Day of the Doctor

[kindkit]

I finally got to watch "Day of the Doctor."

I enjoyed it a lot while I was watching it. There were fun shout-outs to the classic series, John Hurt was marvellous, and Billie Piper was good as Bad Wolf, which means that I got to enjoy watching her in Who for the first time since Doctor/Rose started to become A Thing In Canon.

But then it was over and I started to think. This is usually a bad idea with new Who episodes, Moffat's no less than Davies's, because the episodes don't bear serious thinking.

Here's where this one broke down for me: nothing means anything now. Nothing the Doctor does need ever have any consequences, because he can always go back and fix it. He can cross his own timeline with impunity, he can change history at will. I agree with ibishtar that removing consequences and pain and loss from the Whoniverse in this way is cowardly storytelling. Without consequences, there is no meaning. None. The Doctor can play dice with the universe and always win. Moffat can have his big high stakes stories with planets blowing up, and yet add on the handy moral that violence is always wrong, kids! We viewers can have our Doctor Who adventures without ever have our consciences troubled by how this relates to the real world, because it just plain doesn't anymore. The Doctor never has to make a hard choice. The Doctor can scold Kate Stewart for being willing to blow up London when there was no alternative that wouldn't cost more lives, pull a technological rabbit out of his hat that was not available to her, and she gets the blame and he gets the praise. And the Doctor will never see the irony of it (if he ever did) because yes, for him there are always alternatives. The rules of the universe bend for him, and for him only.

The problem, storytelling-wise, with making an unlimited superhero is that there is no excuse for him not to save everybody. How can the Doctor be justified in doing anything, anything at all for the rest of his lives except going back and endlessly rewriting history? Moffat has done his best to include an excuse: time locks still happen, but "something" allowed the Doctor to go back and fix the end of the Time War. So . . . "something" cares about Gallifrey but not about Pompeii, nor about any of the horrifying real-world events whose names you can easily supply, nor about any of the other horrors that are canon in the Whoniverse? It's lousy storytelling, because it makes a special exception to the rules of the universe so that the Doctor can get his planet back and feel better about himself. (No, it's not really about the children of Gallifrey, because if it is, we again have to ask why the children of Gallifrey are worth a universe-bending exception while the children of earth, dying in their thousands every day from poverty, war, economic exploitation, and abuse, aren't.)

Moffat has written himself into a premise from which no further storytelling is possible except as an act of bad faith. To show the Doctor saving, say, the people of the Philippines from all their current suffering would insult the real suffering that they aren't really being saved from, but to show him happily continuing his adventures (which do involve saving people, yes, but not everybody all the time relentlessly) means that we all, the Doctor and his companions and Moffat and we viewers, have to forget that "Day of the Doctor" ever happened. We have to pretend he's got limits and constraints.

Well, I liked it better when he really had them.

Comments

[lilacsigil]

And there's a hundred ways that there still could be limits and Gallifrey being an exception for some reason (Bad Wolf?), and so on and so on, but it was more important to Moffatt to show the upside, and it really undercut not only the Doctor's decision at the time, but his decisions since and in the future. Personally, I'm quite happy that Gallifrey isn't destroyed and that there was an alternative to genocide, but it was just so shallowly and clumsily done. And he shouldn't have scolded Kate Lethbridge-Stewart when he had made exactly the same choice on a much bigger scale and hadn't undone it yet! Kate Lethbridge-Stewart wasn't committing genocide, at least.

[kindkit]

I'm happy that Gallifrey isn't destroyed and there wasn't genocide (though apparently it's still okay in New Who to genocide the Daleks?) but I don't like it as a retcon of the single most awful and personally painful thing the Doctor has ever had to do, something whose memory has shaped him forever afterwards. Moffat has been clearly building towards this, because he has kept setting up situations where the Doctor might have to choose the lesser of two evils and then inserting very deux ex machina ways out of the dilemma. Someone in ibishtar's post made the point that "a sudden way out of a hopeless situation" worked well, storytelling-wise, in The Doctor Dances because it was a contrast to all the pain the Doctor had faced, all the times when not everybody could live, but that Moffat keeps doing it over and over again and every time it gets cheaper, more gimmicky, less a ray of hope in a dark place than a get out of jail free card.

At this point I feel about Moffat!Who the way I felt about mainstream comics before I stopped reading them: that there wasn't any point caring about a story, because it would all be retconned and nothing would ever change in a meaningful way.

[lilacsigil]

he has kept setting up situations where the Doctor might have to choose the lesser of two evils and then inserting very deux ex machina ways out of the dilemma.

To be honest, I haven't watched the last two or so seasons, which says a lot about it, really, but this was one of the reasons why I stopped. Having the great emotional drama AND the happy ending for everyone just doesn't work all that often. The Doctor Dances is a great example, because it balances pain and joy not just for the Doctor but for everyone. Nancy is still a homeless teenage single mother in the Blitz, but she has her son back. The people from the hospital are healed, but they're not magically made safe. Here we don't know the random "2.45 billion children on Gallifrey", nor do we know the countless others who have been killed in the Time War. There's no scale and no particular sense of it except what it means to the Doctor, and that's just sad.

[kindkit]

I haven't really been watching, either, for that reason among others. I hung on through the end of Amy and Rory's time on the show, but then there was a new companion I had no prior emotional attachment to, and my interest in the show wasn't strong enough to keep me going.

[tree_and_leaf]

he shouldn't have scolded Kate Lethbridge-Stewart when he had made exactly the same choice on a much bigger scale and hadn't undone it yet!

Actually, I didn't mind that bit, partly because I thought it was fairly clear that he was projecting his own guilt like mad, and also because he didn't then go on to arbitrarily destroy her career for doing something much less egregious than he had once done. (Yes, I'm still bitter about what happened to Harriet Jones).

[lilacsigil]

It wasn't just the scolding on that particular occasion, but the idea that (like Harriet Jones) humans shouldn't get engaged with things above their station because the Doctor will fix it. At least in the case of Ten it was part of a traumatic downward spiral (involving Saxon being elected!) to Waters of Mars, but this was shown as a positive thing!

[vilakins]

I don't think he did change his timeline. I regard what they did as being what happened happened, but they forgot due to the Blinovitch effect or whatever, so though there's hope that Gallifrey still exists, 9, 10, and 11 still had to live with the original decision. So the consequences of destroying Gallifrey, or planning to do it, still shaped them.

Time's a hard thing to play with. What's fluid, and what's fixed? The Doctor mentioned fixed points like the destruction of Pompeii, yet he was quite happy (and smug, the bastard) about destroying Britain's golden age along with Harriet Jones's career.