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Sunday, October 2, 2011

Explanation vs Justification

Last night's Doctor Who finale was pretty solid. That's my review, in a nut shell. Instead of talking about the episode itself and what it set up for the future of Matt Smith's tenure as the Doctor, let's examine what it explained and justified, or didn't,  in past episodes.

Looking back at 'Let's Kill Hitler', Doctor Who's midseason premiere, it was a terrible episode. The titular character, Hitler, spent all of four minutes on screen, and was in no way critical to the plot of the episode. Basically they used Hitler as a draw to get the audience to tune in for the premiere, but then didn't know what to do with him in the actual episode. They arbitrarily introduced a new character, Mel, who supposedly had been a part of Rory and Amy's life since the beginning. So much so, that Amy names her daughter after this supposed bestie. All just so the writers could throw in a "surprise" of Amy and Rory's best friend actually being their half Time Lord daughter. Then, for no explicable reason, except perhaps to make the episode a "stand alone" in the Doctor Who canon, the writers introduced the Justice League, or whatever they were called. Humans miniaturized and travelling about in a robotic full sized humanoid righting the wrongs of time and space. Essentially a Doctor clone. To give them their own story, they gave us antibodies, which apparently kill intruders, but why the Justice League would bother creating them in the first place never really gets explained. All in all, the whole episode felt like a mash up of different plots and ideas that the writers had had for this season, but just never got time to get around to.

At least that's what I thought through most of the back half of the season. Until the finale last night.

Last night's finale explained the reason for Mel. For as long as we have known River, her timeline has run opposite the Doctor's, but since 'Let's Kill Hitler' it seems that their timelines have synced, or at least are running in the same direction now. This is important to explain away River's capture, then breeding to be a psycopathic killer, then apparent memory loss, then sudden love of the Doctor, all before we get to the end point where everything depends on River being madly in love with our favorite alien. This, in no way, was the best way to handle this. Just off the top of my head, I would suggest River's timeline continues running opposite the Doctor's, then the River we have all known, who loves the Doctor, could justify the disintegration of time without the complicated unneccesary Mel plot. The only downside to that plan is that we'd have to go through the entire back half of the season wondering what happened to little Melody Pond.... but it's not like we've never waited for an explanation in this series before.

The finale also explained the little robot wielding men. Basically they provide an alternate body for the Doctor to be in at the time of his "death." Explanation. But it doesn't justify the Justice League (or whatever they're called)'s existence. The writers had already given themselves an out for the Doctor's death by creating the Flesh Doctor in the first half of the season. Why, oh why, do we need THREE Doctor's running around in the universe? We don't, even if one of them has to die.

Basically, the flaws of 'Let's Kill Hitler' can all be explained by Stephen Moffat's need to get a lot of plot points that didn't really fit in anywhere in the later episodes into the canon before the finale to justify the overly complicated finale plot that we got to see. As any designer will tell you though, at a certain point, fancy and complicated does not always equal better. At some point, there's an elegance in simplicity, and too much complication just makes things feel cluttered.

Here's the thing though, Doctor Who has never been about the overarching seasonal plot, and it probably never should be. The different seasons do have their own plots: Bad Wolf, Torchwood, Doctor Donna, etc, but they're never the focus of the individual episodes. Typically speaking, each Doctor Who episode is a stand alone comedic piece of universal history for us to enjoy and then forget 90% of. Most of what makes the show such an enduring success is that it has never really tried to be more than a quirky niche sci fi comedy. If the writers want to branch out into serious dramatic television, then they're going to need some help. It's not a move I'd recommend in any case, but it seems to be the direction the show is trying to head.

And it scares me more than the Daleks and Cybermen combined.

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