I finally got round to watching the Doctor Who Christmas Special, “Voyage of the Damned”, and found it a bit lackluster. It suffered from poor execution, and from some Russell T-isms that I found a bit irksome. Since, in these criticisms, I run the risk of sounding like Comic Book Guy, I will first say that I mostly approve of Russell T. Davies’s handling of Doctor Who. However, I do have a few quibbles.
“Voyage of the Damned” probably started well on paper. It seems to have been intended as an antidote to the Martha Jones era, in which, too often, our heroes (along with perhaps a planet or two) would find themselves in mortal peril, and Martha would say something like, “The Doctor will save us because he’s the Doctor”, and sure enough, Doc would don his spectacles, brandish his sonic screwdriver and race around for 90 seconds ranting and pressing buttons, in the process completely banishing the Danger of the Week. “I saved them”, he’d beam, “because I’m The Doctor“. Roll credits.
I don’t want to give away any details about “Voyage of the Damned”, so suffice it to say that our lonely Timelord is taken down a needed peg. There were also some clever asides and a few reversals of expectation, but all of these good elements seemed to get lost in the adventure’s overall pace. The action moves too quickly from plot-point to high-tension plot-point, and there isn’t any time to digest the jokes or the tragedy. Davies is normally adept at handling the emotional impact of Doctor Who, but in what could have been one of the more tragic episodes since we “lost” Rose, our only real sense of disaster was a few moments of David Tennant putting on his woeful face near the end. Perhaps this was because the stakes were ultimately too high: we knew the Doctor would have to (mostly) save the day, or the entire human race would be obliterated, etc etc.
This is one lesson I wish Russell T. would learn from Ron Moore (who heads up Battlestar Galactica): Doctor Who’s characters are more nuanced than Galactica’s, but in that series we actually feel that the characters are in real peril, paradoxically because the stakes are usually a lot lower — nobody on the good ship Galactica needs to worry about saving the entire universe: saving their own skins is typically enough. Put a whole planet in direct peril every week and your viewers will start to feel “crisis fatigue”. There are only so many close escapes any one character can believaly have.
Which brings me to my second problem with “Voyage of the Damned”: Davies is a fine writer of character (which, ultimately, is what drives D.W.) but he’s a little ham-fisted with the SciFi. Doctor Who doesn’t aspire to “fantastic naturalism” where BSG ultimately does, so the comparison isn’t entirely fair, but BSG does a much better job of avoiding many of the tired SF clichés. I know Doctor Who is a show about a 900 year old time traveler from a planet where the higher one’s social standing, the sillier one’s hat, but I do feel they could take the plots a little more seriously.
Some of the best episodes of Doctor Who were written by others besides Davies. According to wikipedia, Steven Moffat wrote the scary gas-mask episodes that introduced Captain Jack in season one, “The Girl in the Fireplace” in season two, and “Blink”, (the crying Angels) in season three. These are some of the most original (and gripping) episodes in the show’s entire run.
By contrast, “Voyage of the Damned” , written by Davies, included lots of familiar SciFi tropes, from spacecrafts that look inexplicably like ocean going vessels (complete with smoke stacks and a big ship’s wheel on the bridge) to gratuitious crossings of deep chasams, to robots run amok, to fires burning away in the damaged background that never seem to spread and are ignored by everyone (Star Trek suffers from this too: wouldn’t putting out fires on a space ship be priority one?). Don’t get me started the poor grasp of physics (flaming meteors in deep space? Really?). And how come the Doctor can work technilogical miracles except when the plot requires that he can’t?
I know “accurate physics” isn’t really a Doctor Who viewer’s top desire, but the hazy understanding of how the “world works” can often make the crises and their solutions seem arbitrary (see also Star Trek: every problem can be solved by “reversing the polarity” of some gizmo or another). One wonders if it would be possible to completely abstract the danger away: the Doctor could simply inform everyone that they are all in great danger without saying why, and then perform his usual dramatics before prononcung everyone safe again.
This wouldn’t really make for compelling TV though.
So, for the legions of TV producers that no-doubt read my blog (Hi guys, how’s the strike going? Are you industriously inventing ever-stranger “reality TV” formats?), here’s my advice: keep Russell Davies in charge of Doctor Who, but give more episodes to other writers, and make Davies watch Galactica DVDs. I don’t think Doctor Who should try to be “gritty” and “realist” like Galactica does, but I do think it could benefit in some of the ways I described above.
And if you really want to revitalize Star Trek, go hire Ron Moore and give him carte blanche. He cut his teeth on Next Generation so he should know what he’s doing.