jjpor | The More Things Change...

I haven't commented on Livejournal yet about the past two weeks' Doctor Who story The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People. I say "yet", but I'm not really going to. No, not like the pirate story - I actually quite liked this one. I didn't love it, but I thought it was pretty decent, a couple of dodgy points notwithstanding. And what about that ending, eh?!

No, actually what I was going to say was something that occurred to me reading some fans' reactions to Pt 2 of the above and to some of the previous stories in S6. And I've been sort of discussing this recently with people on my LJ flist and elsewhere. Essentially, I was going to pose the question; when did fandom, or some of fandom anyway, start holding the Doctor to higher moral or ethical standards than the show's own writers and producers or indeed the Doctor himself, on an in-story level? And then I was going to make the related observation that a lot of comments along the lines of "the Doctor would never do that", while they usually at least make a point about some ethical failing of the Doctor's, are often undermined by the fact that the Doctor has done a great many things that he "wouldn't do" over the years, either through the characterisation changing and evolving from character to character or simply due to inconsistency on the part of successive writers and/or producers [1].

And I suppose out of that comes another observation that there are probably a great many people in modern online Who fandom who are primarily or even only familiar with the new series and its Doctors. I don't mean that as any sort of oldschool fan snobbishness or anything, just an observation. It seems that quite a few of the "Doctor would never do that" observations I see come down to "Ten would never do that". Which is often true, but it doesn't mean the Doctor, one or other of him, wouldn't. And you know, change and reinvention is so much a part of the show, in the larger scheme of things. We all have Doctors or production regimes we like or relate to better (or worse) than others, but you know, that's part of being a Who fan, I feel.

Anyway, these are two very true and very amusing links I came across in the course of talking over some of this stuff over the past day or two. They make the points I'm trying to make above, but much more wittily and succinctly:

http://doctorwho.livejournal.com/4845838.html

http://doctorwho.livejournal.com/7667081.html?view=106444169#t106444169

Yeah, that's right - Four snaps necks like TWIGS!!

And they didn't even include stuff like Seven tricking the Daleks into genociding themselves...and then doing the same to the Cybermen. Or, right back at the beginning, One giving serious consideration to braining some poor Cro-Magnon with a great big rock...

[1] And no, I don't mean the palling-around-with-Winston Churchill thing - I share others' dismay with that one, very much so. I'm talking things like the Doctor's policy (or not!) on guns and instances where he's taken action that would result in the death/injury/etc of whoever his opponent of the week is.

EDIT:

Anyway, just when I'd finished being all reasonable and stuff above, I then read a comment on the

doctor_who comm that made me not want to be, for a moment. And then I reined in my nerd-rage and decided just to make another observation:

Now, I don't know what the situation with the ratings numbers for NuWho S6 is - honestly, I don't. I'm not a television professional and I don't even play one on TV. Some sources (the British tabloid press, which I don't read honest, guv'nor...) seem to be suggesting that the drop-off in overnights is a Bad Thing and a sign that the show is DOOMED, DOOMED, because it's too scary for kiddies or too complicated to understand or doesn't have enough technicolor Daleks or something or other. Other observers whose opinions I trust tend to laugh this off, pointing out that Who is picking up plenty of viewers on other media like iPlayer and don't worry about it, honest, nothing to see here. My layman's instinct tells me that by this point in its lifecycle we might expect Who to not be the ratings phenomena it was in say 2008 - it's become part of the furniture now. I honestly don't know who's right and who's wrong. I try not to worry about it.

However...

What I don't like to see is people who don't like the current regime, or Stephen Moffat personally, or Matt Smith as an actor or Eleven as a character...I don't like to see these people drawing attention to some of the more negatively-slanted stories about falling ratings in an almost crowing, gloating way. Like "look! look! We're right! Moffat is running the programme into the ground!" etc etc. Now, confronted, these people would no doubt claim they're simply Who fans drawing attention to a story about Who, but let's be honest, some of them really are gloating. It's not just my paranoid nature. And I don't like to see that. By which I mean, in my understated British way, it makes me ****ing angry. And here's why:

I don't care if you don't like Eleven or Moffat or whatever - surely you, as fans, want the show to continue for at least another few years, don't you, so that you can experience a bit more of the change and reinvention I talk about above? Don't you?? Because if you don't - if you'd rather see it end now because you don't like this current era, well... My mind boggles anyway.

So yes. Rant over. Read/watch those posts I linked to. They're funny.