Twisted Spinster

And boy aren’t you all relieved. Though there are all those classic episodes not to mention past unreviewed episodes from this season to blog about… Muahahahaha!

Anyway — well, that was a mishmosh of hurried scenes. And then there’s the Soundtrack From Hell, never shutting up, never letting the viewer figure out by his ownself what emotion to feel at a scene… I’m glad that the BBC is employing Welsh musicians and all, but can’t they pay them just as much for a subtle flute motif, or for some of that weird, spare electronic stuff the old show was famous for? I never thought I’d be nostalgic for Moog synth bloops and beeps, until I found myself having to struggle to hear dialog over shrieking trumpets and crashing cymbals.

More thoughts: the heck with plasticene monsters, if I were a kid the note of utter misery this season ended on would have me suffering months of nightmares, while the “terrifying” notion of the universe being destroyed by creatures in tin cans would have long been shuffled to the back of my memories. I am beginning to think that maybe I’m an alien — if not a Time Lord, then at least a member of a race that doesn’t forget what it’s like to think as a child once adulthood is attained. Children are a lot more immune to the supposed “horrors” of fictional death and destruction and a lot more sensitive to the “everyday” mental and emotional trauma caused by mere human relations than adults seem to grasp. This has been something I came to realize at an early age, but that’s another story.

Another thing: it occurred to me that especially in the hands of Russell T Davies that the Doctor’s character has been treated like a prick tease. And in this episode we finally get the bitter unboyfriend in the person of Davros, who acts out the dream of every gay boi who’s been in unrequited love with an unwitting glam straight, by trashing said straight in front of the straight’s fashionable friends. Davies’ handing over the reins of the show’s control to another can’t come too soon… but we still have the shortened 2009 season to deal with, and I think Davies is writing at least one if not most of those episodes. Also a horrid thought occurred to me: just because he won’t be executive producer anymore doesn’t mean he won’t get to write more episodes. The horror, the horror…

One final note: a lot of fans were in hysterics about it but I didn’t find the dispensing of Donna to amnesiac oblivion all that bad. Of course the “make the character forget all the wonderful things that they did so they can live a normal life” is a lame fictional contrivance, but what else could they do with her character? Clearly having her travel with the Doctor “forever” was impossible — for one thing, a nearly immortal being isn’t going to cart about a human after retirement age (the show has attempted to point that out on more than one occasion — this is one of the strengths of the new show) so the only other way to get rid of Donna would be to kill her outright. And in any case she turned out to be one big Deus Ex Machina, and you know what always happens to those. If you ask me she missed a bullet; Donna fans should be grateful she didn’t get the Adric treatment.

PS: by all accounts the new executive producer, Steven Moffett, is planning to dispense with such “classic” villains as the Daleks. Thank God say I — those tin-can Space Nazis passed their shelf life long ago. And speaking of Nazis, what was up with Martha encountering Frau Blücher in a mysterious castle in Germany? Do the writers of Doctor Who not realize that there haven’t been ominous, mad-neighing-of-horses-causing women in Germany since Katarina Witt was born? It would have been funnier — and scarier — if instead of the stock hefty humor-impaired Teutonic female they had had Martha encounter a black leotard-clad metrosexual whose response to the Doomsday weapon that was the Osterhagen Key was “Yes, Ve are doomed and I am filled with remorse, and it is most delicious.”