A more thorough ranting on Who...
Jul. 7th, 2008 12:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
newnumber6Although my usual rants are inspired by my hating an ep that everyone else loved, this one isn't, since a good chunk of my flist seemed to dislike this one too. So it's not so much angry venting as it is just shaking my head at RTD's dumbness and his inability of him to do proper fiction, much less SF.
It's not even about the last 10 minutes, mostly.
(Major spoilers for 4x13: Journey's End, of course)
I mean yeah, they did suck. Outrageously. But at least they sucked, for the most part with a few exceptions, because of a valid artistic choice. I can respect his decision to want to make them suck even if I don't like them. To give Rose a happy but slightly bittersweet ending with her One True Love, and to give Donna the tragic ending that was hinted at through the whole series, but with a twist. He cheaped out on both of them, removing any of Donna's character growth, and reducing Rose's love for the doctor to "OMG I love the way his face looks and wouldn't it be awesome if we could have babies together?". (Because, let's face it... this _isn't_ the Doctor he shuffled her off with. They took great pains to point out that he had some of Donna's personality. So she's stuck with a half-human half-Time Lord guy who has most, if not all of the memories of Who (more on that later, bw), but has no TARDIS (although since the people of Earth in Rose's reality are practically Time Lords already, that might not be such a big deal), acts a little like Donna, and will grow old.
That is, unless he dies first.
You see, wasn't that the big deal with Donna? She was half human, and a human couldn't contain a time lord consciousness without burning up. BUT WAIT. The FauxDoctor was half human too, what with having no regenerations and all. So, shouldn't his consciousness start burning him out too? YEAH, HOW'S THAT FOR A BITTERSWEET ENDING, THE DOCTOR LEFT ROSE WITH A LOOKALIKE WHO HAS SOME OF DONNA'S PERSONALITY, AND IS GOING TO DIE SOON. Or maybe it doesn't matter if you're a guy half-TL/Half-human, it's only female hybrids that can't contain the awesomeness of TimeLordiness.
Or, more likely, RTD didn't consider any of it. Because he's a hack, who doesn't think things through. His plot decisions have no basis in anything but his whim, and no consequence they should have.
Some more examples?
Well, firstly, the Doctor should be short one regeneration now. Because if regeneration energy wasn't limited, there wouldn't be only 12. So if the Doctor used some of the regeneration energy to heal, and stored the rest in the hand which later grew a whole new Doctor, he's used up a whole regeneration's worth. So do we call Ten Televen? Or maybe that's Faux Doctor. In any event, it's not mentioned and I bet not considered.
Let's also look at what he's proved. He's proved that Time Lord memory is not based in the brain, but apparently in the DNA or something. Because otherwise there's no damn way a hand should regrow into a being with all the memories of the Doctor, nor that a trade that affected Donna's body and made her part Time Lord should give her his memories. But if that's the case, then shouldn't his Daughter have had his memories too? Since she was pretty much just a clone. I suppose you could say the memories are stored in the regeneration energy itself, sort of holographically (in a hologram even if you break it in two, the image is still the same in both pieces, only a little fuzzier). But I'm betting he didn't consider it. He wrote it that way and said, "screw thinking about it, this is what I want to do." And that makes you a hack.
More stupidity:
Dozens of Daleks surrounding the prisoners, and not one sees SJS slip and Mickey slip away, even when that group of companions are shouting for each other. (Why? To give a moment of drama where you think Jackie's going to die)
Davros is an idiot. Not just an evil insane genius (his plan, although described with and potrayed with incredible stupidity, was a decent one for an insane genius dedicated to making his creations the only life in the universe. The only problem: if, as you described, you were undoing matter, you wouldn't see the stars going out. Either light is destroyed, in which case by the time the light that reaches you was destroyed, you'd be dying too, or light is not destroyed, in which case stars would disappear years before their light does). He's an idiot. Why? Because Dalek Caan kept predicting that "one of the companions shall die". You know, that also kind of suggests that THE DOCTOR AND THE REST OF THE COMPANIONS WON'T ANYTIME SOON. If you're an evil genius, maybe you should consider that, that prediction kind of goes against your plans. Maybe you should work around that. Not to mention having the Daleks having such a spectacular weakness that you can destroy ALL OF THEM from one Dalek control panel. I mean seriously. This is the alien race feared throughout the universe? One rewired console AND YOU KILL THEM ALL. That's worse than their OLD archenemy (that being STAIRS, of course). REALLY? REALLY? REALLY?
