Yet his work should, ideally, be the baseline for all modern Doctor Who rather than its pinnacle: "The Empty Child" and "The Girl in the Fireplace" should be the norm rather than the crème de la crème. If our standards hadn't been set so low by the (A), (B), (C) approach, then we'd be able to see this rather more clearly.
A big part of the problem here is that television in general, and (sad to say) Doctor Who in particular, is almost going out of its way to discourage any actual talent amongst new writers. As we saw in Week Three, a modern script is expected to be more like a storyboard than a teleplay. It's notable that Davies considers Moffat to be the best of the bunch, because Moffat is significantly older than most. He started working in television in the 1980s, and can therefore remember a time when writers were actually supposed to write, rather than being encouraged to churn out second-rate Hollywood action-movies for TV. I say "notable", because he's succeeded by actively defying what the producers have forced Doctor Who to become. Moffat has - if you will - the element of surprise, but that shouldn't be a sign of genius, it should just be a sign of adequacy. A quick glance at this year's Radio Times round-up of the 2008 season shows us that while Davies is patting his writers on the head for giving us by-the-book scripts like "Planet of the Ood" and "The Sontaran Stratagem", Moffat will be giving us a story involving…. Christ, I don't even know what it involves. (snip minor spoilery thoughts) I'm more interested in "Silence in the Library" than any other story on the menu, not because I believe Moffat to be the high-water-mark of all Doctor Who authorship, but purely because I have no idea what it's going to be like. As I said, this should be a normal part of the Doctor Who experience, not something exceptional.
Perhaps, just perhaps, all writers could be this unpredictable if the producers actually gave them some incentive for doing it. Instead, we get a two-parter that starts with a killer sat-nav device driving a car into a river (see, I told you that modern-day Doctor Who is just like Bugs) and then gives us an alien invasion that makes Independence Day look creative. It's not as if the modern series can't surprise us, just that… it can't be bothered.
...
Increasingly, the series is under the impression that it's okay to keep doing the same trick over and over again, as long as there are clues to the end-of-season two-parter buried in the mix. The big surprise of "Partners in Crime" was the second coming of Rose Tyler, yet many people would much rather have been surprised by an episode that wasn't set on modern-day Earth (again) and didn't involve alien consumer products (again). Likewise, I'm guessing that most of the internet-talk about "The Poison Sky" will revolve around the one-second-long glimpse of Rose on the TARDIS scanner rather than the actual story. Irony Number One is that this new, Americanised form of "surprise" was developed specifically because so many US shows couldn't go anywhere in space and time: if you're stuck on a single space-station week after week, with a finite number of sets, then you need ongoing plots and subplots just to keep the audience watching. The same goes for "small-town" fantasy, Buffy included. But Doctor Who is, demonstrably, meant to be above all of this. Irony Number Two is that the Cult of the Story-Arc demands constant clues about what's going to come next, and the entire essence of Doctor Who - at least when it's any good - is that we're not supposed to have the slightest idea what comes next.
(Spoilers)
Okay, let me get this straight. The Sontarans plan was to get in good with a local kid genius. Get him to 'invent' a device that they somehow get onto half of every single car in the world, that not only does what it's supposed to do, clean all the pollution out of the exhaust, but also is somehow able to control the car completely. Despite it getting in four hundred million cars, nobody notices that it can control your car (I can buy the nobody noticing it spews poison gas thingie, it's magic alien tech that can be hidden in the supposedly magic human tech that's supposed to do chemical changes to the air anyway).
They do this to turn the atmosphere of the Earth into something suitable for a clone farm.
Their plan hinges on making this boy genius think he's going to get his crew of geniuses to go to a new world that has to be terraformed, and so they either tell him enough to build, or build themselves and provide to him (it wasn't entirely clear which was the case) a device which is capable of undoing all of their ATMOSpheric poisoning in an instant and coincidentally can blow up the Sontaran ship). Which raises two different problems: If they gave it to him, why not just use that magic device to magically change the atmosphere the way they wanted it, and if Rattigan's group built it themselves, why didn't somebody at the genius academy think, "hey, why don't we use this to clean up the atmosphere and not have need for Atmos?" (or, conversely, Rattigan think, "Hey, why not use this to convert the atmosphere into Sontarian Green). Now, despite having no furthur use for the boy or his people once he had ATMOS out and running on as many cars as possible, they keep him alive and provide him a teleport to their base. This is all apparently because they want to give him a big screw you and shoot him and his genius kids when they beam up in the middle of the master plan's unveiling, just for kicks.
