RE: Why the new 'Doctor Who' irritates me
October 9, 2011 at 6:43 pm
(This post was last modified: October 9, 2011 at 6:45 pm by Cyberman.)
(October 9, 2011 at 6:00 pm)Tiberius Wrote: The thing with the new series is, it wasn't designed for your generation, it was designed for a generation that have grown up with computers, with special effects, etc, meaning that often storylines aren't important, as long as some funny stuff happens, and there are plenty of explosions. That doesn't mean they won't have a decent storyline at some point, but the fact is, the latest incarnations of the Doctor are mainly meant to be funny, and understandable by a younger audience.
I can appreciate all that, but it shouldn't make all that much difference. Yes, generations come and go and it would be a mistake to expect the series to be exactly the same as it was in, say, 1973. However, I think the viewing public can and should expect a decent standard of writing for their money. Doctor Who has always had funny stuff and explosions but it was never solely about that. It came from the tradition of hard literary science fiction which, although containing fantastic elements, was always grounded at some point in scientific, or at least dramatic, plausibilty; as indeed was Quatermass and the later Doomwatch and Survivors. The stories were aimed at several levels, not just kids. Even as a wide-eyed child I never had any problem following the plots, whether or not I caught on to the complexities that I appreciated later was irrelevant. To me each episode represented the telly saying "we're all going to have an adventure, come and join us". Today it's more like "we're all going to have an adventure, you just sit there quietly until we're done."
Maybe I'm over-analysing it to some extent, but I think this short clip sums up what I mean:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPwuP11fS7I
Like I said, when the series returned in 2005 I was all for it, albeit apprehensively, and I saw the potential in what was being created. It's simply a shame it didn't carry on in the direction it looked like it was going.
BTW, I'm not all that old; I grew up with computers and all that stuff myself. I too have known the pain of waiting twenty minutes at a blank screen for a game to load, only to be cut down with the dread message: "Tape loading error" (or similar).
At the age of five, Skagra decided emphatically that God did not exist. This revelation tends to make most people in the universe who have it react in one of two ways - with relief or with despair. Only Skagra responded to it by thinking, 'Wait a second. That means there's a situation vacant.'
