Tuesday, 26 August 2014

Deep Breath - Doctor Who

I would consider myself a casual fan of Doctor Who. I saw Moffat’s first series and enjoyed it mostly for Matt Smith and Karen Gillan, however due to my overall dislike for the excessively complex writing I didn’t watch anything else up until Smith’s regeneration episode. I thought I would give the show another chance by watching the debut episode of the new doctor, Peter Capaldi. Unfortunately again, I had a lot of problems with the episode in particular Steven Moffat’s writing.

This episode was meant to reintroduce the doctor in his new form and I don’t think Moffat understands that this is basically the only thing we need from the episode. Predictably however the episode seemed overcrowded with irritating side characters and an overly complex storyline. I understand the argument that this episode also needs to set up the new series but to me it seemed like Moffat has forgotten that this is Capaldi's first episode, and he needs to be somewhat established before moving on.

When Capaldi is onscreen it totally works, he’s an able and in fact brilliant doctor. I can even give a pass to how the story also focused highly on his companion since at this point she’s the only character who we know from the previous series. But I disliked how cluttered the story seemed and the undeniable lack of focus it had. Its almost as if they had several ideas and thought the best compromise would be to try and blend them all together somehow.

I said before about how the story needed to establish the new doctor, what he’s like and his new set of morals. So why on earth would there be an appearance from Matt Smith? His appearance to me seemed like the definition of backtracking and almost completely undermined his concluding episode. Some would argue that he needed to be there so Jenna Coleman’s character could accept the new doctor. But wouldn’t it have been great if the episode finished with her still unsure about him, and with a whole series coming up next I could imagine great tension when she gets to the point where she simply doesn’t trust him or doesn’t even recognise him anymore. That could have been a great story arc and one that hasn't been properly explored in Doctor Who before. Perhaps having the Doctor be a unpredictable loose cannon with a companion who he slowly has to build trust with. Now if they try doing something similar to that it would be horribly undermined by the appearance of Matt Smith here.

Look I’m not a ‘Whovian’, I don’t know Doctor Who all that well. But unfortunately I couldn’t help thinking throughout this episode ‘I wonder how Russell T. Davies would have handled this Doctor.’ and that’s sad because there were plenty of opportunities for this episode to be great, and even really surprising. But it just never happened.

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