If I felt like it I could spend pages and pages simply listing all the many good qualities of this show, all the simply amazing ways in which it is smart, funny, heartbreaking, and highly well-crafted in many regards. I adore most of the heroes of this story, both major and minor. The Doctor is truly shown to be extraordinary rather than just stated to be so through his applied intelligence, charm, and willingness to do anything to avoid engaging in any sort of violence. The women he travels with are themselves ordinary people and yet do such a good job of finding their way fumblingly yet heroically through the many strange situations in which they find themselves.
That said, there is one huge glaring flaw with this show that I simply cannot overcome no matter how much I might enjoy its other aspects: that of the villains. Or, rather, the lack thereof. I know that alleged villains exist on the show, but frankly none of them frighten me. As a matter of fact, I am most likely to spend the entirety of every single scene with a Dalek, Cyberman, or Sliveen cringing in horror at the sheer awfulness of the writing. Cassandra left me rolling my eyes. I couldn’t even pay attention to Davros because his dialogue was so unrealistic. The Master made me laugh—at him, not with him. With only very, very few exceptions—the Weeping Angels of Blink and the unnamed alien form of Midnight both come to mind—the villains of Doctor Who are so painfully one-note and flat that they are not frightening, not amusing, not even remotely interesting. The unfortunate habit far too many of them have of repeating a word or phrase for no apparent reason is so cringe-inducing I have horrible flashbacks to the 1940s era of horror films.
It would be possible to say that the low quality of the villains simply comes from the fact that it was originally conceived as a simple children’s show—perhaps the writers preferred to present very simple conflicts and larger-than-life nemeses for our heroes to defeat in uncomplicated plotlines. And yet there is more than ample evidence that simply because a show is intended for children does not mean that it is unable to have complex antagonists. Just look at Avatar the Last Airbender; for much of the series the primary villain is a character the writers show in the second episode is just a scared kid trying to get home to his family. Or in Teen Titans, when during Season 4 one of the main characters becomes the villain, albeit inadvertently, and is used as a tool to destroy the world.
Then there is the argument that in any sci-fi or fantasy show the villains simply don’t have to be human and therefore don’t have to be developed at all because no one ever questions the fact that in The Lord of the Rings there are no bad orcs. (Except when they do…) Finding counters to that argument also isn’t hard. In Supernatural the primary villains are either ghosts or demons; even though these are purely malevolent entities that exist to do evil and nothing else, the heroes show compassion for beings that, as the show establishes, were once humans and generally more or less innocent before dying and becoming trapped either on earth (if ghosts) or in hell (if demons) until they went insane and lost all ability to do anything but destroy. On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampires and demons are portrayed as more or less soulless killing machines—and yet several interesting questions are raised when one or two vampires, when forced to find an alternative to killing people to eat, start to become good, even possibly heroic people… Somehow I just don’t see Amy and the Doctor teaming up with a converted Dalek to fight some greater evil anytime soon.
It’s not just that it is all but impossible to suspend disbelief when listening to characters say something like “This is the ultimate victory!” (actual quote) or chant “exterminate, exterminate, exterminate, exterminate, blah, blah, blah,” and we are expected to take them seriously. It’s not just that scenes of the main characters facing down badly constructed plastic-looking robots fail to raise the pulse rate of anyone who has gotten used to the human-like villains of everything from Star Trek on forward. The issue of the banality of violence is also rather significant here. In “The Poison Sky,” thousands of sentient beings are killed when the Sontaran ship explodes, and it is not only treated lightly but in fact played for laughs; after all, it’s just a bunch of aliens in weird suits getting blown up by a giant plastic Frisbee. Or in “Age of Steel,” when actual human beings are being killed, often the effect is bizarrely funny because these are people who are being apparently cut down completely bloodlessly and with nothing but the prettiest of falls to the pavement by beams of pretty light. Not being familiar enough with BBC networking rules to say, I might have to forgive the show for its lack of blood because of corporate meddling or other similar diseases. Which is all very well and good, but doesn’t mean that the show has to treat people dying in battle like something that happens attractively and instantaneously.
The sheer amount of robot-on-human violence in this show is also quite disturbing. For all that other sci-fi/fantasy shows (Battlestar Galactica, Sarah Connor Chronicles, Angel, Supernatural) may have infamously high body counts of main characters, Doctor Who is by far the most extreme example I’ve seen of a show carelessly and casually killing off ordinary uninvolved citizens. Literally thousands of people are killed in pretty much every single season finale, and often in other episodes in the middle of the season, dozens die during an average week on the show, and this is all treated like it’s no real big deal, so long as the main characters remain untouched, which of course they always do. The deaths, when they come, are inevitably always pretty, calm, and caused by laser beams that cause people to fall over silently without a mark on their bodies. I’m not saying the show should have buckets of blood and gore like so many American programs do. I just wish that it wouldn’t use its detached and overly simplified villains to prettify violence into no big deal. It rather undercuts the otherwise powerful anti-war message of the show, doesn’t it?
The writers of this show have demonstrated themselves as being more than capable of presenting complex characters, even minor ones, with just a few deft strokes of the pen. They balance a show that is part comedy, part science fiction, part historical drama, part social commentary, and all human story with grace and intelligence. So it really bothers me a great deal when the lovely fans of the show are asked to express genuine emotion when confronted with a talented actor doing all he possibly can to act against a twitching toilet plunger wielded to a trash can or a strangely mobile Tin Man that nonetheless has a three-word vocabulary and the intelligence—and ego—of a six-year-old. The writers have demonstrated the rare ability to conjure villains that shock us, horrify us, and tug at our heartstrings all at the same time. I just wish this would happen a little more often.
-Bug
-Bug
