Lawrence Miles on Who
Wednesday, January 6th, 2010Well The End of Time was reliably anticlimactic. Bye bye Russell T. So long David Tennant. I bow in deference to Lawrence Miles’ assessment of the finale, copied and pasted from here.
1. Repeats of “The End of Time” will seem more tolerable if you try not to notice that the first hour is almost entirely made up of characters telling you what’s going to happen at the end, and that the second hour is almost entirely made up of characters reminding you what they said was going to happen at the end.
2. Also, the final Happy Ending Montage is almost tolerable if you forget that you’ve already had to sit through “Journey’s End”.
3. Russell T. may now have presented us with the lowest nadir of “magic wand” plotting (wherein the Machina that Exes the Deus is just an ordinary handgun, which can destroy the link to Gallifrey even though this makes no sense and hasn’t occurred to either the Master or Rassilon as a possibility), but the bugger’s never going to be able to do this to us again.
4. At least we now live in a nice, simple, straightforward world where black people of opposite sexes always get it on, even if they’re wholly mismatched in every respect.
5. Look at it from Gary Russell’s point of view: after a decade and a half of writing stories based on high-concept ideas like “what would happen if the Nimon met the Macra?”, he finally gets to script-edit a multi-million-pound TV story which ends with the Master killing Rassilon. Using death-rays. From his hands.
That being said Bernard Cribbins just has to scrunch up his Wombly eyes and my heartstrings get a good, firm tug. As for Matt Smith/Steven Moffat, I am cautiously optimistic. Who was in something of a rut and maybe this is exactly what it needs. A changing of the guard.
I am a little concerned to see so many of Moffat’s creations from previous episodes reappear in the trailer. Weeping Angels? River Song? This season may be as crowded as RTD’s first, which hit as many populist notes as it could, seeing as a second year wasn’t guaranteed. Britney’s Toxic, Simon Pegg, Big Brother, Trinny and Susannah – looking back it all seems a bit desperate, no?
Returning to his own story concepts is of course fine, but I am worried that Moffat is too concerned with going with what is familiar to the established fanbase. For all my complaints about RTD, he gambled big and managed to transform Doctor Who from a nerd commodity stuck in the horizon of a convention-centre-black-hole, to popular Saturday evening fare. Hell he may have even staved off the evil empire of Murdoch from wiping out the BBC for just a little while longer. The merchandising alone…
Now if only someone would commission an episode from Miles himself.