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

[trav28.livejournal.com]

I thought it was superb - and broke every rule in the book. The way they used music and the acting put this in my top 20 who stories. The ref to oral sex was hilarious (and a little naughty for a kid's show).

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

I just found it insulting and cringeworthy, and I don't think I'm a precious fan by any means. I don't think the stuff you've said about class and gender helps at all, it's just that I can't stand watching farce. And I certainly didn't see any emotional development - we've had some of that with the Doctor and even some of the soap opera characters that I dislike, but this ep seemed to be purely played for laughs without actually being funny.

[ramtops.livejournal.com]

me, I thought it was fab.

[rosamicula.livejournal.com]

I don't think it was change per se that bothered me - and I am someone who was only a fan when a child and am not A Fan now.

I didn't think it was funny because I thought the humour was way too heavy-handed and a splendid cast was wasted in the process. As for the gender/class issues - one of the things I loved about Dr Who as a child was the element of escapism which would have been ruined for me if half of it had been set on an inner city council estate like the one where I lived. I was emphaticvally neither posh nor a boy, yet it was definitely for me, not least because it didn't have romance. It had characterisation by the bucketful and subtle inferences about relationships that were a lot more interesting to pick up on than the banality of the Dr/Rose romance - and were drawn out over several episodes.

The focus on the importance of lurv and family life/values smacks to me of the syrupy 'moral' endings of American sci fi series. The obsession with Rose's parent really irritates me as I think it would put children off, if anything.

The pop culture references are so numerous that the stories seem to rely on them - and will date very quickly as a result.

I thought it was tacky, boring, unimaginative and played to an adult/fanboy audience - genrally a bit of an egowank for RTD.

[loveandgarbage.livejournal.com]

One of the things I have always loved about Doctor Who is that it has a flexible format. However, when something uses that flexibility to tell a story that doesn't fit with preconceptions then I'me bemused at the fan reaction that says weill, it's not a Doctor Who story.

This is from the show that's done the Doctor and companions materialising only inches high on modern earth (Planet of the Giants), a visit to the land of fiction where the threat is the Doctor's companions might get trapped in a book (The Mind Robber); an episode featuring only the central cast set in a TARDIS out of control sending cryptic messages to a dressing gown cladd Ian Chesterton and scissor wielding Susan (Edge of Destruction); fantasy (the celestial Toymaker where the Doctor is rendered invisible and his companions threatened by games and toys they must play); pure historicals (many early stories - The Aztecs, Marco Polo, The Massacre of St Bartholomew's Eve); pseudo-historicals (in The Time Meddler the meddling monk - played by Peter Butterworth, stalwart of the Carry On series - plans to give bazookas to King Harold in order that he win the Battle of Hastings); space opera; quest stories (the fifth story was The Keys of Marinus which involved hunting for a different key every week); one episode without the Doctor or any companions at all (Mission to the Unknown in 1965); horror stories; comedies (three stories in particular stand out: The Myth Makers set in the Trojan war which included one episode called IIRC Is there a Doctor in the horse?; The Gunfighters (gunfight at the OK Corral with a ballad sang throughout each episode updating you on plot developments); and The Romans (The Doctor in Nero's Rome)) as well as rip offs (homages?) to lots of things (Hammer Horror, sci-fi films, Bond &c).

It's notable that most of these types of story (but not really the homages) were found in the 1960s when the creators were well aware of the flexible format, and despite budgetary constraints not tied to any one type of story. As time went on the production team of each era favoured one type of story over others (base under siege stories in Troughton's second season); Hammer and other film homages in Tom Baker stories produced by Philip Hinchcliffe.

In the flexible format no one style of story should dominate. It's perhaps no coincidence that the fans rate Hartnell lower than other Doctors. It's not just that many of his episodes have vanished from the BBC archive or that those that survive are in black and white. It's that they play with the format. The production team thrilled in transcending audience expectations. Love and Monsters is well within the tradition, written out of necessity (because the Beeb wanted an extra episode this year but with the same filming block) but undeniably a Doctor Who story, and a comment on how viewers perceive Doctor Who. This is RTD's best script by far. I wouldn't want it like this every week, but this once it was great.

