Doctor Who saves the world, again. Yawn
- Publication: The Times
- Date: 2010-04-02
- Author: Andrew Billen
- Page: 26
- Language: English
The Time Lord risks death by overkill. The best TV series know to ration the drama
Tomorrow the 11th Doctor Who, Matt Smith, will save the Earth. Forgive me for not prefacing my words with "Plot Spoiler Alert". There is even a brief sequence in Smith's debut in which he explains to the invading nasty of the hour that saving the Earth is his job. He is being modest, for since Doctor Who was revived in 2005, he has just as often saved the universe and, sometimes, time itself to boot. . The days when he would merely help to separate warring stone-age tribes or exterminate the Daleks on their home planet are long gone; 46 years-long gone to be pedantic.
And that, I would submit, is becoming a problem. The stakes on Doctor Who have been raised so high, so regularly, that they no longer have any meaning even, or, especially, for children. They have become absurd. Having, godlike, moved the Earth out of its orbit into another galaxy, writer Russell T. Davies ended one tale with the Tardis lassoing the Earth and dragging it back again. It is a moment best forgotten, not least because it fed into the what might be diagnosed as the Doctor's (or Davies's) messiah complex, the most embarrassing symptoms of which flared up on Christmas Day 2007 when David Tennant ascended into the air flanked by two robot angels. What this friendly viewer of five decades prefers, AO finds easier, to remember is the jeopardy facing not evening but threatening the Doctor (or his crush of the month).
Nor is it only Doctor Who that has lost power even as it has accelerated. The American thriller series 24, which was sadly but inevitably cancelled at the weekend, began life in 2001 with its hero, Jack, thwarting an assassination attempt on a presidential candidate. Its greatest shock was delivered by the murder of Jack's wife. By episode four of season six, a nuclear bomb had been detonated in north Los Angeles and 12,000 people (we were told) had been killed. It had, needless to say, nothing like the impact of Jack's killing of a loyal colleague in the same episode. Unless you know the dead, death is theoretical. As Jane Austen said on hearing of a British disaster in the Peninsular War. "How horrible it is to have so many people killed! And what a blessing that one cares for none of them!"
In exploding the bomb well before the serial stopped ticking, the desperate writers of 24: Day Six were agreeing with the legendary Hollywood know-nothing Sam Goldwyn when he demanded "a story that starts with an earthquake and builds up to a climax". He was wrong for reasons Alfred Hitchcock illuminated when he defined the difference between surprise and suspense. A surprise was when characters sat round a table and, without warning to them or us, a bomb suddenly went off beneath it. Suspense is when we know the bomb is ticking under the table: then even the most banal things the characters say or do become compelling. What Hitch did not say, but we might be allowed to infer, is that the size of the bomb, so long as it killed someone, was irrelevant.
To declare that there is more drama in a foot being mown off on Mad Men or a heart being crushed in Cranford would be, of course, to muddle the demands of separate genres. Doctor Who and Jack Bauer would never have fitted one of Austen's little pieces of ivory. But there is a supersizing tendency even in the plots of domestic TV dramas that can leave them indigestible. How many Coronation Street women can be tried for murder before viewers demand the enforcement of the law of diminishing returns? Not many more than the number of sieges on the Brookside cul-de-sac I would have thought. Overkill killed Brookside, as surely as The Bill died from the critical injuries sustained when Sun Hill cop house exploded. When that plane dropped on Emmerdale it destroyed not only the characters, but the soap's credibility as a portrayal of a rural community.
When I interviewed the new master of Doctor Who, writer Steven Moffat, I pleaded with him to lower the jeopardy levels some weeks. He replied that within every cataclysm there will be details that are "small, and intimate and personal". "But," he said, "I question your tactics if you're saying we should have a Doctor Who season finale with the words 'Now Smaller Than Ever'. Would you be piling into the next James Bond film if they said, 'This week he solves a minor espionage problem in Belgrade'?"
Actually, I countered, I was quite enjoying the smaller scale of the . current 24 season. But he was bored by it. "It is time they blew up the Sun!" Given last week's news he obviously knew more about television than me. The solar apocalypse will have to be saved for the movie. But isn't that the problem with gigantism in art? Not only can you never top it.
You can't go back either.
Caption: Matt Smith and Karen Gillan prepare for apocalypse in the new Doctor Who
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- APA 6th ed.: Billen, Andrew (2010-04-02). Doctor Who saves the world, again. Yawn. The Times p. 26.
- MLA 7th ed.: Billen, Andrew. "Doctor Who saves the world, again. Yawn." The Times [add city] 2010-04-02, 26. Print.
- Chicago 15th ed.: Billen, Andrew. "Doctor Who saves the world, again. Yawn." The Times, edition, sec., 2010-04-02
- Turabian: Billen, Andrew. "Doctor Who saves the world, again. Yawn." The Times, 2010-04-02, section, 26 edition.
- Wikipedia (this article): <ref>{{cite news| title=Doctor Who saves the world, again. Yawn | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Doctor_Who_saves_the_world,_again._Yawn | work=The Times | pages=26 | date=2010-04-02 | via=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=24 April 2024 }}</ref>
- Wikipedia (this page): <ref>{{cite web | title=Doctor Who saves the world, again. Yawn | url=http://cuttingsarchive.org/index.php/Doctor_Who_saves_the_world,_again._Yawn | work=Doctor Who Cuttings Archive | accessdate=24 April 2024}}</ref>
