Russell T Davies: A Retrospective, Part Two
“I honestly couldn’t care less if Martha falls for the Doctor or not. And I don’t want any more references to Rose. I don’t want Martha compared to Rose. I don’t want Martha insulted because she isn’t Rose. I just want Martha and the Doctor to explore and battle bad guys. Is that really too much to ask?”
~ Kevin Lahey, review of “Gridlock”, pagefillers.com
Davies’ venture was inherently paradoxical, dualistic. This was noted by many. One Mike Taylor noted correctly that Davies, at times, seemed “not to get it”, made the Doctor too human, with too much emphasis on Twue Wub. And yet, it was his show and his writing that hammered the idea of the lonely Time Lord being alien, inhuman, other; following his own logic and moral code, often seen as weird by his human companions, but emerging right and victorious in the end—except the times he went too far, and needed the human factor, in the form of the companions, to stop him.
Davies was, on one hand, a producer and brainstormer interested in seeing the show blossom and prosper; but on the other hand, he was an old-time Doctor Who fan. But wait a minute, so is Moffat!
“I am incapable of contradicting an established fact of Doctor Who lore. I just can’t do it, any more than Russell. Russell sticks in little tiny bits of dialogue to account for the fact he might have vaguely contradicted a William Hartnell story in 1965.”
~ Steven Moffat
So, where lies the difference? We’ll get to that.
You could indeed argue that Davies wrote a good show, if you take “show” in the sense of spectacle. Let’s take his typical episode: everything is loud, things go boom, people are running and talking non-stop, there is some not-so-subtle postmodern commentary linking the exotic alien environments to the present day, and in the end… something happens. But what’s the problem? The problem is that these episodes are too absorbed in their own self-awareness, the author’s smug overview of the setting, and the mandatory “character development bits” disjointed from the main plot that they don’t tell good stories.
For an episode to be a story, it has to have, like, plot, with, like, cause and effect narrative—where the end conditions can be reasonably inferred from the starting conditions. When it breaks down, it accounts to the plot being little more than a chain of contrivances to drive the characters from one scene to the next one. This especially shines in episodes like “Boom Town” or “The Stolen Earth/Journey’s End”, where the plot is just a paper-thin pretext to get the characters to interact and either foreshadow things for future episodes or showcase the Cool Action Scenes. The often-noted “disjointed”, clip-show nature of RTD scripts (best exemplified by his final farewell to the series, “The End of Time”) stems exactly from this: writing individual scenes first and adding the plot as an afterthought. Of course, after all the Important Dialogue is delivered and the Great Revelations are made, the plot becomes a hindrance (best example: “Doomsday”) rather than the main point of the episode, and is quickly dispensed with, usually with a quick application of the magic TARDIS, magic sonic screwdriver, or some technobabble invented on the spot.
In fan circles, the words “RTD script” have almost become synonymous with “deus ex machina”. (In this sense, “The Parting of the Ways”, one of the worst offenders, is interesting in its own right: an almost-literal “god” steps out of a literal machine, the TARDIS, and sets things right.) Granted, this is not always the case. “Tooth and Claw” is ranked high among RTD episodes, presumably exactly because the resolution is adequately foreshadowed in addition to the episode itself being atmospheric. “Midnight” was good, but it was good by virtue of Davies abandoning the usual Doctor Who format in favor of writing something he’s actually good at: suspense drama.
And this is his second paradox: we’re dealing with a Doctor Who fan who despises Doctor Who fans, and a television producer who makes jabs at his own audience. An example of the two aspects of his personality reinforcing rather than contradicting each other.
“We already knew that Davies had a low opinion of his audience. They are too thick to understand scientific explanations; too unimaginative to be able to deal with stories set on the Planet Zog; too ignorant to have heard of any but the most iconic historical characters; and so shallow that if there is even two minutes of exposition, they’ll get bored and switch channels.”
~ Andrew Rilstone
Well, that may be too harsh. He did comment on “planet Zog” in defense of every season 1 episode being set within Earth orbit at some point in time, only to boldly go into that territory with the dreadful “New Earth” and later, less dreadful episodes. He does make in-story jabs at the Doctor Who audience, both the nerdy fandom (the even more dreadful “Love & Monsters”) and the mainstream (pre-character-development Donna). He wrote directly about hating Internet forums discussing him.
It would be easy to say that Davies “doesn’t get SF”. It seems more complicated than that. I’d say his main problem is that, and this is his producer side speaking, he underestimates his audience—an offense never committed by his Japanese “spiritual counterpart”, Nagaru Tanigawa, who also writes “soft” SF stories with a touch of romance for the “Internet generation”, yet manages to do it in a way that emphasizes both his skill as a writer and his respect for his readers. Davies thinks he can get away with nonsensical technobabble and lack of verisimilitude in his settings (“Gridlock”, anyone?) because it’s supposedly not what the mainstream audience cares about. So he goes out of his way to make his settings “relatable” to the modern audience by making them bizarre, grotesque pastiches of the present day (“The Long Game”, “Bad Wolf” and the aforementioned “Gridlock”), and he gets points for nailing the idea that the residents of these dystopias treat them as perfectly normal and the only possible states of living—while nevertheless depriving them of any degree of believability.