*pause*
Sorry, I blacked out for a second because of all the stupid.
But I must bravely delve in again.
The parallel universe now have the ability not just to jump across the void between dimension, but to jump into newly created parallel universes, to send messages INTO THE FAR FUTURE that somehow home in on the Doctor where-ever he is and play on the display of a public transport vessel (but can't manage sound). All timelines are converging on Donna because the whole universe is dying... except the whole time this is happening, THE DOCTOR AND DONNA ARE STILL WANDERING ABOUT THE FUTURE. "Your timeline is running ahead of ours, what's going to happen" shouldn't mean a damn thing... THE DOCTOR'S TIMELINE IS RUNNING AHEAD OF HIS TIMELINE. If the alt-universe knows what is going to happen, it's because it's either already happened (and saving the universe doesn't mean a damn thing), or they've somehow got more knowledge of the universe than the last Time Lord in existence. Hence, they're already practically Time Lords (that might actually be the seeds of a decent plot, them becoming 'Paratime Lords', masters of time in the sideways direction rather than front and back like the normal Time Lords).
Donna can't be allowed to even remember that she travelled with the Doctor for fear that it might reawaken her memories. But it's okay to a) let her live in a world where EVERYONE knows about Daleks, b) _meet_ the Doctor again (gee, I guess you didn't care much if it sparked a memory, but then I suppose you could always mindrape her again if it happened). But even mentioning, "hey, you travelled space and saved the universe, even though you can't remember it" TOO MUCH OF A RISK SORRY. Actually it feeds into my old theory that Ten is a sadist. He didn't forbid them from telling her because it might hurt her if she remembers again, he did it to be a jerk, and maybe to assuage his own guilt, so she wouldn't curse his name to the end of time (as well she should).
The Doctor wakes up naked, but Jack goes through an incinerator with clothes still intact.
By the way, Jack pretending to die so he can help later is one of the few bits of the episode that actually work as a fictional device. It's just a pity that his escape and the trick was pretty well meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
In fact, all of the companions are meaningless. For all their planning and attempts to threaten Davros into letting them go, their actions don't influence the resolution of the plot one bit. Hell, Jackie could have at least grabbed the person beside her when she activated the teleport button and saved one life, but even that little moment of glory was denied her. The most the companions were allowed to do is save each other from a Dalek, and call the Doctor, who of course is the only one who matters in any sense from RTD's perspective.
Even Donna doesn't get any choice in the equation - everything she did was 'fate forcing the creation of the Faux Doctor', and after that happened, she doesn't get to shine on her own, she only gets to participate because she's got the Doctor's mind. The solution comes down to The Doctor, the Faux Doctor who has the doctor's mind and intelligence, and Donna who has the Doctor's mind and intelligence. She might as well be a meat puppet for the great glorious Doctor's consciousness, rather than herself. Why bother with all those companions in the story if they're not going to do a damn thing but look pretty and give Davros a half-assed speech about the Doctor turning people into weapons (which is really insulting... of humans. He didn't do anything to them but show there was a wider world out there. They turned themselves into weapons to get what they want or to save the day. Not everything is the Doctor's fault... if he did anything, he made them all such idiots that, in imitation of his holier-than-thou Time Lord ways, they warned the Daleks, a race not known for changing their mind or backing off from a fight, of the plans that were going to be used to stop them, giving the Daleks the chance to undo them by teleporting them away).
It's all just awful.
Let's play the analogy game. If RTD was writing a legal drama, it might go something like this:
"Okay, for my season finale, I need my lawyer (known as The Lawyer) to go to jail facing the death penalty. I know. In order to defend his client, he'll call a witness with a red hat to the stand. And I'll say that the law has it that if you call a witness with a red hat, and your client gets convicted, you are also automatically convicted as a co-conspirator. It'll be sweet. Think of the drama as he waits for the long walk to death, bravely facing his fate... I can write many touching scenes with his love interest, friends. Dramatic scenes where he's soul-searching.
