10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT NEW WHO 5) BRINGING STUFF BACK AND COCKING IT UP When Doctor Who returned in 2005 I was glad it wasnt a reboot, I didnt want the whole of the classic series to be confined to some parallel universe or have 26 years of adventure written off as never having happened. The reboot root could easily have been taken, indeed it was very nearly taken with the 96 tv movie and a pitch document from none other than Mark Gatiss in the early noughties proposed the series start from day one. The fact that new Doctor Who was a continuation of the original meant that old stuff from the original series could be brought back, obviously it could still have been brought back in a reboot but the fact that this was a continuation created a clear line of succession which linked these new adventures inextricably to the glory days of the past. Unfortunately my feelings have now changed on the matter, I now wish Doctor Who had been rebooted so it no longer formed part of the same narrative continuity as the original series. One of the reasons for this is that I believe each time they have brought something back from the past they have messed it up in some way. Okay first the Daleks, Ill take my hats off to them, the BBC design team did a great job on the bronze new series Dalek, it was a masterful update of the Dalek design, close enough to the original as to still be recognisable, but at the same time make the creatures a credible threat for the 21st century. It would have been very easy to pervert the Dalek image and do something like spider daleks as was mooted for the US revival. Thankfully Russell T Davies knew there was something iconic about the whole Dalek shape and it shouldnt be tampered with. The area where the Daleks have now lost credibility is not in the design, but in the constant and repetitive idea of Daleks gaining emotions. Once, in the episode Dalek I can forgive, but they have now used this idea five times . We have had Rose infected Dalek, Dalek Sec hybrid, Dalek Caan, Clara Dalek and more recently Rusty. I am really now fed up of having Daleks who see the error of their ways or we are supposed to feel sorry for. We have also had human Daleks and zombie Daleks, the image of the Dalek eyestalk projecting from a human forehead in Asylum of the Daleks was terrible beyond belief. I must admit to not hating Moffats technicolour redesign but not quite seeing the point in it either. It should really have been a case of if it aint broke dont fix it, the RTD design didnt need changing that soon. Questionable from the word go was the redesign of the Cyberman, the initial Petes world Cyberman was horribly clunky looking and moved badly on screen. The new stomping Cyberman really took away from what had previously been sleek creatures with an element of stealth. The voice never worked for me either, I could see what they were trying to achieve but the tone always reminded me of the Kandyman. The idea to have the new Cybermen come from a parallel Earth, thus not having to explain a rather convoluted back story to a new audience wasnt a bad one, but it very quickly seemed to be forgotten about with the creatures becoming space faring and using advanced technology with no explanation. It eventually seemed that we had gone back to having Mondasian Cybermen but still using the Petes world design. The team never seemed to be able to decide what a Cyberman was either, flitting between being simply brains in a Cyber casing then to entire bodies and then inexblicably being able to convert dead bodies . I must confess to missing two of the Cybermens Matt Smith era adventures as I was boycotting the series at this point, so I could make little judgement on the new design other than to say it was an improvement and much closer to the sleek sophisticated look one associates with the Cybermen. Having now seen them in action in the recent series finale, I must admit to not really being convinced there seems a definite iron man thing going on and the stomping and voice still arent doing it for me. The third big bad to make a comeback was of course the Master, and probably the biggest screw up so far. Ironically they showed how it could be done properly for all of about 10 minutes when Derek Jacobi briefly got a shot at the part before he regenerated into John Simm. At the time of course Simm was big news due to Life on Mars, but it has to be said it was another example of miscasting. He was just too baby faced and lacking in gravitas to carry the part, furthermore the Russell T Davies take on the character was not to make him a suave scheming criminal genius, but rather more of an evil Jack Sparrow with silly one liners and a lot of mugging. We were then invited to try and sympathise with the character, and at one point he confesses to the Doctor he is scared. His return for the End of Time was even worse as he suddenly gained superman like powers and was attired initially in the manner of someone who had walked off Benefits Street. The awful Master race idea and the character suddenly having an about face and turning to good would be about the worst you think it would get. Unfortunately the Master has recently surfaced again now as a woman, I will address the logic and rights and wrongs of this move in a future article, the question really is does Michelle Gomez convince as a female master, and sadly the answer is no, its not that she doesnt look the part, its just that we now have another silly zany Master, except now we cant even call the character that, Missy just doesnt have the same ring to it and The Mistress just opens up a whole world of innuendo which I am sure Moffat will revel in. What else have they cocked up, well we had the jerky Autons from the first episode Rose, which were played a bit for comic relief and didnt have any of the sinister edge of their 70s forebears. Then there were the Sontarans, not a bad redesign but the stories they have been in have stunk and we are now saddled with the comic relief Sontaran Strax. The Silurians took a well designed and memorable 70s race and reduced it to the level of a Babylon 5 or Star trek alien, while also lumbering us with the pointless Madame Vastra character. The new Ice Warrior design wasnt bad, but the creatures were ruined by having their appearance revealed not as being a mixture of their own reptillian skin and armoured plates as I had always assumed, but a Cyberman like mechanical suit. We were then treated to a blatant rip of from Alien as we saw a warrior out its suit and rather underwhelming it turned out to be too. Finally we had the Zygons, again not a terrible redesign but having little impact compared to their original appearance and once again used for light hearted relief in some scenes. We also have a handful of original cast members who have returned and been forced to adapt to the series modern style. Elisabeth Sladens return in School Reunion worked pretty well but it should have been left at that, I must admit I try to pretend the Sarah jane Adventures never happened because although Sladen did her best, it was a cheap kids show which unsurprisingly suffered from many of the same problems as the parent show but without the grand vision. It is unfortunate Nicholas Courtneys last appearance was in this same series, the episode of which was so unmemorable I cant remember a thing about it. Maybe we should be glad the Brig never made in into new Who proper, oh sorry he did, the Cyberbrig was crass and beyond tasteless I cant imagine what Moffat was thinking to believe this was in anyway a tribute to the character. Are we to take it the poor Brig is stuck in this state? We should also not forget that three classic Doctors have also returned to the fold. The first was of course Peter Davison in Time Crash with a total reinvention that bore next to no resemblance to the character played by Davison between 82 and 84. Why would the 5th Doctor suddenly be grumpy, would he really come out with talk of desktop themes and rubbish beards, Tom Bakers cameo was better, brief and a bit more poignant if a little overdone, although I suspect they were indulging Baker to a certain extent. Lastly Paul McGann starred in what I can only decribe as the best thing that has come out of BBC Wales in 5 years namely Night of the Doctor, epic and dramatic and a tantalising glimpse of what Doctor Who should be like more often, but they dont have the balls to do. For the most part however old returns have been a disaster, nearly everything that has come back has ended up worse than the original. It also often makes the new version the definitive one as it will then generally appear on all the merchandising and in guides etc over the original. For that reason I now pray they dont bring anything else back but Im sure they will, I live in dread at what the next icon will be that gets the Moffat makeover. NEXT TIME: 6) TRYING TO BE CLEVER
Posted on: Tue, 02 Dec 2014 23:26:46 +0000
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