What's Wrong with Doctor Who (A Nerdrage Interlude)

While my life in Korea is pretty fabulous, I cannot say it is always so. For example, when my favorite television show takes a turn for the terrible, this upsets me greatly. Warning, this contains spoilers and vast amounts of horrible nerd rage. So you're probably better off skipping it. In fact, I don't know why I'm writing this. Probably because this is the age of the internet and that's how we take out our anger these days.

The writing this season has been pretty terrible, and the writing of the show in general seems to have become incredibly lazy. And they keep getting away with it. I've made a list. I hope you enjoy it. Please excuse me if I start foaming at the mouth or my writing becomes completely incomprehensible.

1. Create rules. Then break them. Then distract the viewers with a love story. 

Let's talk about "Angels Take Manhattan". There were many problems with this episode, and the most obvious one involves the use of the angels themselves. The episode in which the angels first appeared, "Blink", still remains one of my favorite episodes. It had all of the elements of a good horror story, combined with good characters, and, most importantly, a set of rules. When you're dealing with science fiction or fantasy, it's essential to create rules that govern your universe and the creatures that populate it. The angels are deadly, but they do have weaknesses. If anything, even another angel, is looking at it, the angel cannot move. Then, because the angels were so cool, Moffat decided to revisit them in the very poor choice that was "The Time of Angels". Maybe Moffat doesn't know this yet, but sometimes when you have something really cool, it's best to use it sparingly. That's why the Daleks do not appear in every episode. I digress. They added more rules to make the angels scarier. Now, even an image of an angel becomes an angel.

So by those rules, let's think about "Angels Take Manhattan". The Statue of Liberty is revealed to be an angel. First of all, I find it very hard to believe that there's ever a time when no one is looking at the Statue. It's lit up at night and it's the most famous landmark of New York City. Second, and, more importantly, if every image of an angel becomes an angel, that means that every picture or miniature of Lady Liberty is also an angel, which means that the entire earth should be one giant time distortion because we're being constantly zapped back in time by our touristy souvenirs. Also, the angels were looking at each other almost continually throughout the episode. By that rule alone, almost none of the action of the story could have happened. But all of this gets ignored by the love story of Amy and Rory and how oh-so-tragic their exit is. Spare me, Moffat. I would have shed a lot more tears if your plot holes weren't the size of Manhattan.

2. Consistency of Character???

 Quick! Name one thing the Doctor consistently avoids and has avoided for almost his entire life. Was it murder? Congratulations! You know the character better than Moffat does! While the Doctor has killed his share of evil aliens, it's always after giving them a choice to redeem themselves. He always gives them a choice. Change your ways, leave this planet and these people alone...or else. It's when the evil aliens laugh in his face that the Doctor kicks their asses into the Land of Eternal Suffering. For example, remember what the Doctor did in "The Family of Blood"? The villains wanted to be immortal. So he made them immortal...so they could suffer for their crimes for eternity. That is why the Doctor is awesome. He never loses his temper and kills people, even if they deserve it. And yet, the Matt Smith Doctor, under the direction of some terrible writing has been doing just that. In this season alone, he's done that several times. He outright murdered the smuggler in "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship". In "Asylum of the Daleks", the Doctor let the Daleks commit genocide on their own people AND let a character die because even though she was human on the inside, she was still Dalek on the outside. So basically the Doctor let something die because it looked Dalek. This is quite different, if you recall, from season one's "Dalek", in which the Doctor shows pity for his enemy. Then we get to "A Town Called Mercy" in which the Doctor tries to murder a man. So what happened to the Doctor?

3. Overuse:

Moffat can write things, but only in small quantities. He wrote "Blink", "Silence in the Library", and "The Girl in the Fireplace", all three of which happen to be excellent stand-alone episodes. My conclusion is that Moffat can write good small stories, but when it comes to planning an entire season, he's terrible. Instead of writing new material, he returns to previous ideas and expands on them. River Song was really cool in "Silence in the Library", but the more Moffat used her, the more annoying and confusing she became. Do you remember the episode "Let's Kill Hitler"? I try not to because then I remember that River Song was supposedly Amy's best friend growing up, even though she's never mentioned in a single episode up until that point or after.

4. Setting:

For a SCIENCE FICTION show that has all of time and space as its backdrop, the settings have become incredibly narrow. The benefit of science fiction is that you can create any sort of civilization you want and use that civilization to examine morality, social norms, or just have an awesome adventure. Aliens running amok in London is fun, but any science fiction show can cover that. In fact, that's exactly what Torchwood does. The best episodes of Doctor Who take place on distant planets in distant times with characters who may not even be human. When humans are the stars of each episode, you start to forget how vast and awesome the universe supposedly is. Last season's crown jewel, "The Doctor's Wife" was a masterpiece written by Neil Gaiman and featured long-dead timelords, a sentient planet that eats TARDISes, and prolonged conversation between the Doctor and his TARDIS personified as a woman. (By the way, the romance between the Doctor and his TARDIS is so much more believable than anything with River Song. In fact, River comes off as a desperate attention-whore by comparison.) If you make a show about how awesome and exciting alien life is, which stars an alien who's sole principle and goal in life is to observe and respect all alien life, and then you surround him with human characters all the time and give priority to those human characters, your show becomes decidedly xenophobic.

5. Laziness and Making Sense:

There's only so many times you can rely on the power of love to solve your problems. In classic Doctor Who, "reverse the polarity" used to be their solution to various problems. It was silly, but it worked because SCIENCE. Now it's a wave of the sonic screwdriver 2.0 and the power of love. Stop it, Moffat. You can't pull miracles and solutions to time paradoxes out of your ass. And you can't wave the magic love wand and resurrect the Doctor while simultaneously killing him and marrying him to the psychologically scarred, previously brainwashed by mysterious evil people daughter/childhood best friend of your companions. In the strange universe where Moffat lives, that sentence just made sense.

If you still aren't convinced, look back at previous seasons. Many fans complained that Russell T. Davies had made the Doctor too much of a romantic interest. They were outraged when the Doctor developed feelings for Rose because in the history of the show, the Doctor had been decidedly uninterested in those sorts of things. But even if you disagreed with the decision to let the Doctor fall in love, there was the satisfaction of a coherent storyline. Romance was secondary to a good story. Bad Wolf still blows my mind. And don't even get me started on the glorious majesty of season three and the Saxon vote. The characters had depth and their own personal story arcs, but the show still knew what it was about. It wasn't about melodrama or how much of the universe you can destroy in a single episode. It was about telling a good story in the Doctor Who tradition.

Finally, "The Power of Three" was a terrible episode. You cannot bring people back to life fifteen minutes after they've collapsed from cardiac arrest.

For your patience, here's a music video by the band Muse. It has cyborgs and cowboys and is way better than "A Town Called Mercy". Enjoy. Also, sorry that the still for this video is dirty.