...
But crap, how am I going to get out of it at the end?
Oh, I know. He'll plead guilty to jaywalking. And I'll just write it so that he suddenly remembers an obscure legal rule, that if you plead guilty to a crime you didn't commit while you're eating your last meal, you can cancel out a conviction for a real crime, so instead of the death penalty he winds up being able to do community service."
It doesn't matter if he writes those scenes with the love interest the most powerfully in the world, nobody would stand for that crap, and that's exactly what he does with science fiction. There's no REASON for anything happening, except that it's what he wants to do to make the story work. Science Fiction works because you have a few 'gimmies', things where you implicitly say, "hey, audience, I know these things are impossible, but if you come along with me and pretend that they're possible, I'll deal with everything else, including the consequences of the impossible things, as logically as I can, and tell a good story using them that you couldn't tell without them". It's not a carte blanche to create any damn thing you want to have happen to string your half-assed plot. It deprives the audience of the ability to play along. Even Trek understood this most of the time, in the midst of their technobabble. Pulling things out of your ass should _drive_ stories, not be the solutions for them. He writes more like the crappy 60s Batman. "Oh, good thing I brought my Bat anti-bomb powder!"
It makes EXACTLY as much sense for the story to be resolved by his hand growing a new Doctor who knows all the same, and infecting Donna with Time Lord mind, and leaving Rose in her world with him, as it would if RTD had the Doctor go up to Davros and say "Yes, you think you've got me dead to rights. And you probably do, but you've forgotten one thing. On their 10th incarnation, and only their 10th incarnation, all Time Lords have DEATH RAY EYES." And then proceeds to zap Davros and the nearby Daleks, then destroys the machine that destroys the universe, and later justifies to his companions that he never really needed to do it before, and that Death Ray eyes were such a powerful Time Lord weapon that they only use it in order to save the whole universe. There, I have just plotted out a solution to the episode that makes exactly at much sense as RTD's solution.
You know what that's called? Crappy writing. Anything can happen, so why the &*$@! should I care what happens. It's so hard to watch his writing where the seams are showing. I mean seriously. Why does the Doctor break Jack's teleporter? Because it's inconvenient for Jack to have a working teleporter on Torchwood. THAT'S ALL. Why doesn't the Doctor regenerate? Because RTD doesn't want him to and wants him to pull this crap with the 2nd Doctor. THAT'S ALL. Why does the Torchwood base have a magic time lock that Tosh invented, that burns out at the end of the ep? Because he wanted Gwen and Ianto to survive and couldn't think of a plausible reason, but doesn't want them to have a magic defense for the Torchwood series. THAT'S ALL. Why does it take an electrical jolt to give Donna Doctor-Mind? Because he wanted it to be a surprise for the climax. THAT'S ALL. Everything that happens happens "Just So" something RTD wants also happens, and not one damn given that it doesn't make any sense. Why did Donna hear the Doctor's heartbeat in the past? To give the audience a foreshadowing of what might happen. THAT'S ALL. It's magic, it doesn't have to make sense. Magic Doctor Syndrome strikes again. He's so magic, his heartbeat ECHOES BACKWARDS IN TIME TO THE MIND OF A PERSON INVOLVED IN HIS CREATION. I mean seriously, a heartbeat echoing back in time? *bang head against wall*
I say again, you are a hack when it comes to science fiction, RTD. You do have occasional good moments and good ideas - I'll backtrack slightly on my earlier comments about you never being allowed to write SF again, and would say that you should never run a SF show, but instead be the guy who sits in the corner of the room and contributes ideas down and then or maybe helps punch up a character moment. Maybe once in a while you can write a whole plot, so long as it's a throwaway one episode deal like Midnight, which you could do well at. Beyond that, stay the hell away from SF. I'm not even going to bother with S2 (or beyond) Torchwood now, if you're running it, it's forever tainted.
This ep was Suck from beginning to end. It's not just the last 10 minutes. In fact, it's the last ep too. And hell, the one before that. The 3 parter was a whole load of suck, and that does not give me any hope for the future.
Before this ep, I kind of had hopes that the 4 movies of next year might deal with the Time War. Now I want the opposite. Please, RTD, leave the Time War for the next writers. Don't deal with it. You'll only screw it up and make it all suck. Just do a series of 4 extra-length episodes that are independent of one another and make your exit with as much grace as you can manage after this debacle.
