The Trouble With ‘Doctor Who’

…what happened?

Doctor Who Christmas Specials are reliably awful, to the point where despite watching every episode during the rest of the year I will refuse to watch the Christmas special because I don’t want to ruin my Christmas.

They conform to every whimsical cliché associated with Christmas whilst attempting. This year I managed to get to the 12 min mark before shutting off iPlayer. My palm immediately hit my face when Clara awakes to find Santa crashed on her roof.  Then we have a sudden shift in tone to deathly-serious, then back to painfully unfunny comedy, then to deathly-seriousness, and then Santa rides in on a reindeer. Then he gets off the reindeer and uses a remote control to lock the reindeer like a car. It’s at that point I turned off. I then looked at the reviews to find that the critics had obviously seen a completely different episode to the one I did.

I wasn’t invested. The tone was jumping from your typical snow-encrusted magic to hard sci-fi with no transition or space to breathe. And within the first ten mins we had already seen the monsters in full-frame with clear bright lighting. Not to mention these monsters were blandly designed and had a telepathy-related power that I swear every alien in series 8 had.

What happened? How did we go from An Unearthly Child to this?

Of course, Doctor Who doesn’t do hard sci-fi anymore. That’s fine. Doctor Who has endured for over fifty years because it’s evolved, and if you want to see how quick and readily the show evolves: look at Tom Baker’s run. At the start the show was a gothic horror, then showrunner Peter Hinchcliffe was fired because people were accusing Doctor Who of being ‘too dark’ – which is ironic considering that Tom Baker’s first few years were in hindsight the best the show has ever gotten. Then the show became a pantomime in space, which is clearly what inspired current Showrunner Stephen Moffat to include a central-locking Rudolph. This era was awful, and so Doctor Who was dragged kicking and screaming into the 80’s with a brand-new theme tune and a new hard sci-fi tone. Tom Baker was still on board, but his characteristic joy was gone – mostly because Baker was ill during shooting.

The show had radically re-jigged its theme and tone thrice, all with the same lead-role. And each era had it’s good and bad stuff, though the panto-era only had one good thing in the form of The City of Death.

Because, and this is the most crippling thing: Doctor Who is and has never been perfect. What sums up the show for me is how The Caves of Androzani – one of the best episodes not just of Doctor Who but of any sci-fi show – being immediately followed by The Twin Dillema…which is one of the worst episodes not just of Doctor Who but of any sci-fi show. This tragically funny sequence of events demonstrates how Doctor Who has the potential to be (and at rare moments is) a truly fantastic show, yet it so often hides behind the sofa of shlock. The good/bad ratio is probably at 1:50.

But there are times when one series as a whole will be better than others. As I said, the Hinchcliffe-era was the golden age of Doctor Who. Meanwhile, everyone can agree that the Peter Davidson-era was bland with a handful of exceptions, the Sylvester McCoy-era started as awful then suddenly became good, and we don’t mention the Colin Baker-era. It makes us want to hurt people.

The last series showed promise with Peter Capaldi’s Doctor, who is vastly different from any other incarnation – but the problem is that the show is turning into Sherlock In Space…only written by a ten year old with a fetish for middle-aged women. Moffat once again claimed that the show was ‘getting darker,’ yet we opened with giant dinosaurs and closed with Santa Claus Conquers The Bland Aliens.

Can someone please pull this man away from the writing desk?