Breakfast Discussion: Hey how was the season 4 finale of Doctor Who? It was absolute rubbish, thanks. [I Heart TV]

So after being way more excited than a human being should get over a TV show about the season 4 finale of Doctor Who, me and Delsyd watched all 65 minutes of it and at the end… normally when we’re all like “oh wow that was cool”, it was this dead, grim silence.  Like being kicked in the balls.  Like having your candy taken away.  Like feeling ripped off.  Whether you’re a Who fan or not, the consistent extremely poor delivery by Russel Davies throughout these last 4 seasons should serve as a grand example of why you under promise and over deliver.  Not the other way around.  Because when you over promise and then cop out, people feel burned and cheated.

Um.

Really Russell Davies?  Really?

I love Doctor Who and I’ll keep watching, but that episode just infuriated me.  While it had its high points, it showcased everything that was wrong with RTD’s style.  Yes, there was plenty of emotion and laughs.  Yes, there were lots of great moments within the show itself, but it just infuriates me that RTD frankly doesn’t have the balls the actually advance the show, flesh out the universe and add new and exciting elements to the Doctor Who world.  I find his points of character development and emotion refreshing in sci-fi and he pulled that off well.  But that was all there was to the story.

“All of time and space crumbling”? Didn’t happen.  Wasn’t even really hinted at, resolved or mentioned except for very briefly when Rose and the Doctor had been captured by Davros.  But did Davros destroy her reality (the darkness, stars going out etc)… obviously not, so it was all just babble.  It was the absolute crux of the last couple of episodes and then… it just sort of was like it never happened.

The crapload of cameos and crossovers? Pretty much pointless other than to say “ooh look at Gwen shoot that Dalek!”

Davros? Julian Bleach was fantastic, but they really made him an utterly pointless character.  The Daleks were essentially holding him prisoner and he created this incredibly stupid, poorly named and designed “reality bomb”, but other than that his presence in the episode felt a bit wasted at times.

The Osterhagen Key? Complete horseshit.  Supposedly a “suicide device” that would destroy the Earth in extreme emergency, it consists of 25 nukes that would detonate inside the Earth destroying it. 25 NUKES?  REALLY OMG!  I know there’s lots of made up sci-fi mumbo jumbo and suspension of disbelief, but if you’re going to invoke a modern, well-known and well-understood bit of science, please for god sakes make it somewhat believeable.  Someone really should have said to RTD: “25 nukes?  25 nukes would barely make a crater.  You would need the enormous arsenal of tens of thousands of nukes that the US and the USSR had at the height of the Cold War times like a shitload times 100k to actually destroy the planet.  Why not just make up some alien tech?”  We’re not fucking stupid.

“The most loyal companion will die”? Not even close.  Donna, after suffering through the most of any of the modern companions so far in a single season has her memory wiped… all her experiences and realizations gone.  She’s back to the ditzy temp she was before.  It was an incredibly rude and unfair way to end her character.  Really awful.

The regeneration? A fucking joke.  The Doctor decides he “doesn’t want” to regenerate so he channels the regeneration energy into his hand in the jar and voila.  He’s not phased, suffers no ill effects and it was like nothing happened.  A complete copout to an awesome cliffhanger from the episode before.  Yes, it prompts the regeneration into a second Doctor and the Doctor/Donna thing, all which would have been brilliant had they lasted more than 20 minutes before everything magically rights itself.

And Rose… I was sort of neutral about Rose coming back at first.  She annoyed the hell out of me with her selfishness at the end of season 3 and I thought it did her good to be separated.  But then when she did come back, she came back a different character all together, toughened, wizened and hardened by her experiences.  And so then I thought that maybe she would make a good one off every now again “here comes Rose and her big ass gun and her teleport” sort of thing… but then she got left again on the beach in Norway with a shoddy reproduction (the Real Doll version if you will) of the Doctor.

Sentiment on the Doctor Who Forum was mixed.  Those who liked it loved the last 15 minutes.  Those who disliked it like myself, strongly disliked it.  Again, I appreciate Davies introducing more emotional characterization into Doctor Who, but it often seems that’s all he goes into it for, that the other stuff like plot and logic and whatnot are just inconvenient things that get in the way of him wanting Rose and the Doctor to have a good snog.

Grammaton Cleric had this to say:

RTD proves once again that LOTTL was no fluke. He has no ability to script a coherent plot with multiple storylines, and to resolve a story with any internal coherence. Nope, its deus ex machina magic techno babble all around, and no insult to the viewers because most aren’t paying attention anyway. At least that’s what most will prove here, or when they did listen, RTD thumbs his nose at them, confident that the rabble will drown out contrary opinion, and that the loud rabble will successfully label a negative opinion, a mere contrarian.

