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strange_complexSo, the Doctor Who Christmas special, then. I am usually an absolute sucker for these, frequently believing them to be far better on the day of viewing than I later realise is really justified. But sadly this one failed to wow me even on Christmas day itself. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
swisstone has already covered most of the plot-holes and lazy clichés, thus saving me the trouble, and I agree with his basic thesis - that Steven Moffat is not really giving Doctor Who the attention it needs or deserves. So I will stick to noting a few things which particularly struck me as I watched.
The two stand-out aggravations for me were mystical motherhood and negotiable death. On the mystical motherhood side, I couldn't shake off an icky feeling throughout the story that someone had pointed out to Moffat some of the sexist tropes which have cropped up in his previous stories, so he decided to Do Something About It and redress the balance - but completely failed because he assumed that femininity is essentially equivalent to motherhood, and can only understand motherhood anyway by treating it as strange and mystical and quasi-supernatural. I thought while I was watching that I recognised this as a common trope by male writers who are trying to portray women positively, but still fundamentally viewing them from a patriarchal and reductive point of view. However, having typed a seemingly endless string of searches involving words like "trope" "women" "feminine" "motherhood" "mysterious" "mystical" and "magical" into Google, I still can't seem to track down a basic description of it or a list of other examples, even on TV Tropes. Surely I'm not making this one up, am I? More likely I'm just using the wrong search terms. Anyway, it's annoying.
As for the negotiable death, Moffat has done this so often now that it is intensely predictable, and I groaned with resignation at the inevitability of what was to come as soon as Madge started seeing visions of her husband's 'death' in the time vortex. That's annoying in itself, because it makes Moffat's stories less able to surprise or enthral, but I find this particular device repellent even if it is only used once. It undermines our ability to engage meaningfully with in-story deaths, so that any emotions which they provoke have to be regarded as temporary or provisional until we can be sure whether or not the death is 'real' - often much later in the story. And it toys with the viewer, dangling a hard-hitting narrative with a very powerful emotive force, but then just waving it all aside without working through its consequences properly. I would respect Moffat very much if he had dealt with parental death properly in the Doctor Who Christmas special, and equally much if he had chosen not to include it at all. But what he actually did smacks of wanting to have it both ways - maximum emotional impact and a fairytale happy ending - without being prepared to do the creative work necessary to make the two consistent with one another. In other words, it is lazy writing again - not to mention insulting to people who have had to deal with the utter non-negotiability of death in the real world.
Other than that, I also felt that we hadn't had enough time to get to know the family and their wartime lives before they came to their Uncle Digby's house, so that it was difficult to get any real sense of how fantastic the house might seem to them in comparison to everyday normality, or how badly they needed such a wondrous experience. Here, in fact, it would have helped if the children had known by the time they arrived that their father was dead, so that we could have seen them briefly being able to forget their pain and loss as they got caught up in the magic of what the Doctor had in store for them. As it was, all the Doctor's efforts seemed rather embarrassingly over-blown from their point of view. And although this in itself could have been been used to move the emotional trajectory of the story forward by tipping the children off to the fact that something more fundamental was wrong within their family, it wasn't.
Meanwhile, I'm sufficiently steeped in the work of Ray Harryhausen at the moment to notice how similar the design of the Tree King and Queen was to that of the wooden figurehead who comes alive and starts attacking people in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and to be very little surprised to come across yet another example of the extent of his influence:
But as for Doctor Who, I don't really have anything else to say about this story.
Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.
swisstone has already covered most of the plot-holes and lazy clichés, thus saving me the trouble, and I agree with his basic thesis - that Steven Moffat is not really giving Doctor Who the attention it needs or deserves. So I will stick to noting a few things which particularly struck me as I watched.The two stand-out aggravations for me were mystical motherhood and negotiable death. On the mystical motherhood side, I couldn't shake off an icky feeling throughout the story that someone had pointed out to Moffat some of the sexist tropes which have cropped up in his previous stories, so he decided to Do Something About It and redress the balance - but completely failed because he assumed that femininity is essentially equivalent to motherhood, and can only understand motherhood anyway by treating it as strange and mystical and quasi-supernatural. I thought while I was watching that I recognised this as a common trope by male writers who are trying to portray women positively, but still fundamentally viewing them from a patriarchal and reductive point of view. However, having typed a seemingly endless string of searches involving words like "trope" "women" "feminine" "motherhood" "mysterious" "mystical" and "magical" into Google, I still can't seem to track down a basic description of it or a list of other examples, even on TV Tropes. Surely I'm not making this one up, am I? More likely I'm just using the wrong search terms. Anyway, it's annoying.