Note that I don’t ask for realism. Heck, I like some of the boldest, most “unrealistic” ideas from the new series, as long as it makes logical sense and is internally consistent. (For example, speaking of Moffat, I don’t mind the effing space whale, but I don’t see how anyone in their right mind would design peacekeeping androids on an Earth starship to look like the Smilers.) We have the 1984 effect: there is no way these societies can work, simply because of the human factor, even with all the advanced technology you want, and ignoring the pop culture references. (It’s telling how often “Bad Wolf” was praised for being allegedly a clever satire of mind-numbing reality shows, while in fact those were never intended as satire and RTD inserted them as a tribute to them.)
Davies is at his best when he drops his “viewers are morons” assumptions and writes intelligent stories for intelligent people. I haven’t watched it, but I was told that Torchwood: Children of Earth is really good, part of it because it drops all the random, inorganic, forced silliness that in Doctor Who specifically exemplified by two things: creating “kid appeal” species that fall flat, such as the Slitheen, Adipose and especially the dreadful Abzorbaloff, and inappropriate pop culture jokes where drama should be. (His pet character is specifically guilty of that, which is one of the reasons that contributes to the annoyances of season 2.) Doctor Who always oscillates between silly and seriousness, between comedy and drama; but in Moffat’s case, for instance, both tie together organically, without random bits of either sticking out like sore thumbs.
As for internal consistency, let’s just look at all the times he made familiar concepts exhibit many previously completely unseen functions, exceptions and corner cases, including such core ones as the TARDIS, sonic screwdriver and regeneration. (Regeneration can be either quiet or violently explosive, sometimes it plain doesn’t trigger when the plot demands it, you can refuse it at will—something never seen before—you can regrow limbs for as long as the plot says, you can suppress regeneration by channeling it into said severed limbs, which will cause copies of you to grow from them, etc etc etc.) Really, the phrase “it works that way except when it suddenly doesn’t” describes just about anything about RTD‘s pervasively used plot devices: while the basic concept stays the same, intricacies appear, disappear, and are plain handwaved in with no foreshadowing when the story demands it.
No review of RTD, even a very informal one, would be complete without mentioning his pet character, Rose Tyler, and the tackled-on George Lucas love story (at least the creators were smart enough not to make the Doctor mention love explicitly, not even Rose’s personal Doctor Clone For Shippers, thus allowing viewers to make their own interpretations). Indeed, that’s his fanboy side kicking in, and it’s best said by TV Tropes: sometimes it feels like he’s writing a fanfic of his own show, making all the same mistakes that make most fanfiction look bad (as opposed to stories written by authors who actually “get” the setting and the characters). The adventure-of-the-week format is both a strength and a weakness: a weakness because it forces writers to squeeze plots and interesting settings into 45-minute straightjackets, and a strength because if you didn’t like this week’s episode, chances are, next week’s will be completely different. The same story is with characters, the constant cast turnover lets you pick favorites. Don’t like Martha? Try Donna’s season. Can’t stand Ten? Chances are, Nine or Eleven will appeal to you more.
And this is where Rose stands out from the other companions. Not because she’s inherently better or worse, mind you. But her creator tries to force us to think she is, with all the subtlety of an anvil. While my opinion of Rose as a person is less than rose-colored, to put it mildly, what makes her particularly annoying is that the show couldn’t shut up about her even long after she was stranded on Earth-2—notwithstanding even her temporary return, purely to appease shippers, cheapening the drama of that separation. Yes, we get it—RTD thinks she was the Best Companion Ever, and wants to portray her and the Doctor as an item. (The fact that he didn’t give a 900-year-old Time Lord any legitimate logical reason for attachment to a completely random average companion is another story.) Now, can we please move on and see him saving the universe with someone else without the obligatory reference to Rose every episode?
Whoosh. This was a lot of text. Hopefully, I’ll be free of accusations of hating Russell T Davies. I hope I demonstrated that it’s not the case, I don’t hate him. As for love (in a non-romantic sense)... If I were to describe my complicated, multi-faceted opinion of him with a list of single words, perhaps that one would have a place on the list too, and maybe not even the last.
2 things:
1. The Abzorbaloff was created by a child, not RTD
2. Since it is canon that Time Lords can choose when to regenerate (Romana regenerates at-will), for a Time Lord to suppress regeneration doesn’t surprise me. Also, given Romana’s ability to cycle through many bodies before settling on one during the course of a single regeneration, for the Doctor to be able to keep using his regeneration energy to fix his hand doesn’t seem too far of a stretch.