It's not even about the last 10 minutes, mostly.
(Major spoilers for 4x13: Journey's End, of course)
I mean yeah, they did suck. Outrageously. But at least they sucked, for the most part with a few exceptions, because of a valid artistic choice. I can respect his decision to want to make them suck even if I don't like them. To give Rose a happy but slightly bittersweet ending with her One True Love, and to give Donna the tragic ending that was hinted at through the whole series, but with a twist. He cheaped out on both of them, removing any of Donna's character growth, and reducing Rose's love for the doctor to "OMG I love the way his face looks and wouldn't it be awesome if we could have babies together?". (Because, let's face it... this _isn't_ the Doctor he shuffled her off with. They took great pains to point out that he had some of Donna's personality. So she's stuck with a half-human half-Time Lord guy who has most, if not all of the memories of Who (more on that later, bw), but has no TARDIS (although since the people of Earth in Rose's reality are practically Time Lords already, that might not be such a big deal), acts a little like Donna, and will grow old.
That is, unless he dies first.
You see, wasn't that the big deal with Donna? She was half human, and a human couldn't contain a time lord consciousness without burning up. BUT WAIT. The FauxDoctor was half human too, what with having no regenerations and all. So, shouldn't his consciousness start burning him out too? YEAH, HOW'S THAT FOR A BITTERSWEET ENDING, THE DOCTOR LEFT ROSE WITH A LOOKALIKE WHO HAS SOME OF DONNA'S PERSONALITY, AND IS GOING TO DIE SOON. Or maybe it doesn't matter if you're a guy half-TL/Half-human, it's only female hybrids that can't contain the awesomeness of TimeLordiness.
Or, more likely, RTD didn't consider any of it. Because he's a hack, who doesn't think things through. His plot decisions have no basis in anything but his whim, and no consequence they should have.
Some more examples?
Well, firstly, the Doctor should be short one regeneration now. Because if regeneration energy wasn't limited, there wouldn't be only 12. So if the Doctor used some of the regeneration energy to heal, and stored the rest in the hand which later grew a whole new Doctor, he's used up a whole regeneration's worth. So do we call Ten Televen? Or maybe that's Faux Doctor. In any event, it's not mentioned and I bet not considered.
Let's also look at what he's proved. He's proved that Time Lord memory is not based in the brain, but apparently in the DNA or something. Because otherwise there's no damn way a hand should regrow into a being with all the memories of the Doctor, nor that a trade that affected Donna's body and made her part Time Lord should give her his memories. But if that's the case, then shouldn't his Daughter have had his memories too? Since she was pretty much just a clone. I suppose you could say the memories are stored in the regeneration energy itself, sort of holographically (in a hologram even if you break it in two, the image is still the same in both pieces, only a little fuzzier). But I'm betting he didn't consider it. He wrote it that way and said, "screw thinking about it, this is what I want to do." And that makes you a hack.
More stupidity:
Dozens of Daleks surrounding the prisoners, and not one sees SJS slip and Mickey slip away, even when that group of companions are shouting for each other. (Why? To give a moment of drama where you think Jackie's going to die)
Davros is an idiot. Not just an evil insane genius (his plan, although described with and potrayed with incredible stupidity, was a decent one for an insane genius dedicated to making his creations the only life in the universe. The only problem: if, as you described, you were undoing matter, you wouldn't see the stars going out. Either light is destroyed, in which case by the time the light that reaches you was destroyed, you'd be dying too, or light is not destroyed, in which case stars would disappear years before their light does). He's an idiot. Why? Because Dalek Caan kept predicting that "one of the companions shall die". You know, that also kind of suggests that THE DOCTOR AND THE REST OF THE COMPANIONS WON'T ANYTIME SOON. If you're an evil genius, maybe you should consider that, that prediction kind of goes against your plans. Maybe you should work around that. Not to mention having the Daleks having such a spectacular weakness that you can destroy ALL OF THEM from one Dalek control panel. I mean seriously. This is the alien race feared throughout the universe? One rewired console AND YOU KILL THEM ALL. That's worse than their OLD archenemy (that being STAIRS, of course). REALLY? REALLY? REALLY?