Oh, but wait, there's more. The Sontarans also have a secret facility in Unit, which they use to make a clone of someone with Level 1 clearance, something Martha has, and which apparently allows someone to control all of the Earth's nuclear arsenal. Oh, remember those days when bureaucracy prevented UNIT from acting when it was important? Well, those days are over. Now a doctor who works with them has a high enough security clearance to single-handedly determine whether they nuke or not. No rogue nations, either.
And let's not forget that the Sontarans need to land troops on the ground to protect their 'asset', who, to all appearances, was _only_ needed to _keep_ pushing a "No please do not launch the weapons" button on a regular basis. All of this leaving aside that apparently the weapons are useless against the Sontarans anyway, according to the Doctor, and the only reason they prevented it was so a nuclear detonation, in space, wouldn't 'affect the atmospheric conversion'. But then "useless against the Sontarans" in this episode turned out to be as big a hyperbole as 'nothing will ever be the same again' is in comics. Remember the 'only weakness' of the Sontarans? Apparently it's the 'only weakness' if you don't have the right kind of bullets. Now, I love that Unit was able to improvise once they learned how the anti-bullet technology works, but come on, this is Who. You shouldn't have guns being able to destroy a legion of armored Sontarans from the _front_.
So, the Sontarans show up and get slaughtered once their anti-bullet-ray is defeated, and with Donna's help the Doctor reactivates their teleportation and uses it to go to Rattigan, to grab the magic device which _lights the sky on fire_ with apparently no ill effects to anyone or anything on Earth and saves the day. Yes, wave the magic wand some more, please, it's really not done enough in this series. Not to mention the doctor isn't at all deceived by fake Martha, of course. One mustn't let the Doctor be fooled or upstaged for one moment, he's so perfect and can do everything. In fact, even if he seems fooled, it's really just a brilliant stratagem of his own and you're doing what _he_ wants! Meh. Magic Doctor Syndrome strikes again. And what the hell was up with Martha's conversation with clone-Martha. What, _after_ they unhook her from Martha's memories the clone suddenly gets enough self-awareness to decide "hmm, destroying the human race is wrong, maybe I should help the Doctor." Man, that Martha must hate people, since while her memories were hooked up she was a perfectly willing soldier.
Of course Rattigan does the expected thing and saves the Doctor at his own expense. Like I said, expected. Not particularly well set up, but it was a decent moment with the Sontar-Ha thing.
Ross died, which is annoying, as he was one of the few enjoyable things in the episode. I would have loved if his 'death' was a fakeout, and he faked dying so the Sontarans would move past him and he could strike from behind, remembering what the Doctor said about their only weakness. Even if he died after that, it would be preferable to just going out like a chump.
All in all I did not care for the episode, bringing in most of the elements I dislike about the episodes that are set in the 'present day', putting the entire world in angsty danger (that is, danger that the whole world _knows_ its in and where people are dying all over while the Doctor tries to solve it), magic wand type solutions and just generally sloppy plotting. It also reminded me too much about Helen Raynor's last two part effort, which started okay but the plot became sloppy and nonsensical when the two parter started. Ms. Raynor, you do decent work with character interaction, but please get somebody else to write your _plots_ for you?
It does get bonus points for mentioning the Brig, and I did like how Rattigan's child soldiers just did a "Uh... yeah, whatever, you're nuts" and left him when he revealed his master plan, but those things only polish a turd so much.
Edit: I've decided to attach some quotes from an article about "Why Doctor Who Sucks right Now" that sum up how I feel. No spoilers for future episodes in my segments, though the original essay has a few. I just wanted to quote it here because of a big, MAN I AGREE (not specifically that it sucks, just that it could and should be so much better).
...
