Doctor Who 4×09: Forest of the Dead

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What an utter waste of time. I hope Tennant leaves when Moffat takes over so I can make a clean break and won't be tempted to keep watching.

It's just so... condescending. Stephen Moffat doesn't write stories that appeal to me. He writes generic love stories, okay, with time travel added, but the themes are the same old love story themes. Oh, the Doctor loved someone and lost her, how sad. It's like those TV shows that introduce a woman of the week, wring out the love story angst, and then forget about her the next week.

Moffat wants the emotion, but he doesn't put in the work necessary to earn it. He just shoves in some sparkly superawesome Mary Sue and expects us to care about her because the writing tells us she's special, but never bothers showing her being special. Okay, so she's a rude condescending jerk who shows up out of nowhere and goes around insulting the characters I do care about... and I'm supposed to see this thing through her POV? I don't care about her. I hope she gets wiped out of the timeline and never meets the Doctor.

It's an insult to me as a viewer, and to the writers and actors on the current show, to shove aside all the characters we've seen grow and develop and tell us that this Mary Sue is more important. Nope, sorry. Donna's more important, Rose is more important, Sarah Jane is more important, Jack is more important, hell even Martha is more important than the ridiculously named River Song (ugh).

And the other thing that pisses me off: the happiest thing that can happen to a woman is marriage and babies, didn't you know? And a woman can't be beautiful and smart at the same time, or something. And women as kickass and adventurous as Donna Noble and the supposedly amazing Mary Sue Song will be perfectly happy in a fake world as long as they've got children to look after.

What was even the point of Donna in this episode? The first one she was barely even Donna, it was just like Generic Companion in the script and Moffat did a find/replace with Donna's name. This one had a subplot for her, but it didn't mean anything. She got a glimpse of what her life might've been like if she wasn't traveling with the Doctor, but we didn't see how that affected her or whether it made her reconsider traveling with him. She starts to figure out that she's trapped in a fake world, and Miss Evangelista shows up to drop hints and act creepy, but it doesn't matter because Donna doesn't figure anything out or use the knowledge to escape; she just gets rescued along with everyone else.

Seriously, could Moffat possibly be less interested in the current companions and the current Doctor Who universe? It's like he tries to barge in and assert his own story, his own continuity (lots of references to his own earlier scripts) and make his inventions and his characters WAY MORE IMPORTANT than the ones we're actually invested in and watch every week.

I liked: the rich guy turning out to be benevolent, the little girl in the computer being a real girl, the stuttering guy Donna fell for (aside from the whole heteronormative stupidity, the actual guy was nice), and the skeletons in suits were creepy (although the Vashta Nerada turned out to be kind of pointless... at least for once we got to see the Doctor succeeding at talking a bad guy down).

Tennant's acting was wonderful, as always, but how many single-story relationships can they keep inventing and shoving in just long enough to wring tears from? Yes, we know Tennant cries pretty. It's more effective when it doesn't happen every other episode. His tears at the end of series three were so effective because he'd been holding them back for the entire year. This is making me worry that the finale of series four will lose its impact because... well, what can top losing your "daughter" and "wife" a couple episodes apart?

At least they left it ambiguous enough that I can pretend River Song is just some companion the Doctor picked up out of guilt because he knew she'd die for him someday. He told her his name so that his past self would trust her, and gave her the screwdriver so she'd be "saved," and she's a flirt like Jack and yeah they like each other but she's really NO MORE SPESHUL THAN THE CHARACTERS WE'VE ACTUALLY SEEN GROW AND CHANGE AND DEVELOP RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE DOCTOR.

But the reason I liked Doctor Who before was that I didn't have to read against the text. Russell T. Davies writes themes that actually appeal to me: that adventures and unconventional lives are just as valid as "living a normal life," that there's so much more to the universe than what we're raised to believe, that anyone--no matter how seemingly insignificant--can be amazing and become a hero. Stephen Moffat writes with the assumption that the best thing that can happen to you is to fall in love (River, Reinette), get married (River, Sally Shipton Sparrow), and raise babies (Nancy, Donna, afterlife!River). Just, yuck.

Current Mood: annoyed

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