*pause*
Sorry, I blacked out for a second because of all the stupid.
But I must bravely delve in again.
The parallel universe now have the ability not just to jump across the void between dimension, but to jump into newly created parallel universes, to send messages INTO THE FAR FUTURE that somehow home in on the Doctor where-ever he is and play on the display of a public transport vessel (but can't manage sound). All timelines are converging on Donna because the whole universe is dying... except the whole time this is happening, THE DOCTOR AND DONNA ARE STILL WANDERING ABOUT THE FUTURE. "Your timeline is running ahead of ours, what's going to happen" shouldn't mean a damn thing... THE DOCTOR'S TIMELINE IS RUNNING AHEAD OF HIS TIMELINE. If the alt-universe knows what is going to happen, it's because it's either already happened (and saving the universe doesn't mean a damn thing), or they've somehow got more knowledge of the universe than the last Time Lord in existence. Hence, they're already practically Time Lords (that might actually be the seeds of a decent plot, them becoming 'Paratime Lords', masters of time in the sideways direction rather than front and back like the normal Time Lords).
Donna can't be allowed to even remember that she travelled with the Doctor for fear that it might reawaken her memories. But it's okay to a) let her live in a world where EVERYONE knows about Daleks, b) _meet_ the Doctor again (gee, I guess you didn't care much if it sparked a memory, but then I suppose you could always mindrape her again if it happened). But even mentioning, "hey, you travelled space and saved the universe, even though you can't remember it" TOO MUCH OF A RISK SORRY. Actually it feeds into my old theory that Ten is a sadist. He didn't forbid them from telling her because it might hurt her if she remembers again, he did it to be a jerk, and maybe to assuage his own guilt, so she wouldn't curse his name to the end of time (as well she should).
The Doctor wakes up naked, but Jack goes through an incinerator with clothes still intact.
By the way, Jack pretending to die so he can help later is one of the few bits of the episode that actually work as a fictional device. It's just a pity that his escape and the trick was pretty well meaningless in the grand scheme of things.
In fact, all of the companions are meaningless. For all their planning and attempts to threaten Davros into letting them go, their actions don't influence the resolution of the plot one bit. Hell, Jackie could have at least grabbed the person beside her when she activated the teleport button and saved one life, but even that little moment of glory was denied her. The most the companions were allowed to do is save each other from a Dalek, and call the Doctor, who of course is the only one who matters in any sense from RTD's perspective.
Even Donna doesn't get any choice in the equation - everything she did was 'fate forcing the creation of the Faux Doctor', and after that happened, she doesn't get to shine on her own, she only gets to participate because she's got the Doctor's mind. The solution comes down to The Doctor, the Faux Doctor who has the doctor's mind and intelligence, and Donna who has the Doctor's mind and intelligence. She might as well be a meat puppet for the great glorious Doctor's consciousness, rather than herself. Why bother with all those companions in the story if they're not going to do a damn thing but look pretty and give Davros a half-assed speech about the Doctor turning people into weapons (which is really insulting... of humans. He didn't do anything to them but show there was a wider world out there. They turned themselves into weapons to get what they want or to save the day. Not everything is the Doctor's fault... if he did anything, he made them all such idiots that, in imitation of his holier-than-thou Time Lord ways, they warned the Daleks, a race not known for changing their mind or backing off from a fight, of the plans that were going to be used to stop them, giving the Daleks the chance to undo them by teleporting them away).
It's all just awful.
Let's play the analogy game. If RTD was writing a legal drama, it might go something like this:
"Okay, for my season finale, I need my lawyer (known as The Lawyer) to go to jail facing the death penalty. I know. In order to defend his client, he'll call a witness with a red hat to the stand. And I'll say that the law has it that if you call a witness with a red hat, and your client gets convicted, you are also automatically convicted as a co-conspirator. It'll be sweet. Think of the drama as he waits for the long walk to death, bravely facing his fate... I can write many touching scenes with his love interest, friends. Dramatic scenes where he's soul-searching.
...
But crap, how am I going to get out of it at the end?