This surprise-free version of the series should come as no surprise. Looking back on it, the clue was there two whole years ago, in the Confidential that accompanied "The Girl in the Fireplace". You may recall an interview with Julie Gardner, in which she expressed her surprise that a script which begins with monsters on eighteenth-century Earth should then cut to a space-station in the fifty-first century, and said that this clearly wasn't business as usual. Now, this puzzled me at the time. Since Doctor Who is capable of going anywhere, anywhen and anyhow, and has the ability to change its methods with every episode, I'm sure I'm not alone in saying that I consider a time-shift between the 1700s and the 5000s to be pretty much par for the course. At the very least, it's no big deal. Yet as far as the programme-makers are concerned, standard practice is to (A) find a historical setting or a modern-day "topical" issue, (B) attach a monster to it, and (C) arrange the set-pieces around the result. To me, a script that stretches our attention between Mme de Pompadour and clockwork droids in the far future is surprising, but it's only a background-radiation level of surprise. To a producer who doesn't even realise that surprise is a minimum expectation, on the other hand… yes, it must seem spectacular.
This point became even more obvious when Russell T. Davies announced that he considers Steven Moffat to be a genius, and to have neural pathways made of gold (or something like that… I forget the exact quote). Well, Moffat is certainly competent, which is a novelty these days. Yet his work should, ideally, be the baseline for all modern Doctor Who rather than its pinnacle: "The Empty Child" and "The Girl in the Fireplace" should be the norm rather than the crème de la crème. If our standards hadn't been set so low by the (A), (B), (C) approach, then we'd be able to see this rather more clearly.
A big part of the problem here is that television in general, and (sad to say) Doctor Who in particular, is almost going out of its way to discourage any actual talent amongst new writers. As we saw in Week Three, a modern script is expected to be more like a storyboard than a teleplay. It's notable that Davies considers Moffat to be the best of the bunch, because Moffat is significantly older than most. He started working in television in the 1980s, and can therefore remember a time when writers were actually supposed to write, rather than being encouraged to churn out second-rate Hollywood action-movies for TV. I say "notable", because he's succeeded by actively defying what the producers have forced Doctor Who to become. Moffat has - if you will - the element of surprise, but that shouldn't be a sign of genius, it should just be a sign of adequacy. A quick glance at this year's Radio Times round-up of the 2008 season shows us that while Davies is patting his writers on the head for giving us by-the-book scripts like "Planet of the Ood" and "The Sontaran Stratagem", Moffat will be giving us a story involving…. Christ, I don't even know what it involves. (snip minor spoilery thoughts) I'm more interested in "Silence in the Library" than any other story on the menu, not because I believe Moffat to be the high-water-mark of all Doctor Who authorship, but purely because I have no idea what it's going to be like. As I said, this should be a normal part of the Doctor Who experience, not something exceptional.
Perhaps, just perhaps, all writers could be this unpredictable if the producers actually gave them some incentive for doing it. Instead, we get a two-parter that starts with a killer sat-nav device driving a car into a river (see, I told you that modern-day Doctor Who is just like Bugs) and then gives us an alien invasion that makes Independence Day look creative. It's not as if the modern series can't surprise us, just that… it can't be bothered.
...
Increasingly, the series is under the impression that it's okay to keep doing the same trick over and over again, as long as there are clues to the end-of-season two-parter buried in the mix. The big surprise of "Partners in Crime" was the second coming of Rose Tyler, yet many people would much rather have been surprised by an episode that wasn't set on modern-day Earth (again) and didn't involve alien consumer products (again). Likewise, I'm guessing that most of the internet-talk about "The Poison Sky" will revolve around the one-second-long glimpse of Rose on the TARDIS scanner rather than the actual story. Irony Number One is that this new, Americanised form of "surprise" was developed specifically because so many US shows couldn't go anywhere in space and time: if you're stuck on a single space-station week after week, with a finite number of sets, then you need ongoing plots and subplots just to keep the audience watching. The same goes for "small-town" fantasy, Buffy included. But Doctor Who is, demonstrably, meant to be above all of this. Irony Number Two is that the Cult of the Story-Arc demands constant clues about what's going to come next, and the entire essence of Doctor Who - at least when it's any good - is that we're not supposed to have the slightest idea what comes next.
