Bullshit

As River Song would say: SPOILERS.

SO, Doctor Who. I remember it, vaguely, form my childhood. My older brother, always a sucker for old-school monster stories, liked it for a while during the gory, gothic-tinged Tom Baker era and being a younger brother I naturally avoided it in public and then watched it secretly a few times and was scared witless by Tom Baker’s Insanity Grin. Then I forgot about it for a long time, and when it was reborn in 2005 I barely paid attention. Over the years I’ve occasionally heard a few things about it, seen come clips on YouTube etc., but generally ignored it, as any good American should.

Recently, for no reason whatsoever beyond being intrigued by the hype surrounding the 50th Anniversary of the show, I started watching. I sprinkled in some of the classics and a few of the older new episodes, but mainly I started watching the Matt Smith era for no other reason than there seemed like there were some interesting details in there. And for those who are already wondering: Yes, I watched Blink. It was actually the first episode I tried out, and based on it’s success I forged on. So stop asking me if I’ve seen Blink. I have.

Anyways, Dcotor Who has always been problematic for me, and remains problematic. In the old series I was always bothered by the slow pace, rough editing, terrible special effects, and the silly costumes. In the modern series they’ve solved many of those problems but some of the plot problems remain. All in all I think I’m in a Love/Hate relationship with this show at the moment. It’s sort of like an old friend from elementary school who comes back to stay with you for a while. You have fond memories, and you find him good company sometimes, but it’s just kind of strange.

Or maybe I’m more haunted by Tom Baker’s Insanity Smile than I’m letting on. LOOK AT IT (you can’t look away):

HOLY SHIT

The World is Ending! Again! And Again! And Again and Again!

So, let’s keep in mind that I am mainly familiar with the Steven Moffat/Matt Smith era. I know a lot of the general backstory and some specifics from previous incarnations, but let’s stipulate that I’m playing with half a deck. Still, I have observations about this most modern version of the show.

The first is simple: It is a lot of fun.

People often say that Doctor Who is a children’s program, and it is, to an extent. The science is all wobbly and the history is too, but there is an awful lot of fun  in the stories, the sense that danger is fleeting, death impossible, and that we’d all prefer to be flying around the universe rather than, say, going to work. Yes! That. There are dramatic moments and even deaths from time to time (not counting the 12 times the Doctor himself has ‘regenerated,’ stated as canon as a type of death, since what makes him him dies and his memories are reborn as someone new) but generally speaking this is a show where the universe is a playground and even the most dire of threats are resolved by the end of the episode – or the story arc, at the very least.

The characterizations are fun, too. The Doctor himself is played with an affecting mix of boyish charm, wonder, curiosity, heavy sadness, and insane temper, but always with a human heart somewhere under all the alien physiology. The companions I’m most familiar with, The Ponds, make for fun people as well, and have supported some very effective dramatic beats in the story.

Overall, I’m saying: Don’t take any of my criticisms to mean I’m not a fan. I am! I really enjoy it.

But.

The problem with the modern Doctor Who is simple: The world is always ending. The world is always ending and Amelia Pond is always near death or being tortured or abandoned for 36 years or having her baby torn from her loving arms. Always. Always. This is an effective strategy for telling interesting, compelling stories … until it isn’t, because my dramatic/end of the world chip is burned out.

Moments

The modern Doctor Who always wants moments – which is to say, Steven Moffat, the showrunner, wants moments. As in, Moments. The show craves those big, dramatic, emotional moments like a writer craves booze. That is, constantly. Few episodes go by without a big emotional beat between characters, or the end of the world, whichever is happening sooner. After so many partings of the way and heartfelt declarations of affection and epic this and epic that, my Epic Emotion Chip gets a little burnt out. These sorts of moments are meant to happen rarely in any story. Not every single episode. Not to mention the fact that Amy Pond has, let’s see, been abandoned several times, suffered childhood psychological trauma, been assaulted and near death, been kidnapped and had her baby taken away from her to be raised as an assassin, been split into two versions one of which was left to rot and fight robots for thirty-six years, robbed of her ability to have more children, and eventually banished to the past to live out her years decades before her own parents and everyone she knows is born. And yet at no point is there any serious suggestion that Amy has suffered, you know? Because she got to go on adventures in between these horrific moments.

After a while you get tired of The Girl Who Waited and want her to get some peace and stop being Moffat’s little Emotional Beat monkey.

Of course, part of this is a product of binge-watching – fair enough. I’m not waiting weeks or months for the next episode – I’m just porning my way through them, and why not. The thing is, once you release a work, you can’t force people to watch in some very slow way so your emotional beats feel measured. That sort of thing has to be baked in.