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

None of your reasons listed above apply to my dislike for this episode.

We have had so many different types of episode on 'Dr Who' over the years that practically anything can be included. Even the dreadful TV movie has to be included in canon somehow.

I don't like Rose. I'm not particularly fond of Tennant's doctor. So their absence didn't bother me. I disliked the bits where they did appear because they were totally out of character.

I don't know what you mean by 'confounds expectations'. It confirmed mine - unfortunately.

It wasn't like a soap opera - I could have coped with that, and there are elements of the soap opera in current continuity anyway. (Jackie, Mickey, the Doctor/Rose romance.) What it was was a sitcom, and not a very funny one at that. What annoyed me about this was that it was played as sitcom, which is completely at odds with the way 'Who' is normally played. They might just have got away with it if the continuing characters had played their roles straight. Unfortunately, the Doctor, Rose and Jackie were also playing as sitcom - or even farce. The result is to downgrade the rest of the season, because when you are watching high drama - if we get any amid the camp - this episode will be at the back of your mind. If it had been hilarious or moving this might have been justified, but it was funny only in odd moments, and not at all engaging.

It is not original. The outsider view has been used many times - the most familiar will, I think, be its various appearances in 'Babylon 5'. Fannishness as send up sitcom is the whole purpose of the dreadful 'Kinwig'. And us nerds are being sent-up all the time.

Finally, over the other side of the fence, apparently RTD was heard to say that it was aimed at males because women don't watch 'sci-fi'... This has caused much hilarity in Trek fandom, apparently.

Interesting ...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

... do you really think that's the full list of reasons people didn't like this episode?

Actually, I might go along with the first ... maybe!

I'm not a massive Who fan (I watched Pertwee, hated Tom Baker and didn't watch it again except for a couple of McCoy episodes until the TV movie came along, which was NOT Who (half human? That's Mr.SPOCK you fools!)) and still I didn't like this episode.

In any long running series, there's a chance to play with conventions and doing something from a different angle (musical episodes of Buffy, The Drew Carey Show, Moonlighting and even something similar in X-Files) and sometimes they work and sometimes they don't (Buffy was brilliant because it was great music *and* advanced the plot)

I think the problem, for me, was that it *was* a Supergran/Rentaghost episode. It was a sitcom, aimed at kids (and not very bright kids either). It was CITV at its worst.

Now I can understand that a lot of the comedy was from the memories of Elton (and so any change in characterisation of Jackie, Rose, the Doctor etc. were based on his memories/interpretation rather than "reality"!), and yes, I did like the ELO references (grin!).

And then you say that the problem the BOYS have is that we want it to have monsters, aliens, no characterisation and no emotional development which is almost exactly what that episode was, and my problem with it was that it was that way. Everyone was cardboard characters being pushed around (it *was* an animated storyboard of a bad cartoon version of Dr.Who)

Sure there were good bits, but Peter Kay was annoying (particularly his Mike Myers/Fat Bastard impression). LI'n'DA were great, and I'm sorry they were killed off ... they could have got together with Sarah Jane and K9, bought a big green transit van, and gone investigating!

[hfnuala.livejournal.com]

Something else that occured to me - I *hated* Andrew in Buffy, but loved this. I don't know if it's a tone difference or I feel more like a Buffy fan than I do a Dr Who one.

[the-gardener.livejournal.com]

I couldn't get over Ursula being Moaning Myrtle in the Harry Potter films.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

I did laugh out loud at several points. I love the Buffy musical. I thought L&M failed in its own terms.

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

Well my trouble with it was not the idea, but that it was badly done. Peter Kay just played Peter Kay, the rubber suit was just crap, and I have never found fart jokes funny. The idea of the absorbothon held no logic -- where were all his previous victims?

What could have been interesting, Elton's past encounter with the Doctor continuing to haunt him, was skipped over with a glib comment. 'A shadow came out of the howling walls' So much for character development there. I get the feeling that RTD started down a fertile line then got cold feet, which is worse than not going there at all.

Only the Jackie/Elton flirtation was really taken to a proper conclusion. Jackie's dabbling with the idea of seducing Elton as an expression of her loneliness and feeling of being left behind was in character for her and in keeping with one of this series themes.