New(ish) series of Doctor Who: watch it, as if the very future of Earth depended upon it!

Doctor, Doctor

Frankly, for millions of Earth people, Tom Baker is The Doctor. Think ‘Doctor Who’, and think ‘wild eyes and long scarf.’

To his credit, Christopher Eccleston is on record as saying that when he approached the rôle he aimed only to be the second most-definitive doctor, but for my money he gives Tom a good run for his money. I think he can be allowed to be equally as Doctor as Tom.

Cardboard Daleks

In the Old Days, Doctor Who was famous for two things: being really scary, and (when you got a bit older) being full of cardboard sets and unrealistic monsters. (Of course, laterly, it then became less famous for having shit scripts.)

This generation round, a fresh breath of air in the form of Thingy Who Wrote Queer as Folk, acting as chief scriptwriter and exec producer, sweeps away the rubbishness of the past and has created a Doctor Who whose effects can actually hold their own against the average cinema movie, with scripts which are beautifully written. But still scary.

Really, the new series looks brilliant. On a TV budget (though presumably a TV budget with half an eye to the merchandising and DVD sales), they’ve (re)created WWII London, crashing spacecraft and hoards of Daleks which even hold up to my cynical and jaded eye. The finalé, episodes 12 and 13, is just awesome to look at. Hundreds of Daleks spilling out into space. Lucas’s industrial light magicians could hardly have done better.

Alien Plot Holes From Outer Space

Eccleston, as mentioned, is great, but so is Billie Piper as his erstwhile assistant Rose. Fascinating. Here is a woman who was hitherto famous for two things: being a momentarily popular singer, and marrying Chris Evans, ginger-topped bad-boy of breakfast television. But she’s a really good actress. And good as The Doctor’s assistant: plucky without being irritating, feminine without screaming and waiting to be rescued, bold without being Ace.

Scripts: very human, but exploiting the sci-fi element nicely.

Really the only problem I had with the series were the plot holes… Now part of that is the fact that they’ve got to set up a different sci-fi quest in each episode, and they’re dotting all around history (though they didn’t actually visit any alien gravel quarries this time), and it must be horribly difficult to imagine a future, and make it seem convincingly foreign. Science fiction is always—often creakingly—a product of its time.

But I had to, almost consciously, suppress any sense of logic while watching the stories. On a human level, the stories are wonderful, and the characters are involving, and it’s all quite exciting and gripping, but on a making-sense level, they’re all pretty much nonsense.

Extermination

Like, furrexample, Episode 6: Dalek—Cover your eyes if you haven’t seen it.

Seriously, look away now if you don’t want me to spoil it for you.

Right, now part of the plot is that this rich collector chappie in the year 2015 (or thereabouts) has a museum of aliens, and has bought a Dalek at auction. So far, so good setup. It’s in chains, being tortured in a basement, and Rose feels sorry for it and touches it, whereupon it copies her DNA (as you do), regenerates its powers and bursts out of its bonds. It then (after killing a lot of expendible soldiers) realises that it has inherited some of Rose’s inherent goodness, begins to hate itself, and commits suicide in a flash of visual effects.

So, right, how come these humans had captured the damn thing, and known to avoid touching it for years. Like, it’s been sold between collectors, moved from place to place and all it needed was a scrap of human DNA to touch its shell to start regenerating and creating havok—and I really mean unstoppable, almost preternatural havok.

Daleks were always scary, and always powerful, but never this unstoppable. You could always blow them up, grab their plunger out the way to stop them exterminating you or whack them about the visual-stalk. The super-powerful, über-Dalek was a bit too unbalanced for me, especially since it started the episode chained up and successfully contained by the very puny humans who were powerless to stop its rampage afterwards.

And if Daleks are such xenophobes, why do they have the facility for incorporating other species’ DNA? Then get all upset when incorporating said DNA changes their nature? Hmmhmmm?

Grand Father Paradox

Another example, from another very lovely-but-flawed story, Episode 8: Father’s Day. It’s touching because it is about Rose going back in time to see the death of her own father. She ends up saving his life, which causes ruptures in space and time, and causes lots of mad bat-dragon monsters (the Auditors of Time, who have a very brisk approach to ‘auditing’) to start eating everybody on Earth.

My point: The Doctor is always saving people and changing the course of history. He saves planets, space stations, alien races all the time. All the time. But suddenly saving one bloke from being run down by a car causes the pants of space and time to get all in a fankle. They don’t really try to explain that in the episode, and it’s probably just as well.

As Thingy Who Wrote Queer as Folk (Russell T. Davies) pointed out in an interview, there are very few actual time-travel stories in Doctor Who, i.e., stories which exploit the nature of time-travel as part of the plot, so it was nice to see them try, and again, very lovely from a human point of view, but plot-wise rather jarring to my logical and alien mind.

Qualified Doctor

(You see what I did with that headline?)

So what am I saying? Did I like the damn series or not?

Oh, yeas, loved it. Watched every episode religiously, and the ‘making of’ thing afterwards, and all the wee extras on the website.

(Actually, even Charlie Brooker, professional tv-humorous-bile-merchant liked it: ‘Best. BBC. Family. Drama. Series. Ever,’ he said.)

But I watched it with an ever-present little voice at the back of my mind shouting annoying things like ‘that’s ridiculous’, or ‘they did what?!’

They’ve fixed the visual effects kitchness which at one time seemed part and parcel of Doctor Who, but that has just exposed the plot holes and scientific oddness… so they should attack that bit next…

But then maybe it wouldn’t be Doctor Who if the stories make logical sense.