We are four episodes in to the reign of the 13th Doctor
on Doctor Who, which isn’t a large enough sample size for a definitive evaluation,
but it is about one-third of the way through the season, so some criticism can
be justified. On the whole . . . I am not sanguine about where new
showrunner Chris Chibnall is taking the series.
This is in no way a complaint about the new Doctor, played
for the first time by a female actor, Jodie Whittaker. I have the same
complaint I had about the prior Doctor, peter Capaldi, which is that I
occasionally find her accent impenetrable, but other than that she has been
fun, quirky, smart, and in command of most situations she finds herself
in. Casting a new Doctor is always tricky, and they’ve had an excellent
track record (in the 50-plus year history of the show, the only major casting
mis-step for a Doctor was Colin Baker as the 6th Doctor, and
that was probably a failure of concept, not acting).
As for what doesn’t work, let me start with a couple of
minor things that really irritate me. The first is the new opening credit
sequence, which looks like someone just started messing around with some
computer program that makes psychedelic swirls. Prior credit sequences
referred either to the Doctor’s capacity to travel in space or (for the
previous credit sequence) in time, but this looks like a throwback to the
1970’s when they discovered they could do neat psychedelic effects on a
computer and just went nuts.
I also hate the design of the interior of the TARDIS, which
is dark, confusing, and not at all comfy looking. I thought prior designs
of the control room made it look bigger than necessary (if for no other reason
than to get the standard reaction, “It’s bigger on the inside!” when someone
enters), but the new set looks positively claustrophobic. They haven’t
spent too much time in the TARDIS in the first four episodes, since the Doctor
didn’t reclaim the TARDIS until the end of episode number two, but I hope they
make it look more habitable if they do spend more time there.
New showrunner Chris Chibnall has been checking off the
episodes types as he begins his stint as the head of the Who-niverse, with an
Earth invasion show, a show set on a foreign planet, an historical show, and
then another Earth (well, Sheffield) in peril adventure. Overall, I think
Chibnall has picked up former showrunner Peter Moffat’s most annoying habit of
creating preposterous premises but without Moffat’s ability to justify them
eventually. The second episode was supposed to be the last leg of a
massive marathon race to find something, but the two finalists in no way gave
any indication of why they were successful where all their competitors
failed. How either survived without the Doctor’s assistance in prior legs
of the rally is a mystery, as is the reason for the elaborate rally in the
first place. The appearance of the TARDIS at the end is a deus ex machina
and not an ending earned by the script.
The third episode, Rosa, was a noble effort to humanize an
historical feature known almost solely for her name, but I thought it came
across as heavy-handed and overly earnest. The whole idea that the Doctor
and her companions were fighting to keep the historical record on track when
another time traveler was trying to disrupt history seemed too derivative of other
TV shows like DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, or Timeless, or Quantum Leap.
Also, the whole scenario of Rosa Parks being arrested for not giving up her
seat on a Montgomery bus was orchestrated, so if she had missed that particular
bus it would not have been the end of the Civil Rights movement; someone else
would have done it. So the Doctor’s efforts to restore history weren’t
really needed.
I also have major issues with the way the fourth episode,
Arachnids in the U.K., was resolved. So, there are these giant spiders in
England, and they are killing people (not because they are evil but because,
well, they’re hungry). The 13th Doctor has a strict “no
killing” policy, but her method of solving the giant spider infestation is to
lock them in a room and . . . let them starve to death. She gets angry
with an American businessman (played by Chris Noth, whose face is a little too
familiar to be a credible guest actor) who shoots a giant spider near the end,
but she had just said the spider was dying from suffocating because it was too
large to be supported by the spider’s lungs, so it was sort of a mercy
killing. I appreciate her anti-gun stance, but whether the spider died by
bullets or suffocation isn’t really a distinction with a difference and letting
them starve to death isn’t a humane alternative.
She also maintained an anti-gun stance in the second episode
when one of her companions used a weapon to incapacitate a number of hostile
robots, which someone pointed out to her weren’t alive so it’s not killing. I do
applaud the anti-gun stance in theory, but let’s be reasonable.
I do like the three companions, and hopefully they will be
fleshed out more as the series unwinds. Having one companion seemed to
lead the creators of the shows into making the companion almost as “special” as
the Doctor (I’m thinking of Clara, Donna, and Rose). I can’t believe I am
saying this, but Amy Pond became a better companion after she and the Doctor
were joined by her husband Rory. For now, I like the group interactions
of a crowded TARDIS.
I was glad that Steven Moffat decided to step down as
showrunner, not because he hadn’t done a good job but because he had developed
a “swing for the fences” approach that made overall seasons interesting but
precluded any single episode being great. New blood is good, change is
good, and the show Doctor Who is still good despite my many reservations based
on the first four episodes.
But seriously, lighten up the interior of the TARDIS!
No comments:
Post a Comment