[ SECRET POST #4789 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #4789 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 03 pages, 54 secrets from Secret Submission Post #686.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[sabotabby]

Doctor Who has always been woke (for whatever the definition of woke was in its time) but the writing has been clunky. I'm finding this season loads better than the last one but there are just some flaws with Chibnall's writing. I find he doesn't have the confidence in the material, like he's vaguely embarrassed by it, if that makes sense, which is why we're not seeing a lot of classic monsters. He tends to write the Doctor as a passive observer who is there to explain, not to be the main character, and the companions as a Greek chorus. And he doesn't know how to write for a family audience; he thinks he's writing for very young children who need everything explained to them.

But like, the show has done environmentalist, or anticapitalist, or antiracist messages before. And it should. What bothers me is the need to pause at the end for the Doctor to explain what the message was how we should feel very bad and Do Something about climate change. It's not that it's woke, it's that its message is explained in a facile way via a monologue at the end, with no solution offered or suggested, where it should stand on its own.

I am seeing improvement though. The storylines are more complex this season, there's more weird shit, there's less pausing to explain what's happening to the viewer. I'm relieved that Jodie's getting at least one more season because she's really good and deserves better than some of the material she's gotten so far. Last season I was cringing a lot more, but this season I'm legitimately looking forward to every Sunday night.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, the very direct monologue is what gets me. I was explaining to a friend about the Praxeus episode and how if she'd stopped at "well yeah you all ingest microplastics all the time now", it would have been fine. We would have gotten the point just fine. But she continued into an outright moral lesson that slowed down the entire action (though Jodie's delivery was as energetic and on the money as it could be, because she's great).

[sabotabby]

It bothers me aesthetically. It's also, like, I remember watching this show as a little kid, and I didn't get all the messaging (I was in Canada, so I didn't understand, for example, that "The Happiness Patrol" was about Thatcher) but I got the broad strokes of "be decent to people, don't screw with the environment" themes that were quite often present in the episodes. And even modern children's TV does less of the "stop and explain for the audience" thing; I don't watch tons of it, but the few children's shows that I've seen in recent years have messaging without compromising the story pacing. Jodie does her best with those monologues, and she's a delight on screen doing anything, but they're so badly written.

I am digging this season though, because they've had parts where she has actually said the opposite of what's going on in her head and allowed the viewer to pick up the subtext. Like even a very young child would understand that if we see Gallifrey in flames, and then a few episodes later the Doctor says that everything's fine to her companions, it doesn't actually mean that everything is fine. I don't really remember anything like that happening last season and it really bothered me. But it's allowing the show and character to be interesting again as a narrative, and it's letting Jodie actually use her acting skills with decent material.