The Beast Below
Apr. 11th, 2010 07:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
penfold_xUnfortunately, I didn't enjoy this week's ep as much as the premiere. There were an awful lot of problems with the plot, and it seemed to me like Moffat didn't know what type of story he wanted to tell. I blathered about this in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
neadods's journal. My upshot is pretty much:
"[This] could be a plausible and interesting story about a society faced with a range of terrible choices (much like real life), but I think it fell down with execution (the plot holes many have mentioned, the muddled mix between this story and the police state aspects that were not fully developed or resolved, the IMO unjustified and childish allegory to the present election, etc.).
... We start out with a fascism story, where everyone is under the constant eye of the creepy plastic statues, and failure to know your place in society gets you sent to the scary below place. Then that story just stops and it becomes a story about exploitation of the creature and society's willing blindness to its own cruelty. The rest of the story is just never revisited, and the Doctor doesn't seem to care... The Doctor is always willing to go in and overthrow such a system (see "The Happiness Patrol", which this story kept reminding me of, which is never a good sign!), but that's not even close to his mind."
I had a lot to say about this inneadods's journal, so it's quicker to just repeat myself:
"Instead, it's all about how it sucks to be the Doctor when he's in a no-win situation, because then he has to feel bad about himself. Well, boo-hoo. Life deals those. Sometimes you have the choice of allowing the whole of the universe to be enslaved to the Daleks or committing genocide and wiping out your own race in the bargain. Sometimes you don't know the intentions of the giant alien space whale that just parked itself outside your door, and you have to decide how much you're willing to gamble. That's the choices real leaders in real life get, and unless you're a sanctimonious television writer, you have to live without your deus ex machina."
I've seen this type of commentary on the show before (and excoriated the heck out of it), but without a well constructed plot and charming acting to hold it up, it's tiresome.
neadods's journal. My upshot is pretty much:"[This] could be a plausible and interesting story about a society faced with a range of terrible choices (much like real life), but I think it fell down with execution (the plot holes many have mentioned, the muddled mix between this story and the police state aspects that were not fully developed or resolved, the IMO unjustified and childish allegory to the present election, etc.).
... We start out with a fascism story, where everyone is under the constant eye of the creepy plastic statues, and failure to know your place in society gets you sent to the scary below place. Then that story just stops and it becomes a story about exploitation of the creature and society's willing blindness to its own cruelty. The rest of the story is just never revisited, and the Doctor doesn't seem to care... The Doctor is always willing to go in and overthrow such a system (see "The Happiness Patrol", which this story kept reminding me of, which is never a good sign!), but that's not even close to his mind."
I had a lot to say about this in
neadods's journal, so it's quicker to just repeat myself:"Instead, it's all about how it sucks to be the Doctor when he's in a no-win situation, because then he has to feel bad about himself. Well, boo-hoo. Life deals those. Sometimes you have the choice of allowing the whole of the universe to be enslaved to the Daleks or committing genocide and wiping out your own race in the bargain. Sometimes you don't know the intentions of the giant alien space whale that just parked itself outside your door, and you have to decide how much you're willing to gamble. That's the choices real leaders in real life get, and unless you're a sanctimonious television writer, you have to live without your deus ex machina."
I've seen this type of commentary on the show before (and excoriated the heck out of it), but without a well constructed plot and charming acting to hold it up, it's tiresome.
