Dr Who and The Fatal Compromise

 Yeah, I wasn't keen on Dr Who. 

Something borrowed, everything blue

It was brave. It was bold. It was fatally compromised. It was spinning a lot of plates, and ultimately saw Dave Tennant wading through shards of shattered crockery, his tartan trews in ribbons.   

The episode - I'm talking about The Star Beast, of course - had to do the following things: 

*Introduce the concept of the Doctor to an apparently ignorant Disney Plus audience. 

*Introduce a vast amount of back-story about who Donna is, who her family are, and the odd significance of her daughter being called Rose. 

*Fan-serve the grumbling hordes of middle-aged (and older) Whovians (Whovians, guys...) who hate everything about the show they profess to love, and will never be pleased with anything. The show does this by taking large plot elements from a 1980 comic strip, implying the Doctor Who Weekly comic strips are now canon.  

*This also gives us a range of Beep the Meep dolls just in time for Christmas. It's all about the merchandise when you're working for Disney. One of the better jokes in the show is Donna's narky resolution of a scene ripped off from E.T. Because this is still a British programme, and we're going to be bolshy, aggressive and ignorant. It's just what we do. 

*Save the BBC. 

*Work as a freestanding, one hour adventure, and as the flag-ship for the new, vaunted WHONIVERSE (Whoniverse, guys...), and as acceptable fare in the context of all the other Doctor Who adventures, and make you care about characters who everyone knows will be gone in three episodes. 

It isn't bad. 

I mean the revamped theme music is actually, actively BAD, with it's trilling flutes, piano flourishes and, bizarrely, back and forth heavy breathing a la Fleetwood Mac's "Big Love". I mean, fucking hell. And the music never lets up for an instant. It's such a lack of faith in the audience. Every grimace or sigh is accented with a plucked string or ominous rumble. We get it. On our own. Stop spoon-feeding us, Rusty. We're not fussy babies. There's even a joke about it - the Doctor has tunneled through the roof spaces of several houses using his magic wand, and they sneak past a sleeping home-owner and, for fifteen seconds, the music stops. Then, as soon as Converse hits pavement, the bombast begins anew. 

Both the leads are fine. There's a ton of exposition and running about and David Tennant is great at that. Also his hair is absolutely magnificent. His new Doctor is subtly different to the tenth: not cocky and smug, but thoughtful and wary. It's a welcome reinterpretation. He's there not to kill his friend, but as the adventure continues, as he gets more involved, he starts to forget not to kill her. Luckily, he needn't worry. The memory of him, which absolutely, definitely must kill Donna if she recalls him, even for a second, proves to be far less head-explodey than anticipated. 

Catherine Tate's Donna is great. She always is. She's an explosive reaction waiting to go off, a comic depth-charge. One of the greatest things Rusty ever thought to do was Donna Noble, a portable conscience for the doctor, and never cowed by him. She's often outraged by his excesses, his alienation, the seeming callousness of his global world-view. She doesn't get to do a lot of that here, but there's two more episodes, so...

Beep the Meep is pretty annoying. Miriam Margolyes is on fire on Twitter right now, but this isn't up there with her best work. This is no Cadbury's Caramel Bumpkin Bunny. God, I loved that bunny. The cute thing is the baddy, and the evil looking things are the goodies is a Tharg's Future Shock level inversion, and Beep's a bit one note. Well, two note, I suppose. Their defeat is perfunctory, but requires Donna to become half Timelord again, and there are obvious nods to The End of Time. But she doesn't. She shrugs it off, like the Doctor shaking a cyanide poisoning out of his sock. There you go, Doctor. All that angst was for nothing. You big silly, just assuming consequences, when all that bother can be just magicked away. 

Sometimes when you watch Dr Who, you can reverse engineer the episode from the idea, and I would swear the germ of this story - apart from all the Pat Mills bits - was the moment where Russell T had a brain-wave about the word Donna keeps repeating as her brain goes into meltdown: Binary. It looks as if the Doctor hadn't quite sealed off his Timelord brain - information leaked out, leading to Donna naming her daughter Rose, or more likely Rose naming herself Rose, as she has inherited this magical time mind too. She's also non-binary. And that was the moment Rusty's fag fell into his coffee and he shouted "Eureka! I've only gone and done it again."

It's a classic Russell T conclusion: a bit of wordplay, a bit of magic, a bit of men-are-a-bit-dim-eh? And we're sorted. Hmm. 

The programme looks good but, oddly, given the gigantic new studios - and the new Tardis set-design is enormous and gorgeous - the whole thing felt a bit cramped, a bit confined, and strangely muted. And everything was blue-filtered all the time. A bit of natural light, a bit of open space would have made the production breathe a little. At times it looked like a high-end Supermarket Christmas advert. 

I just think this was a ridiculously ambitious approach, and it hasn't properly come off. We end up with a children's film with no children in it (Rose is a teenager, and I'm reminded of Skizz, a 2000AD strip of a similar vintage to The Star Beast and yet another knock-off of E.T.) There are two middle-aged, obviously damaged people, being chased by a cute, furry monster, under a blue lamp, while the Harry Potter score plays in the background. I'm not sure these different tensions will end up pleasing anyone. But who knows. 

And of course, the embattled fan's cri de coeur, there's always next week.