Who Done It (But Not All That Well)

As with the first half of this season of Doctor Who, I wanted to withhold judgment on the second half until a couple episodes into things. Unfortunately, neither story so far has shaken my feeling that this is the hardest season to watch since Sylvester McCoy's first as the Doctor in 1987. In some ways, it may even be harder. As dicey as that stretch of episodes was, you could at least see signs that the production team was in the process of finding their way forward, and it paid off in 1988 and 1989 with stories like Remembrance of the Daleks and Ghost Light. Watching the current season, there's no sense that the current team, especially head-writer Steven Moffat, thinks that what they're doing is anything less than great. They should be right about that, but they're not.

They have great raw materials in the form of a wonderfully alien Doctor, a good supporting cast and a head-writer with an understanding of the show's conventions and a gift for plotting that enables him to turn those elements skillfully on their head. Unlike the late 1980s, the show also has the full support of the BBC, which means it has a decent budget. Expectations are justifiably high for the current season to be as good if not better than any of those with David Tennant or Christopher Eccleston. The difference seems to be that that, however much then head-writer Russell T. Davies went off-track at the end of Tennant's run, you could sense his desire at least in the early seasons to push the show forward in content and quality. In contrast, the current regime seems to be driven mainly by a sense that good enough is good enough. The manifestations of this attitude vary, but they seem to follow the theme that if you throw in enough appearances by established characters and monsters (however ill-conceived they were in the first place) it will seem like there's a coherent plan at work rather than a grab-bag of intermittently clever ideas, snappy dialogue and some suitably creepy imagery.

 

To some extent, both episodes that have been shown so far exemplify that trait, though, one was far more frustrating than the other. Let's Kill Hitler was a mess, but it least it was an entertaining one that made me wonder if the script had started life as an episode of Coupling. Moffat answered at least some of the questions raised by previous episodes while advancing others that will hopefully lead to a satisfying pay-off. It also featured an intriguing concept in the form of the time-traveling war-crimes avengers that made the episode's use of Hitler somewhat less bogus.

Night Terrors on the other hand is all the proof I need that Mark Gatiss should not be allowed to write for Doctor Who anymore. Even the relatively good moments felt pointless and uninvolving. While there were some superficially creepy moments with the dolls, they felt grafted on to the plot rather than being anything truly relevant to the story. As for the plot itself, which was more than a little reminiscent of the 2006 story Fear Her, it managed to be 100% less clever than the earlier episode while cramming in 100% more superfluous references to Doctor Who continuity.

I'd been trying to keep an open mind about Gatiss' writing after last year's Dalek story, because there were some really good character moments, especially involving Bill Patterson as Professor Bracewell, that helped offset idiotic things like "Danny Boy" and the Spitfires in space. Night Terrors didn't even have that much to recommend it. In short, it committed the cardinal sin of any drama, more so even than being bad, it was boring.

So, all in all, the second half of the season isn't off to an auspicious start, but I'll keep watching. Wading through some crap on the way to something stellar is part of being a fan of virtually anything and, unique though it may be, Doctor Who is no exception. Beside, next week's episode looks interesting. Fingers crossed.