As for the negotiable death, Moffat has done this so often now that it is intensely predictable, and I groaned with resignation at the inevitability of what was to come as soon as Madge started seeing visions of her husband's 'death' in the time vortex. That's annoying in itself, because it makes Moffat's stories less able to surprise or enthral, but I find this particular device repellent even if it is only used once. It undermines our ability to engage meaningfully with in-story deaths, so that any emotions which they provoke have to be regarded as temporary or provisional until we can be sure whether or not the death is 'real' - often much later in the story. And it toys with the viewer, dangling a hard-hitting narrative with a very powerful emotive force, but then just waving it all aside without working through its consequences properly. I would respect Moffat very much if he had dealt with parental death properly in the Doctor Who Christmas special, and equally much if he had chosen not to include it at all. But what he actually did smacks of wanting to have it both ways - maximum emotional impact and a fairytale happy ending - without being prepared to do the creative work necessary to make the two consistent with one another. In other words, it is lazy writing again - not to mention insulting to people who have had to deal with the utter non-negotiability of death in the real world.
Other than that, I also felt that we hadn't had enough time to get to know the family and their wartime lives before they came to their Uncle Digby's house, so that it was difficult to get any real sense of how fantastic the house might seem to them in comparison to everyday normality, or how badly they needed such a wondrous experience. Here, in fact, it would have helped if the children had known by the time they arrived that their father was dead, so that we could have seen them briefly being able to forget their pain and loss as they got caught up in the magic of what the Doctor had in store for them. As it was, all the Doctor's efforts seemed rather embarrassingly over-blown from their point of view. And although this in itself could have been been used to move the emotional trajectory of the story forward by tipping the children off to the fact that something more fundamental was wrong within their family, it wasn't.
Meanwhile, I'm sufficiently steeped in the work of Ray Harryhausen at the moment to notice how similar the design of the Tree King and Queen was to that of the wooden figurehead who comes alive and starts attacking people in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and to be very little surprised to come across yet another example of the extent of his influence:
But as for Doctor Who, I don't really have anything else to say about this story.
Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.
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yupyup
Date: Tuesday, 17 January 2012 10:34 (UTC)Re: yupyup
Date: Tuesday, 17 January 2012 22:37 (UTC)I heard about Moffat's rebuttal of criticism regarding Sherlock at the BAFTA Cymru preview screening of The Hounds of Baskerville, both from a friend who was there and from this article (http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/need-to-read/2012/01/04/sherlock-writer-steven-moffat-furious-with-sexist-claim-91466-30062866/) (which I'm sure you'll have seen, as it references your Guardian piece directly). What the article doesn't make clear, but my friend's write-up did, was that the issue of sexism in Sherlock was raised in the very first question when the floor was opened up to the audience - which is a good indication of how prominent the issue has become amongst his target audience, and how fed up people are about it. But you are quite right that his response shows a continuing total failure to understand what it actually is that people are complaining about. In fact, not only did he confuse being excessively protective towards women with actually respecting us as human beings - he also deftly deflected the question from the issue of whether the programme (and therefore he as writer) is sexist to whether the central character is. Grrrr - not the same thing at all!
Sadly, it's obvious at this stage that Moffat ain't gonna change. He's hearing the complaints, but he's not really listening to them - and I doubt he ever will. But I'm glad all the same to hear a rising chorus of voices raised in criticism about it. It may be too late for him, but the more the problems in work like his are called out, the more hope there is that future writers will learn how to avoid them.
Re: yupyup
Date: Wednesday, 18 January 2012 12:18 (UTC)Re: the particular episode of Sherlock, I half agree with you, but possibly for different reasons, in that, I also find Moffat’s sexism far less egregious here than in Who (I mean, to me, asking whether Sherlock is sexist kinda brings to mind an old line about popes and catholics…it's about the power of pure rationality, it's likely that its not gonna be great with the ladies) but as your nice Bechdel test userpic makes plain, Who is a different matter. As you say, Moffat’s not capable of hearing, that much is plain…but maybe some of the people at BBC Cymru are…Really, I understand the decision, insofar as Moffat’s episodes during RTD’s tenure were outstanding, and there are certain things he has a real talent for as a dramatist (timey-wimey plots, great monsters etc)…but its interesting to me that they thought they could hand over a show whose success was in the hands of a gay-man/woman/metrosexual man triumvirate to a dude who has such serious problems with women and thought it wouldn’t have an effect. What RTD/Gardener’s input/thought-process here was would be interesting to know…and I also really want to know what they and DT really think about the current situation…Anyway, maybe it is too late now for Who, but if it has been heard that gender politics in the writing of drama, and Who in particular, is a real issue…and an issue insofar as it actually seriously impacts the quality of the drama, then that will be something.
Re: yupyup
Date: Wednesday, 18 January 2012 12:18 (UTC)Which is all to say that probably, I should just start dealing with the fact that maybe Who is over for me (and not waste my time sticking it to Moffat in public…oh…but it was such fun!)…dammit, hoisted on my own….
Re: yupyup
Date: Wednesday, 18 January 2012 23:10 (UTC)Re: yupyup
Date: Wednesday, 18 January 2012 23:02 (UTC)On your more general point about how Who has changed since Moffat took over, I really hope it isn't too late in the sense that the show can never recover from this! But yes - surely RTD must wince sometimes, at both Who and Sherlock? And BBC Cymru can't be entirely deaf to people's complaints. Sadly, we're clearly stuck with Moffat until the 50th anniversary year has been dealt with, but Who had always reinvented itself, and I'm optimistic that it can find a new direction once Moffat moves on.