Okay, right here will be a good spot for fans of Doctor Who to join me in spazzing out utterly about the finale for Season 4.

I finally got around to watching it last night, all three episodes - ALTHOUGH I had originally thought that it was a two-parter composed entirely of "Turn Left" and "The Stolen Earth," so when we got to the cliffhanger at the end of that second episode and I saw the TO BE CONTINUED, I literally yelped out loud. Fifteen minutes earlier and in subsequent five minute intervals, I'd been thinking "Well, the episode wraps up in ten minutes, how are these assholes going to fix all of this now? Five minutes to go and they still haven't started resolving anything, I wonder what shitty deus ex machina is going to ruin this episode for me this time?" and then "AHHHHHHHHHH NO WAY" and a mad rush to, er, acquire part three.

I wisely chose not to indulge in reading the spoilers, so I received the full impact of Sarah Jane and Torchwood crossing over, the juvenile visceral thrill of hearing that "Exterminate!" come out over the speakers, the very welcome return of Davros (whom I always thought was woefully underused in the original series), a delightful dash of K-9, the welcome return of Mickey Jones (Guys, I loved Mickey from his first appearance, you johnny-come-latelies can eat it) and - oh lord, I can't believe how much I loved this - Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister! She was possibly my favorite recurring background character, in her way a Brigadier for the new Doctor, and I'm so thrilled to see that she played out a character arc.

I also enjoyed the wee bit of in-jokeyness this episode, the delightful prosody of Catherine Tate cheerily rattling off pseudo-scientific nonsense with confident aplomb, the downplaying of Captain Jack for fucking once. I can't say I appreciated the resolution of the Donna Noble arc, not because it was sad or shocking but because it was irritating. It sort of underlines many of the problems I have with Doctor Who, in that the female characters don't really get much of a shot at growing ...



As a testament to these three episodes, I would have to say I only found myself rolling my eyes once - maybe twice - per chapter. Given the last two years' worth of stories, that's a record.

ludickid mentioned that, of all the people whom he knew who watched the new Doctor Who, none of them seemed to be enjoying it. I have to give him that, I'm a dedicated viewer and yet, stupidly, I get incredibly frustrated with the damn show. It has major problems - it runs all of forty-five minutes, but there've been very few episodes that couldn't have had ten minutes cut out of them, if not fifteen, twenty or even thirty. None of the two-parters since the first season have had to be two-parters, and so the episodes are relentlessly padded; the swelling orchestral music is overwhelming; the female characters are defined almost entirely by (a) how awesome they think the Doctor is and (b) their relationships with their mothers; much dialogue is spent underlining the obvious, when it isn't just two female characters sitting down and talking about how awesome the Doctor is¹; and so the fuck on.

I almost don't know why I endure all of this and much more; that the actors are charismatic only goes so far, you get damn sick of their scripted awe after a while. The show has potential, which gives my hyperactive imagination a chance to play with the world that Russel T Davies is stitching together out of thirty-plus years of incidentally assembled continuity (the very thing for which I love Grant Morrison so much, when he does it with DC's history), and you can't put down too much a show that fires up the ol' gears. Mostly I do watch it to see how Davies - warts and all - stitches together a mythos which was assembled on the fly by journeyman script writers whose eyes were on cheap thrills rather than coherent universe-building, as I find that kind of Wold-Newtonism fascinating. And then, of course, it's worth it for when episodes like these come along, which for all its and the series faults, I enjoyed immensely.

I usually cannot abide genre fiction, and I'm only able to enjoy Doctor Who because I enjoyed it when I was a kid, so I have a nostalgic emotional attachment to it. I couldn't stand Buffy, I have no interest in Heroes, I give no shits about Battlestar Galactica - I just cannot get involved in these stories, possibly because the scope is so enormous but the heroic trope demands victory over all evils.

It's ridiculous when you think about it, when you look at a typical dramatic work and the conflicts that the characters face therein, all the questions you find yourself asking about the protagonists and their challenges - will this guy beat his drug addiction, will this one balance family and school, will this one overcome this illness or get out from this awful relationship or whatever? You never know, on the best shows, your favorite character could fail ninety-nine times out of a hundred against the most mundane daily challenges, she might cheat on her husband or he might start shooting up again, you never know what little temptations and troubles will overcome them. But in fantasy and science fiction, there's monsters from outer space who shoot lasers out of their eyes and mind control you and have conquered a million worlds but OBVIOUSLY they're going to get beaten in the end. McNulty on the Wire may never wrestle his demons back in the bottle, but Doctor Who can obviously beat Satan by yelling at him (seriously, he did).

It ends up being hard to give a shit about a world like that, where all the evils are unimaginably humongous but inevitably beaten. It would be fine if the shows didn't routinely use that as the crux of their drama, but of course they do - it's the conceit of genre fiction, all the character stuff happens in between dragon attacks.

I'm not a hundred percent sure why I enjoy Doctor Who - more as a concept than an actual show, I admit - but I suppose it has very little to do with the actual episodes. I think I love the premise, the ideas at play, the delightful sense of joyful cognitive dissonance at a robot dog who is also the world's most advanced computer and an adventurer, or a beat-up phone booth that travels through time, or the idea that the future is this wonderland of optimistic possibilities, that forces of menace are dire and ominous but better dealt with abstractly, that good is a big loud gaudy thing in converse tennies and can fix most problems with a screwdriver. In its ideal form, it's absurd and more than a little camp, and is nothing but inspired ideas at play.

Anyway, really good season finale. I think I could stop watching now.

¹Doctor Who drinking game: Every time two female characters sit down and have an ominous conversation about how badass the Doctor is, take a shot. If one of them says something incredibly fruity like "He is like the fire between the stars," take two. Watch a whole episode and then wake up the following morning with the events of the previous evening blacked out and a new tattoo.

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