More on the Great Dr Who debate..

[green_amber]

.. from email conversation..

Reasons why people didn't like Love and Monsters

- it's not Who
- the Doctor (and Rose) wasn't the main character
- it "confounds expectations" (as if that was a bad thing!)
- it's like a soap opera, and that's NOT WHO

I think at root what we're seeing here is the naked faaaan mentality - we want it to look like the Who
we remember, monsters, aliens, no characterisation and no emotional development - that's for GIRLS. There's also a lot of gender and class issues floating around in there - Dr Who is above soap opera, and , god help us all, popular culture references - it's POSH and for BOYS. (oddly enough, exactly the kind of boys who will get the ELO references - which makes the hostility all the oddder.)

I do think anyone who could say it wasn't funny has had a complete sense of humour failure- but this seems to include people like Swisstone, so I'm utterly bemused..

It's CHANGE. Like I always say, nobody likes that :-)

Comments

Re: Interesting ...

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Is there a plot? Alien monster takes over fan group to absorb its members is hardly a strong or logical one. (Why?????) Or is it boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy sort of gets girl back?

One of my main objections is the characterisation of the on-going characters - Jackie's sudden longing for a toy boy, the Doctor and Rose playing Shaggy and Scooby.

I also noticed Madame de Pompadour's courage, her ability to face facts without flinching, her intelligence, her ability for leadership - and her ability to love several men and keep them from cutting each other's throats. And what about the girl in the two parter from last season -'The Lonely Ghost'(???) and 'The Doctor Dances'. May I respectfully suggest that her journey was more complex and painful than Elton's, and she had less screen time?

There are plenty of 45/50 minute shows where characters are drawn superbly within a single episode. They do it every week on 'House' - sometimes in less than five minutes with the clinic patients. It isn't 'Who''s strong point, agreed, but this one wasn't any better than most and worse than some.

Re: Interesting ...

[andrewducker]

Jackie's "sudden" longing for a toy-boy wasn't at all out of character for her - she shows interest in the Doctor the second she sees him, and I'm sure there's another man mentioned in passing at one point.

And I assumed the Dr/Rose/Monster playing Shaggy/Scooby/Ghost was a way of getting across that we were getting Elton's over the top, hand-waving "Wow, look how exciting things were" explanation of events, rather than The Truth.

Re: Interesting ...

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Yeh. He's an unreliable narrator. Actually, the whole episode might be fanfic :-) (we never do know who he's filming it for, do we?)

And of course the whole ep IS fanfic! I love this!

Re: Interesting ...

[blue-condition.livejournal.com]

> Actually, the whole episode might be fanfic :-)

Nah, fanfic that bad would be torn to pieces by other fans ;)