Doctor Who
We are having Thinky Thoughts about (2005 onwards) Doctor Who
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24th February 2020 @ 10:35 pm
Sherlock came up in our house the other day, very much off the back of us saying that we’d just recorded a thinky thoughts episode on doctor who, and people going into the whole ‘fucking moffat’ debate. (it’s what we say in our house, as short hand, for why something got ruined. I spend quite a lot of late game of thrones just grumbling ‘fucking moffat’ around the house, even tough he had nothing to do with it.. same principle haha) and yes, Sherlock is one of those bizzare ones that I was convinced was THE BEST THING EVER, and then when you have some distance to it you realise… it really kind of isn’t. i’m on my laptop so don’t have a facepalm emoji to hand, but just picture a facepalm here please 🙂
And yes, in 2021 we are going to spend a looooot of time talking about the entire premise of Merlin and Merlin and Arthur’s destiny and how the show just… didn’t do it. and why. and also wtf? lol but for now we have to bite our tongues and stay spoiler free… it’s absolutely a massive credit to the characters and the acting that merlin had 5 seasons and I love it as much as I do, in spite of the massive fail to live up to any of the promises they made…
and oh my god, ‘why didn’t you write the show I wanted you to write?’ is basically the entire bottom line of fascination & frustration. and also why fandom and fanfic is THE BEST!!!
22nd February 2020 @ 7:42 pm
(Spoiler warning for potentially anyone other than Michelle and Ruth lmao: I somehow end up ranting about the final season of Merlin a little and I mention some feelings about both DW and Sherlock in general that miiiight count as slightly spoilery but probably not)
You have put my hatred of Moffat into words perfectly. I gave up on Doctor Who somewhere between 11 and 12 – I think I was watching it still by the end of 11 just because it was the thing my sister and I did on Saturdays, but then during 12 I just couldn’t bring myself to care anymore. I think I started watching a little while before Blink – that’s the first episode I rememeber watching, I know I was in lower school so I couldn’t have been older than 10 years old, and it scared me too much to watch Doctor Who for a while. I’ve watched a few 9 episodes since then, but mostly my Doctor is David Tennant. For a while I loved Doctor Who, and then I convinced myself I still loved Doctor Who, and then I admitted… it’s not good. A lot feels even worse in retrospect than it was to me at the time, in part just because I’m now 22 and have a literature degree so I know a tad more about storytelling than I did when I was a kid, but also for the same reason Sherlock seemed good for a while until I looked back on seasons 1-3 in light of season 4: Moffat is good at promising things, and not very good at delivering them. I love the world of BBC Sherlock, but I hate the plots. I love the idea of the 11th Doctor, but I hated every plot he was involved in. (Heck, bringing Merlin into this because I bring Merlin into everything: I was 10000% obsessed with Merlin as an 11-15 year old, but now rewatching along with Destiny and Chicken I’m realising that what I love is the characters and the relationships and the world, not the plots. They keep promising this whole ‘uniting Albion’ thing but never fulfil it to my satisfaction. I want to see Arthur react to Merlin’s magic over a long arc with serious character development, but it gets squished into one episode (or two? I don’t rememeber)) My feelings veer dangerously close to “why didn’t you write the show I wanted you to write?”, but it really bothers me when writers suggest something cool is going to happen – especially regarding character development and relationships – and then don’t fulfil it. Moffat keeps saying “the Doctor has this dark past that will come back to haunt him ooooh” and then… it doesn’t. A Big Bad comes and the Doctor just… beats it. It’s fine. He’s still a superhero, and the people around him are superheroes, and it’s all so BORING.