Predictable, all……..

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Mr. Chimpey said:

Yet another under-whelming season finale from RTD. What a time to deliver the worst episode of the season.

Too many characters with not enough to do. For example what exactly was the point of having Rose in it as she did virtually nothing & contributed very little. Same goes for SJA & Jack.

The Daleks were disposed of far too easily, basically they were destroyed with a cloud of pseudo-science nonsense.

As for the way the Donna was written out, that was just so ridiculous & a gross disservice to a great character. to undo the growth she had experienced & to rob her of her experiences was just cruel.

To be blunt I really feel now that all I can say is RTD’s departure cannot come too soon.

With the series end of 1… Rose sucks in the heart of the TARDIS, becomes a bit of a god and then… the Doctor sucks it out of her, wiping her memory and she’s back to normal.  Everything’s back to normal.  But at least that one had a proper lead-up to the ending.

Here, a dozen damn opportunities to add something interesting to the Who universe– a human Doctor, a half-time lord Donna, a complete shift in reality (possibly opening up unanswered questions about the Time War and Gallifrey)… and on every single one, he drops the ball, wipes the memories and everything is back to the way it was.

All this week, this forum was on fire with great speculation on what might happen… things that would be great devices to add more complexity to the show and while many of them came true, it was all just temporary until RTD hit his magic reset button and at the end of the show… nothing really has changed… companions go back to their lives, the Doctor moves on, only to get a new companion at some point, etc etc.

He left us with a fantastic cliffhanger last week, only for the regeneration to be resolved in a few seconds.  Because the Doctor chose not to regenerate (?) and then the sound of pixie dust and voila!  So the Doctor split into 2 and Donna became a time lord.  If you don’t follow through with it, BFD.

Hell, throwing everything else out, I was excited about the Doctor Donna… that would have been awesome… and then when he started to wipe her mind, my stomach sank… oh no, here we go again.

So maybe he wanted to give Mofatt a clean slate, but please don’t do this to us.  I liked the emotion, I liked the laughs, but really… give us something to build on… anything.  I feel like saying good riddance to RTD.  All hat and no cattle… all fluff and no substance.  I love him forever for bringing the show back and doing an overall good job, but he never actually advanced the canon really.  He brought in the Time War as a device to just boil it down to the Doctor and a companion and I was hoping he would bring some real substance to the table.

I’m sorry… I’m just really, really disappointed and annoyed.  Russell Davies purposely led everyone on, threw out clues and red herrings and disinformation only to end up following up on none of it.  That just shows an absolute lack of respect for the audience and a lack of skill as a writer.  This was awful.  Thanks Davies for bringing the show back, now get out of the way.

On a humorous note, if the Doctor Donna couldn’t exist and her brain would have fried because she’s half-human half-time lord and we know the blue Doctor got the human frailty, does that mean he should be as vulnerable?  What if as soon as the TARDIS leaves, he just explodes into chunks in Rose’s arms?  Ewww.  That was Delsyd’s idea of how it should have happened and I’d pay to see it.

I am worried though… Davies has done a great job of bringing in people who aren’t normally “sci-fi” people with his in-depth character relationships, but many times he seems to forget that while that’s nice and all, it can’t come at the expense of everything else.  The people that seem to looove this episode do so because of the tidy wrapping up of the emotional strings at the end, but that’s just one part.  If all you want is emotion, watch soap operas or stand in the grocery store reading Hallmark cards.  If you want story, demand story.  I just hope that Mofatt isn’t pressured or doesn’t follow in Davies’ footsteps of sacrificing good plot for a couple of weepy moments.  You can have both– Davies has done it before, just not most of the time.

That all being said… if Davies wanted to introduce the idea of romance to Doctor Who, it’s certainly not something that has been explored in depth on the show before, so in that way it’s something very new and he did manage to resolve that in a satisfactory manner without it forever becoming a soap opera and that will be his legacy.  And he did go ballsy quite a bit– I mean the whole split Doctor thing, the companion-turned-half time Lord thing is pretty unique and I applaud it, I just wished that he had the guts to actually make these things into longer lasting bits of a larger plot rather than just having them pop up for 5 minutes before someone’s memory is wiped or the reset button is hit.  The whole Doctor Donna thing could have been really fun for several more episodes or an entire season.

But for now, let me mourn what could have been: a new Doctor, or 2 David Tennants, a Donna Time Lord, a Davros that actually meant something, a recurring bad ass time-traveling Rose, reopening of the Time War and some understanding of the fate of Gallifrey… ah those all would have been nice. One of them would have been nice. Hell, anything.