Oh, I know. He'll plead guilty to jaywalking. And I'll just write it so that he suddenly remembers an obscure legal rule, that if you plead guilty to a crime you didn't commit while you're eating your last meal, you can cancel out a conviction for a real crime, so instead of the death penalty he winds up being able to do community service."
It doesn't matter if he writes those scenes with the love interest the most powerfully in the world, nobody would stand for that crap, and that's exactly what he does with science fiction. There's no REASON for anything happening, except that it's what he wants to do to make the story work. Science Fiction works because you have a few 'gimmies', things where you implicitly say, "hey, audience, I know these things are impossible, but if you come along with me and pretend that they're possible, I'll deal with everything else, including the consequences of the impossible things, as logically as I can, and tell a good story using them that you couldn't tell without them". It's not a carte blanche to create any damn thing you want to have happen to string your half-assed plot. It deprives the audience of the ability to play along. Even Trek understood this most of the time, in the midst of their technobabble. Pulling things out of your ass should _drive_ stories, not be the solutions for them. He writes more like the crappy 60s Batman. "Oh, good thing I brought my Bat anti-bomb powder!"
It makes EXACTLY as much sense for the story to be resolved by his hand growing a new Doctor who knows all the same, and infecting Donna with Time Lord mind, and leaving Rose in her world with him, as it would if RTD had the Doctor go up to Davros and say "Yes, you think you've got me dead to rights. And you probably do, but you've forgotten one thing. On their 10th incarnation, and only their 10th incarnation, all Time Lords have DEATH RAY EYES." And then proceeds to zap Davros and the nearby Daleks, then destroys the machine that destroys the universe, and later justifies to his companions that he never really needed to do it before, and that Death Ray eyes were such a powerful Time Lord weapon that they only use it in order to save the whole universe. There, I have just plotted out a solution to the episode that makes exactly at much sense as RTD's solution.
You know what that's called? Crappy writing. Anything can happen, so why the &*$@! should I care what happens. It's so hard to watch his writing where the seams are showing. I mean seriously. Why does the Doctor break Jack's teleporter? Because it's inconvenient for Jack to have a working teleporter on Torchwood. THAT'S ALL. Why doesn't the Doctor regenerate? Because RTD doesn't want him to and wants him to pull this crap with the 2nd Doctor. THAT'S ALL. Why does the Torchwood base have a magic time lock that Tosh invented, that burns out at the end of the ep? Because he wanted Gwen and Ianto to survive and couldn't think of a plausible reason, but doesn't want them to have a magic defense for the Torchwood series. THAT'S ALL. Why does it take an electrical jolt to give Donna Doctor-Mind? Because he wanted it to be a surprise for the climax. THAT'S ALL. Everything that happens happens "Just So" something RTD wants also happens, and not one damn given that it doesn't make any sense. Why did Donna hear the Doctor's heartbeat in the past? To give the audience a foreshadowing of what might happen. THAT'S ALL. It's magic, it doesn't have to make sense. Magic Doctor Syndrome strikes again. He's so magic, his heartbeat ECHOES BACKWARDS IN TIME TO THE MIND OF A PERSON INVOLVED IN HIS CREATION. I mean seriously, a heartbeat echoing back in time? *bang head against wall*
I say again, you are a hack when it comes to science fiction, RTD. You do have occasional good moments and good ideas - I'll backtrack slightly on my earlier comments about you never being allowed to write SF again, and would say that you should never run a SF show, but instead be the guy who sits in the corner of the room and contributes ideas down and then or maybe helps punch up a character moment. Maybe once in a while you can write a whole plot, so long as it's a throwaway one episode deal like Midnight, which you could do well at. Beyond that, stay the hell away from SF. I'm not even going to bother with S2 (or beyond) Torchwood now, if you're running it, it's forever tainted.
This ep was Suck from beginning to end. It's not just the last 10 minutes. In fact, it's the last ep too. And hell, the one before that. The 3 parter was a whole load of suck, and that does not give me any hope for the future.
Before this ep, I kind of had hopes that the 4 movies of next year might deal with the Time War. Now I want the opposite. Please, RTD, leave the Time War for the next writers. Don't deal with it. You'll only screw it up and make it all suck. Just do a series of 4 extra-length episodes that are independent of one another and make your exit with as much grace as you can manage after this debacle.
