A Fanboy Writes

May 27, 2006 · 2 minute read

I haven’t talked too much about the new series of Doctor Who this time around. Which isn’t an indication that I haven’t liked this run so far; I think The Girl In The Fireplace is one of the best episodes of the show ever made, for example. But it’s annoyingly inconsistent. Tonight’s episode started out with a reasonable premise, and then proceeded to throw all that promise out of the window, with silly ideas like filming every other scene like a first-year film student who’s just watched The Third Man (yes, angles. Very film noir. We get it. Now put that camera back on the horizontal), kitchen-sink drama acted out with less subtlety than an average episode of Johnny Briggs, and a barely-developed villain (it sure was handy she was called The Wire, eh, viewers?). For an extra fanboy moment, I was annoyed to hear that they cut out the transmitter gag; if the episode can make references to Coronation Street, five seconds throwing out a funny reference to the old series would not have killed them. Fair’s fair, though, the Betamax gag was funny.

The sound was abysmal as ever, although I'm coming to the conclusion that it's not the composer's fault. I'm wondering if the soundtrack is being compressed to make it seem louder, thus leaving less space between, say, the vocals and the background music.

There comes a point where it's not enough to say that "well, it's better than the old stories, which were just silly all the time!" For a start, that's not true, but even if it was, so what? It's like the show's infatuation with this wonderful creation of Rose Tyler. I'm sorry, the last episode of the old series was in 1989. Things have moved on. At the moment, Rose has got all the depth of Cordelia from Buffy's first season, and the scripts are often far too flimsy to compare favourably with any other half-decent series of the past five years. It's not enough to think "well, this is certainly better than The Happiness Patrol!" They should be aiming for The Body.

This rant sponsored by "Really, it's only because I think Mark Gatiss is capable of so much better".