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 ...

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Whereas every other fictional haracter you encounter in a 45 minutes TV show slot is a fully worked out original and completely comvincing character?
Come on. It's serial, relatively low budget, pre watershed TV. We're all working within certain limitations, both watcher and writer. To give an example: after Dr Who, I was channel hoping and I got the first episode of some dreadful new US Friends-lite comedy, but I watched it through, because it had Alyson Hannigan in it. Every single character in it was a complete cipher, distinguishable only by gender, occupation and haircut (and perhaps not even then), their only purpose being to be manoeuvred into certain situations which might enable the delivery of supposedly funny lines. Now that's what I call standard TV lack of characterisation.

Whereas at the end of 45 minutes here, I felt I had a good idea who Elton fundamentally was, hiow he'd behave in certain scenarios, and had seen him go through subtstantial character development - as said above, realising he had feelings that had gone from friendship to love, becoming acclimatised to the fact his whole life had been altered/destroyed, his acceptance that sometimes danger and thrils were wonderful even if they were also awful. That's just about as much as you can hope for from a one off character in 45 minutes. (It is also, incidentally, far more than I felt I learnt about Mme de Pompadour in a very well received episode - all I knew of her was that she was cute and inexplicably fond of the Doctor.)

Indeed of all the eps of New Who so far you've *liked*, can you name any one-ep character (ie not Rose, Jackie, Cpn Jack or Mickey) you feel has been better characterised than Elton?

(I'm getting tired of this one, as you can tell - this is a reply to others , not just you. I can see lots of reasons why people wouldn't like this ep, but plot and chacracterisation are just not acceptable reasons compared to the rest of the oevre.)

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 ;)