Time traveller suffers premature extermination.
As you may have heard, Ncuti Gatwa has been launched from Doctor Who with such speed that his local spacetime is slowing down.
I wanted to briefly share my thoughts on this, because nothing bad has happened to authors who have had opinions before.
Firstly, when I read “DOCTOR WHO AXED” in the papers, I was surprised to learn it was not merely the first three words preceding a list of people attacked by some lunatic general practitioner. Such is the state the UK is in at the moment (or perhaps the newspapers themselves, but that discussion would take up another newsletter entirely).
Secondly, I saw this coming.
Why?
It’s not because Doctor Who got ‘woke’ (ask two people what that means and you’ll get two different answers) nor is it because this ancient show is being overshadowed by other shows in a world increasingly flooded with new entertainment.
No, I think simply the writing is struggling, and I expected they might take a leaf from the book of politics and get rid of the prominent figure in order to usher in a new era, a new writer.
It’s a sort of reset, a clever device written into the show’s lore so that it might continue indefinitely. They do this with Prime Ministers and Presidents too, by the way, when they want to quit and pursue their true calling as a vessel for the old gods, writhing and screaming on the marble floor of some sacrificial chamber deep below wherever it is your tax forms go to.
Why I tuned out
I stopped watching Doctor Who during Capaldi’s run, which irritated me as I loved the idea of having an older doctor again (my intro to the show was the apparently non-canon, but nonetheless brilliant Peter Cushing movie, Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.). It is still my favourite science fiction film.
I really wanted to enjoy Capaldi’s run, but the decline in writing quality had really started with Matt Smith, where certain longer story threads felt like Eastenders in space, which would have been fine for a fresh new Sci-Fi show, but increasingly I felt the writers were losing track of what made DR WHO great, or even worse, losing track of what made the show DOCTOR WHO.
It’s life force had been sucked out, and not in the good way.
But there was one final flash of life before the end.
In the season that ended it all sat my favourite episode of NewWho, Time Of Angels, where Matt Smith’s doctor went on a good old fashioned adventure into a crashed spaceship, fought off Weeping Angels (one of the best NewWho monsters) with gravity tricks, and tied into the wider Pandorica story arc, where time rifts were going around deleting things from existence.
But, once that storyline was wrapped up (with Smith looping back to this episode during the season finale, saying an emotional goodbye to Amy Pond) the writing started to slip.
The clone Amy storyline was unsettling, sure, but it became too heavy on the drama, and started to forget it was a Sci-Fi. I believe that this, coupled with a pressure from social media to produce lines of dialogue that worked as quirky tiktok soundbites, rather than working in the context of the wider show, is perhaps what has motivated Dr Who’s recent decline in quality.
I think the same has happened to literature, too.
I try to be an antidote to that.
Still, the decline of Doctor Who doesn’t mean there are not brilliant episodes. I plan to watch Capaldi’s run eventually, and I actually tuned back in for Jodi Whittaker specifically because I thought her acting in Broadchurch was brilliant, but it is hard to watch Doctor Who now without realising you are watching a show.
And that is precisely the problem.
One of Jodi’s first episodes had a very lazily written American businessman doing business with evil space spiders, or something.
Naturally, this Donald Trump fan fiction would later try to strike up a deal with the Daleks, who by the way, are genocidal aliens inspired by Nazi tanks.
They (the Daleks) were conceived by writer Terry Nation and first appeared in the 1963 Doctor Who serial The Daleks, in casings designed by Raymond Cusick. Drawing inspiration from the Nazis, Nation portrayed the Daleks as violent, merciless and pitiless cyborg aliens, completely absent of any emotion other than hate, who demand total conformity to the will of the Dalek with the highest authority, and are bent on the conquest of the universe and the extermination of any other forms of life, including other "impure" Daleks which are deemed inferior for being different to them. - Wikipedia
There is a certain ignorance to Doctor Who now. There’s no longer that subtle sort of commentary you got with old SciFi. Now everything must have a lesson and it is not good enough for modern writers that this lesson is secreted carefully amid clever dialogue and storytelling. No, the audience is too thick for that, so let’s just put the lesson right on top, and maybe we don’t need to worry so much about the story itself.
Yeah, forget the story.
After all, what is a story if not a vehicle for a message?
(it’s a story, obviously)
I don’t much care about Ncuti vanishing from Dr Who because I don’t much care for his doctor. I saw a handful of episodes because I couldn’t find the TV remote to turn them over, and they were okay, but I don’t remember them.
But I remember Eccleston’s gas mask aliens.
I remember Matt Smith’s Dalek episodes.
I remember these because the story was bigger than the message, to the point where you didn’t need to think about the message. You could derive it from the story, mine it from the script, sure. But you weren’t beaten around the ears with it.
Bad writing is an insult to its readers.
I don’t watch much TV these days. I wonder if my tastes have changed, but every time I see someone complain about ‘woke’ television or books, I am reminded that a lot of people -feel- what I am feeling, but they don’t have the time or vocabulary to hand to express it.
It’s like those open mic poetry nights where there’s always someone telling you that racism is bad. You know racism is bad, so hearing them yell this into your face feels patronising.
I don’t need Doctor Who to tell me dumping car batteries into the ocean (which I conceal inside the bodies of bears I’ve killed) is a bad thing for the environment.
I need Doctor Who to entertain me.
All else is secondary.
Have your lessons, have your morals, sure. But don’t do your audience the disservice of treating them like they’re small-minded, hateful little people every time they tune in.
Because one day they’ll stop and find someone who respects them.
END
