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bugger all this Harry Potter, anyway
Monday, 23 July 2007 02:56 pmPhooey. As a result of spending the weekend reading and re-reading Deathly Hallows, I completely forgot to mark an essay and read an Honours thesis draft I was supposed to do by today, resulting in interviews with sad, reproachful students in between a morning of frenetic curriculum advice. I also damned nearly forgot to phone my dad on his birthday. It's true: fantasy rots the brain.
So. Russell T. Davies. Grrrr, aargh. Grateful though I am to the man for his masterly resurrection of the Doctor Who franchise in its current appealing form, with very few exceptions I really cannot say that I enjoy his actual scriptwriting. He's the anti-Steven Moffat: he flings together scripts on a principle of "wouldn't it be cool if [insert giant set-piece concept here]". Then he cobbles together a story that more or less almost justifies the set piece. Thus we largely fail to rejoice in the possession of Cybermen vs. Daleks, farting aliens in Downing Street, the Tardis in a motorway chase scene, scenery-chewing giant spiders from the centre of the earth, and random Scottish Victorian technicolour warrior monks. The only reasonably well-constructed episodes he's written are "Tooth and Claw" (despite the warrior monks), "Gridlock" (which I loved) and "Love and Monsters", for which I retain an affection in the teeth of the loathing of most Who fans. The man damned well thinks in cartoon. "The Long Game" equally balanced cool with silly, "New Earth" operates in giant splashes of fabulist pseudo-justification, and don't get me started on "The Runaway Bride", a collection of plot holes loosely held together by loud noises and irritating people. Besides, he's writing Martha out for the first half of the next season. The man clearly has no taste.
The three-part finale to the third season is, in every way, vintage Davies. The Master is a classic Who villain resurrected, thus conforming to Davies's First Law of Season Finales. (And John Simm was brilliant, in manic energy the perfect foil to the Doctor himself: I just wish he'd had more subtle and intelligent things to do). "Utopia" was a bit of a non-event, marking time before the big finish: the aging of the Doctor in "The Sound of Drums" was simply ridiculous and deprived the episodes of the major strength of the series. With his cartoonish tendencies, Davies is horribly prone to cliché: the instant the Master's triumph gave way to the caption "ONE YEAR LATER" at the start of "Last of the Time Lords", I found myself thinking, OK, obviously there'll be some kind of fiddle with time and everything will roll back. Which it duly did. Yawn.
The emotional aspects of the three episodes were also dodgy in the extreme. The Doctor's complex responses to the notion of not actually being immortally alone were rendered in two-dimensional plastic by the script, and the revelation of the identity of the Toclafane was curiously lame, too, not the moment of pathos it should have been. In fact, about the only things I liked about the episode, apart from the Master himself, were Martha's departure (yay! self-aware intelligent companion yay!) and her rather dishy human doctor sidekick.
Phooey. Tchah and phooey. Davies needs to stick to producing the damned series, he does that well. Like George Lucas, he should be prevented from actual script-writing by the application of rubber bludgeons.
Last Night I Dreamed: either as or with a dark-haired, wildly eccentric ballet dancer, I was dancing on stage with Johnny Depp. Later we broke into someone else's larney hotel room to use the shower, noting with horror the occupants' giant, frumpy clothes.
So. Russell T. Davies. Grrrr, aargh. Grateful though I am to the man for his masterly resurrection of the Doctor Who franchise in its current appealing form, with very few exceptions I really cannot say that I enjoy his actual scriptwriting. He's the anti-Steven Moffat: he flings together scripts on a principle of "wouldn't it be cool if [insert giant set-piece concept here]". Then he cobbles together a story that more or less almost justifies the set piece. Thus we largely fail to rejoice in the possession of Cybermen vs. Daleks, farting aliens in Downing Street, the Tardis in a motorway chase scene, scenery-chewing giant spiders from the centre of the earth, and random Scottish Victorian technicolour warrior monks. The only reasonably well-constructed episodes he's written are "Tooth and Claw" (despite the warrior monks), "Gridlock" (which I loved) and "Love and Monsters", for which I retain an affection in the teeth of the loathing of most Who fans. The man damned well thinks in cartoon. "The Long Game" equally balanced cool with silly, "New Earth" operates in giant splashes of fabulist pseudo-justification, and don't get me started on "The Runaway Bride", a collection of plot holes loosely held together by loud noises and irritating people. Besides, he's writing Martha out for the first half of the next season. The man clearly has no taste.
The three-part finale to the third season is, in every way, vintage Davies. The Master is a classic Who villain resurrected, thus conforming to Davies's First Law of Season Finales. (And John Simm was brilliant, in manic energy the perfect foil to the Doctor himself: I just wish he'd had more subtle and intelligent things to do). "Utopia" was a bit of a non-event, marking time before the big finish: the aging of the Doctor in "The Sound of Drums" was simply ridiculous and deprived the episodes of the major strength of the series. With his cartoonish tendencies, Davies is horribly prone to cliché: the instant the Master's triumph gave way to the caption "ONE YEAR LATER" at the start of "Last of the Time Lords", I found myself thinking, OK, obviously there'll be some kind of fiddle with time and everything will roll back. Which it duly did. Yawn.
The emotional aspects of the three episodes were also dodgy in the extreme. The Doctor's complex responses to the notion of not actually being immortally alone were rendered in two-dimensional plastic by the script, and the revelation of the identity of the Toclafane was curiously lame, too, not the moment of pathos it should have been. In fact, about the only things I liked about the episode, apart from the Master himself, were Martha's departure (yay! self-aware intelligent companion yay!) and her rather dishy human doctor sidekick.
Phooey. Tchah and phooey. Davies needs to stick to producing the damned series, he does that well. Like George Lucas, he should be prevented from actual script-writing by the application of rubber bludgeons.
Last Night I Dreamed: either as or with a dark-haired, wildly eccentric ballet dancer, I was dancing on stage with Johnny Depp. Later we broke into someone else's larney hotel room to use the shower, noting with horror the occupants' giant, frumpy clothes.
