ow that all the cheerleading about the new Doctor Who turning into a Yorkshire lady
has died down a bit, it's fair to ask whether the new series has pulled itself
out of its 55-year slump.
Doctor Who was conceived as a children's show. Apparently, British children found the idea of giant talking salt shakers with plungers stuck on the front to be immensely terrifying. So we can't complain too much that the nerdy-genius-babbling-after-ten-cups-of-coffee dialogue of the David Tennant era finally died down.
But they overdid it. In the third episode of the new season, Ms. Unlucky No. 13 goes back to 1953 Montgomery, Alabama to help Rosa Parks sit at the front of the bus. An evil time traveler interfered with history by giving the bus driver the day off, so he went fishing, and her task is to put him back. That's the whole story.
The new theme seems to be that The Doctor (Jodi Whittaker) gets outraged about something or other, so she runs around a lot frantically doing good deeds and trying to sound down-to-earth. Her new role is time cop, standing athwart history, yelling Stop. The fans are wondering whatever happened to that fun-loving guy who once blew up the entire universe by mistake.
They should have made her his sister—or maybe his aunt—instead of breaking the canonical twelve-regeneration rule. The female Master was brilliant, but this new Doctor seems to have misplaced more than his Y chromosome.
What makes sci-fi worth watching isn't heroic characters doing good deeds and reciting lessons from history. History isn't a simple-minded story of good guys vs bad guys. Telling kids it's a forum for feeling good about themselves for fighting injustice would be lying to them. As goofy as they were, the last few Doctors were far more realistic in depicting the craziness and terrible majesty of the universe.
Doctor Who represented a struggle to rise above history, at the cost of realism. Who could forget that panicky doofus Doctor with the piece of eternally un-wiltable celery, defying all the laws of biology, stuck on his jacket? Or how 'bout the one where people were turning into graffiti, thanks to an invasion by the two-dimensional graffiti people? Another fascinating character, in an episode that was remarkably touching, was said to have had so many facelifts that she was little more than a big piece of skin attached to a frame like a trampoline.
Doctor Who used to be quirky and imaginative. Now they preach to us that racism is bad. Next week: Water is wet. Week after next: Math lessons.
The humans on this planet need to have their imagination stimulated more than they need a selective recounting of feel-good history lessons. So here are some ideas for new stories. BBC, feel free to use them.
- The Quality of Brexit: The Doctor goes back to 2016 to stop a nefarious scheme by an evil alien named Nigel, a member of a dissident faction of a species called the Croutons, which is not only trying to push the UK out of the EU, but also, as proof that they're pure evil, increase global warming.
- Black Death Forever: The Doctor discovers that being a Time Cop is not all about doing good deeds. The Doctor has to travel to 14th century Europe and stops an evil time traveler from curing the bubonic plague. Then, after making sure no one prevents the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and Artichoke Franz Ferdinand, she tops it off by preventing somebody from stopping the Holocaust.
- The Military-Industrial Complex Menace: The Doctoress travels to the 1960s, tries LSD, listens to some Jimmy Hendrix, shacks up with Zoë Heriot, and discovers that the Vietnam War was bad.
- The Taxes of Wrath: The Doctor goes back to 2000 to make sure British taxpayers pay their HM Revenue and Customs bill on time—a subtle hint about Section 363 of Communications Act 2003, whereby British citizens are forced to pay a £150 a year license fee for the privilege of having a color TV, so the BBC TV Centre receives sufficient revenue for their new escalator. It turns out to be a Sontaran plot to bore the humans in the colonies to death.
- The Bells of Saint Berners-Lee: The Doctor discovers that, due to an undocumented flaw in Cisco's Generic Routing Encapsulation Tunneling Protocol, humans can be sucked into the World Wide Web over port 443. He or she must once again ride his or her motorcycle up the side of The Shard to save them. Afterward, he or she submits a bug report along with a patch, and he, she, or they receive the Croix de Guerre from the militant commando wing of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) which, by this point in history, has been waging a decade-long scorched-earth jihad against the W3C.
Maybe in the last half hour of the Rosa Parks episode, the Silence punches a hole in reality, prompting an invasion by gaseous multi-dimensional hafnium-based beings who force the humans to worship a deity composed entirely of Bigfoot toenail clippings. I don't know. I started channel surfing, looking for something imaginative. The fiction is out there . . . .
oct 23 2018, 5:03 am. last edited oct 24 2018, 5:15 am
