The End Of The World

It's already happening. Who fandom seems to be splitting- maybe not equally- but into two distinct areas. The people who love Russel T. Davies's defiantly bold take on the show, and the people who are shaking their head and wondering how the hell it went so wrong- or at least wishing for something that bore a little more resemblance to the programme they remember and love.

I'll be honest- I'm in the "take it with a pinch of salt" camp. I wasn't bowled over by "Rose"- there were moments that I loved, and moments that made me want to hurl my TV out of the window- but I went into "End of the World" with an attempt at a positive outlook. As they say, always look on the bright side of life...

So, anyway, I sit down to watch "End of the World", and forty five minutes later, one thing is absolutely clear:

Russel T. Davies adores Season 24.

It's true- "End of the World" was essentially a big-budget homage to the kind of campery that was being practiced in Paradise Towers, Dragonfire, and- (shiver)- Delta and the Bannermen. You even had a "Death of Kane" reference, someone being pulled into a duct by mechanical creatures, overdone use of pop music on the soundtrack... For me, Season 24 was one of the darkest times of the show- where I had to work especially hard at filtering out the stuff that wasn't working to find what was- and to find that the new version of Who is essentially just a bigger version of that is disconcerting to say the least.

The overdose of camp humour is certainly getting a little grating. It'll be interesting to see how the show works when RTD isn't writing it, because at the moment it's like being locked in a lift with a gay man who's determined to show how wonderfully smart, sophisticated and bitchy he is. The characterisation of Cassandra wasn't particularly effective- instead of trying to blend any "plastic surgery" satire with the sci-fi, we just got lots of overplayed "You could be flatter!" gags (And if anyone could explain to me exactly how you can get a sentient piece of skin, I'd be very grateful. Who doesn't have to be hard sci-fi, but it'd be nice if they tried to come up with something that made me vaguely suspend my disbelief...).

And then, the music related gags. It's not enough that Cassandra has to bring in a Jukebox (somehow perfectly preserved after five billion years), she's got to call it an Ipod (Oh, how ironic!) and then it's got to play Tainted Love by Soft Cell. And then Toxic by Britney Spears (certainly one of the most surreal moments of Who ever broadcast). I suppose, this is the man who wrote The Second Coming, where one of the most dramatic and disturbing sequences of the show was accompanied by a song by ex-Spice Girl Mel C, but it'd be nice to have some humour later on in the show that isn't like being bashed around the head with a pink, velvet-wrapped sledgehammer. 

(As a note: The whole "misinterpreting artefacts from the present day" concept is very very old, and has been done an awful lot better than RTD manages here. Michael Moorcock's The Dancers at the End of Time is a fantastic example.)

Not to say that "End of the World", when it worked, wasn't tremendous fun. Probably the biggest strength of this new version of the show is that it doesn't ever stand still for too long, and the energy managed to carry the frankly rather weak plot (Ambassadors arrive, someone gets murdered, countdown to Doom, The End!) through a few (if not all) of the sticky moments. 

And then, there's the points where the show got darker, and shiver my timbers if it didn't actually start FEELING like Who. First up, the nicely played relationship between the Doctor and Jabe- could have been squirmingly embarrassing, and instead was subtly done and quite convincing, and the moment where Jabe reveals that she knows where the Doctor is from was both hugely surprising and utterly magic. It's interesting to see a Doctor with this much baggage (although I think we can safely say that it's a very different version of the War depicted in the Eighth Doctor novels. Who else is betting on the Daleks being responsible?), and the climax- with the Doctor calmly standing by and watching Cassandra die- was more like something you'd expect from the Sixth Doctor (Is hi-jacking so much tone and form from the eras of the show when Who definitively didn't work a fantastic idea?).

Most of all, there was Billie Piper as Rose, who's doing a great job of anchoring the show. The sequence where she realises that she really doesn't know anything about the Doctor was beautifully played, and where she's trying to get the facts about his origins out of the Doctor, it felt real and convincing in a way that the psychobabble between the Seventh Doctor and Ace never did. Billie's performance gave the ending a real emotional impact, and the "I want chips" line was simply fantastic (Pity RTD had to then ruin it with the "Five billion years till the shops shut", as truly horrible example of the "end your episode on a gag and have your main characters laughing" principle as I've seen).

Christopher Eccleston as the Doctor is still a jumble that's both intriguing and frustrating. Now that he's jumped ship and the potential for the Ninth Doctor has been shrunk down to the upcoming episodes and very little else, he's a bizarre mix- great at the action, great at the dark stuff, creaky on the humour, and absolutely terrible at looking like he's experiencing a sense of wonder. The fixed grin he was wearing as the delegates filed in was decidedly dodgy, and he doesn't yet feels like he owns the role. The previous Doctors all managed to feel like they belonged- like the bizarre and the surreal was completely commonplace- where as Eccleston is overdoing the "love of life" aspects of his characterisation to the extent that he's coming across as a hyperactive teenager at times. He's very good at certain moments, and cringeworthy at others, which seems a fairly effective way of summing up the show at the moment.

The production values were pretty good- and yet, it also feels like the show is falling victim to the "all flash and no substance" vote- especially considering they've used up 20% of the CG budget for the entire season in one episode. An entire room full of weird looking aliens- and yet hardly any of them get used. The Moxx of Balhoun got talked about plenty and shown lots in the pre-publicity, and yet he turns out to have diddlysquat to do with the actual story, and the CG Minority Report-style spiders felt like gratuitous showing off rather than good storytelling. The genuine strengths of the show seem to be getting dumped in favour of showy humour and "look at me" effect shots which- for all the effort that's gone into them- aren't good enough to stand up next to the US shows that are doing the same thing. It's the same problems that affected the TV movie- big sets and flash effects can't help you if there are fundamental flaws in the way you're thinking about the show. It was an improvement on "Rose", but the new series is still in very shaky territory, and without a small amount of balance and intelligence in the scripting, Who is simply going to be remembered as "that daft sci-fi show that had people painted blue as aliens". And I'd like to think that Who was a little better than that...