I have been writing this thing for over eight years now and, except for the beer stuff, it’s been largely driven by the facts and opinions surrounding the weakness of the Federal government. Way back then Paul Martin killed off the Liberal Party by slow drip poison starting almost a decade ago by dividing the party against Chretien and Harper declared the corpse cold with last week’s election. So, what to write about now? Doctor Who for starters. Just look at this statement today from the show’s top executive, Steven Moffat:
It’s heart-breaking in a way, because you try and tell a story, and stories depend on surprise, stories depend on shocking people, stories are the moments you didn’t see coming – those are what live in you and burn in you forever. If you are denied those, it’s vandalism. To have some twit who came to a press launch write up a story in the worst, most ham-fisted English you can imagine and put it on the Internet … I just hope that guy never watches my show again, because that’s a horrific thing to do. It is exactly like that boring man in the pub, who waits until you’re nearly finished your joke and jumps in with the punchline, and gets it slightly wrong. You hate that guy, you just hate those guys too – can you imagine how much I hate them? … It’s only fans who do this – or they call themselves fans – I wish they could go and be fans of something else!
What a bizarre thing to say. “My show”? “Vandals”? “Go and be fans of something else”? There is, of course, an underlying problem causing the need to discuss the show this year as it become more and more under Moffat’s control. It makes no sense. I made this point over at James Bow’s blog. James has sensibly been writing about centrist politics and pop culture for longer than I have – and done a far better job. I know. I have let the team down, falling into that trap of believing that Twitter and Facebook have made blogging irrelevant. Sure no one reads this stuff anymore but is that any reason to pack it in?
Anyway, less about me and more about Moffat. People are starting to compare the show with that disaster of the post-9/11 culture, Lost. Moffat seems to think convoluted is a fix all replacement for clever. Sadly, this is mostly the case with not only the long arc of the story he controls but the scripts he personally assigns to himself and the new characters he introduces. Most embarrassing is this thing “The Silence” which seems to feed Moffat’s need to one up the Daleks as the main baddies all time. But they make no sense. Other characters must have run into them over the past 48 years. Other baddies must be subservient to them. Oh, but all forget that they have seen them one they turn away… that’s a great fix. Hopefully, there is a Dallas solution at the end of this and the foreshadowed “it was all a dream” scenario plays out.
Confusion plus a general shift in all underlying premises developed over a 48 year run of a TV show. Yawn. Self-indulgence. A return to the slow death of the John Nathan-Turner years as far as I can tell. That was the last time someone decided to remake the show and move it from a fun relatively easily resolved romp.
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