usuallyhats | DW: "The Name of the Doctor" (Reply)

Vidukon was awesome! I am thinking about doing a proper write up post, but in case I don't get round to it, I want to acknowledge its awesomeness here. :D

One thing I decided not to do at Vidukon was join the Doctor Who finale watching party, and, having seen it, I am v. glad, because it would probably have made me grumpy. Here, have some bullet-points on why.

Let's face it, I am the sort of person who would vastly prefer "the Doctor never tells us his name, it's probably Jeremy or Hyacinth or something" to "the Doctor never tells us his name, it must be Important and Meaningful and Doom Laden", so this episode was never going to work all that well for me. (And now I am picturing Matt Smith yelling "it's JEREMY, all right?" and am very sad that didn't happen.) (Disclaimer: I quite like the name Jeremy, but it's not really considered cool, is it?)

Fundamentally I just hate it when New Who gets all portentous and mythic. I just want it to be about the Doctor wandering around the universe making friends and trying to help people. I also dislike the arcy stuff because it just doesn't work with the format of the show. RTD just about got away with Bad Wolf, but that's it.

This episode made me really worried about the anniversary special, because all the theories I've read about who the John Hurt Doctor is just make me go "NO NO NO NO NO". Maybe Moffat will pull something out that I don't hate... but on current form, I am not optimistic.

Blah blah dark Doctor angsty angsty blah angst is so much deeper and more important than happytimes doncha know.

OK, yes, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, but that's not the same as "sufficiently advanced technology is BASICALLY magic so we can do what we like and be all mystical and not bother with even paying lip service to rules or explanations or anything".

Oh which note... why is a time traveller's grave the one place they must never go? Why is it so dangerous? I genuinely do not understand this AT ALL. Surely the most dangerous place a time traveller could go is the day they set off?

From an in story point of view, I am OK with Clara sacrificing herself to save the Doctor (and, let's not forget, all of time and space). It makes sense as a choice she would make and on the terms the story has set up (...which don't make sense themselves, but whatever). From an out of story perspective... meh. Look, there's a gender imbalance at the heart of the show, which isn't going to change until/unless we get a female (or canonically non-binary) Doctor, but there's no need to make it worse by having all the women's lives revolve round the Doctor, ok? Or the bits of them we see, anyway, because there's an assumption implicit in the choice to show some parts of a character's life rather than others that the bits we see are the important bits, and the other bits, although cool, are the less interesting bits, because if they were that good, they'd be right there on the screen. Clara's had all these lives and experiences now, and I would LOVE it if the series acknowledges that later on and has her remember them all, but right now all those lives were all about facilitating the Doctor's life. SIGH.

Loved seeing Gallifrey, hated that we have even more evidence for the "almost all Time Lords are male" theory. (Were they both white, too? I thought so but I was watching on the tiny iPlayer screen and also texting at the same time.)

What was with everyone dying and coming back to life every five minutes? THIS ISN'T COMICS, PEOPLE.

So I love River, and I quite like Doctor/River, but I do not like it being actualfax no denying it canon. Because I feel like at this stage making anything definite canon about the Doctor's sexuality is just closing off possibilities that we've been playing with for years. Plus, all the Doctor-centric romancy stuff in the new series has been so heteronormative (with the exception of Jack), I would rather not have it at all if that's the way it's going to be.

Minor thing, but though I liked the idea of the Doctor's friends having a way of getting together to talk, I didn't like calling it a "conference call", that just irritated me. It's a bit "our current time is the default time" for my taste.

I didn't hate everything! I loved seeing the classic Doctors, even if I didn't like why we were seeing them. Ditto River and the Paternoster gang. (Strax's ongoing inability to get the hang of conventional human gender markers is entirely delightful.) And it's Moffat, so there were lots of funny bits, and Matt Smith and Jenna-Louise Coleman have excellent faces and everything. It was just all the stuff around that that I didn't like.

I feel the need to add that a few reservations aside I really loved "The Crimson Horror" and "Nightmare in Silver". Just... can we stop having arcs now, please? I don't like being unhappy with Doctor Who.