The Bandage

Part of this is, I think, a reaction to the fact that Doctor Who has never had the greatest plots. Now, 800 or episodes is a lot of storytelling, so I will grant that not only have some of them been very good, but Doctor Who has a certain structure and feel to it that remains even in the new version. It’s a Monster of the Week serial and always has been: Most episodes can be boiled down to a few basic plot points:

1. Doctor and Companion arrive somewhere, usually unexpectedly

2. There is mystery. Doctor surmises alien of some sort is behind it.

3. Doctor investigates/opposes, seems out of moves and about to lose

4. Twist = Victory!

Now, certainly not every single episode follows this pattern – but most do, and it works well enough, even when the Monster of the Week is the Daleks Yet Again or the Cybermen Yet Again. But the point is it works precisely because Moffat et al have created characters we really do care about. The Doctor is kind of charming, especially with the spice of his darker side emphasized. The Ponds were charming and hilarious, and their back story in regards to each other and the Doctor was affecting. That stuff worked, and it distracts from the fact that most of the mysteries are explained, somehow, via timey-wimey and a sonic screwdriver. In other words, Moffat basically writes himself into a corner and then shouts TIME LORD!, throws a smoke bomb, and escapes yet again. You can do that when your character has 50 years and 800 episodes of history, but goddamn it, Moffat is abusing the TIME LORD/SMOKE BOMB button. If you ask me.

Which no one has. Am I thinking too hard about this? Likely. I tend to get all obsessive with things like this – I ignore them for years while others are telling me to check them out, and then suddenly, as if it was my idea all along, I dive in, burrow deep, and live and breathe it for a while.

I do enjoy the show and will keep watching it. But that doesn’t mean the Smoke Bomb’s gonna keep working on me.

That’s right, Imma about to write about the ABC show Scandal starring Kerry Washington. The TL:DR version is: I never would have watched this unless forced to by The Duchess, then briefly found it balls-out brilliant, and now not so much.

Here’s the long version: So, like I said, The Duchess commanded one day that we check out Scandal because people were talking about it and The Duchess loves her some zeitgeist. And I do what I’m told or things get broken. So we started to watch.

Right about here is where spoilers might start happening. Just sayin’.

At first it was kind of dumb: The editing tricks were headache-inducing, and the whole idea of the super-connected Olivia Pope schtupping the President in secret was only mildly interesting. I find a lot of Shonda Rimes’ writing tricks a bit shopworn and annoying at this stage; any attraction they had for me eleventy billion years ago when Grey’s Anatomy launched has been worn away. But it was serviceable, and The Duchess liked it, so we hung in. And for a short period of time, during the Defiance Arc, as it’s known, this show became so adorably fucked up insane it was absolutely entertaining.

The Defiance Arc was brilliant because just as you assumed the whole point of the show was OMFG THE PRESIDENT IS SCHTUPPING OLIVIA POPE! the show set you up and then hit you over the head with a conspiracy that stole the election that elected President Fitz-whatshisname. A conspiracy that involved the First Lady, a Supreme Court Justice, a Texas Oilman, the future Chief of Staff, and Olivia Pope – but not the President, who thought he’d won the election fair and square. This was such a demented plot twist that it carried the show for a while solely on the fumes of its audacity. Along the way, the President murdered the Supreme Court justice while she lay dying of cancer in the hospital, to give you a hint of just how demented it all got.

That was then. The Defiance Arc was resolved and the show must go on, so it’s been casting about for other ways to distract us from awe-inspiring awfulness that is the central relationships of the show (and the fact that the main character is so lacking definition she basically does batshit things all the time for no reason and does not in any way resemble the character introduced in the pilot at all unless you count consuming red wine in volume, in which case, a little bit). These ways have so far involved creating larger and more ridiculous straw villains who Rule the Universe – even more powerful than the President! – who also have intimate connections to Olivia et al. It’s so hammy by this point I fully expect Olivia to wake up in the shower one day and it was all a dream.

The reason Defiance worked was that the central idea was demented, and wonderfully so – but the mechanics of it were mundane. The way they stole the election? Simple, clean, and small-scale. It made sense, once you suspended disbelief sufficiently. The new arcs are now so soapy and silly I’m cleaner after watching this show and that DOES NOT happen when I watch TV, usually.

Ah well, I just wrote 550 words on a TV show no one will remember twenty years from now. I feel dirty.

I’ve been a huge fan of Breaking Bad throughout its run, and so I watched the finale, Felina, with a mixture of joy and horror, because it was very well done and it also meant it was ending. You don’t often see television shows that have 60+ episodes that are all reliably excellent. Of all the episodes of Breaking Bad, the worst ones were still pretty damn great. Grading them, I don’t think there would any below a B- in my book, and even those would be rare.

So, yeah: I’m a fan.

The Internet encourages instant reactions to things and then a quick Forgetting. Breaking Bad was a few weeks ago and it’s already fading from the Internet like a dim memory from childhood. But I’ve been thinking about it still. Because the finale was great, and because I think it accomplished something truly amazing. So let’s talk about menace.

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