DOCTOR WHO-THE BELLS OF SAINT JOHN

 

DOCTOR WHO-THE BELLS OF SAINT JOHN

 

Didn’t care or know about the prequel but this might be some of the best stuff from this Doctor. I must say I’m not looking forward to the last ten stories of Matt’s horrid era, though I am actually looking forward to COLD WAR so the last nine are causing me to go slow and with extreme caution. I don’t know how a season that started off so well drained the life out of itself and ended up with one POS story after another. This prequel is cute but it can’t hold up the entire season or indeed, this sorry story. Let’s see if I feel the same.

 

What I feel about the Moffat Era/Error is that it is the worst time in the show’s entire history. And yes, that includes the Colin Baker stories, which had their problems but I’ve just done a reassessment of them all and yes TIMELASH is horrid and the TRIAL is pretty bad but it’s still not Moffat WHO bad.

 

Nor is McCoy’s first season, which I once considered worse than the TRIAL season. I rather liked it. ALL DW has its problems but Docs one through four had maybe seven bad stories between them with Doctor Three having NO bad stories though yes, many had slow spots and lapses of logic, almost none were totally boring and illogical and time wasters.

 

Docs 1 an 2 had maybe two stories each that were bad; Doc 3 had none and Doc 4 had maybe four but even those eight or so stories had something that something that kept you a fan. Moffat’s stories were so bad during his show running that being a fan was something you regretted.

 

Perhaps in time, like with McCoy’s stories and even some of Colin’s, I’ll feel better about Moffat’s Era’s monstrous so called stories but I highly doubt it. Perhaps it was seeing them on BBC America with a thousand commercials making them seem endless and with several cuts of important dialog. Maybe it was just the time I saw them. Or maybe they’re all just a malarkey POS from a man who pretended to be a fan, walked out of a Big Finish meeting early because he couldn’t write for Paul McGann (the then current Doctor) and from a man who once stated the classic series sucked and the actors should never have gotten their equity cards.

 

There’s Clara. It is as if Moffat couldn’t figure out what kind of companion he wanted so he went for all the idea rumbling around in his head without ever really thinking any of them through. Let’s see if I feel differently: here goes:

 

As usual, there’s a good idea and premise at the heart of this “story” but Moffat blows it in the first few moments as he tells with talk rather than shows. Great classic like the original THE OUTER LIMITS and THE TWILIGHT ZONE which this can’t hold a candle to knew the difference. And believe it or not so did other second string shows like STAR TREK, LOST IN SPACE and LAND OF THE GIANTS. Moffat gives the whole premise away here and frankly while it’s a bit disturbing, it might have been more so back in 2013 but I doubt it.

 

Moffat’s problem is that he’s always reaching for a DW premise or monster to equal or better BLINK’s Angels. Even when he brings back the Angels he can’t seem to manage to make them as scary or original as RTD did (and yes, I still believe RTD rewrote Moffat BIG TIME; there’s no way the writer of this wrote BLINK). Thus, he’s always looking for the next average thing in our real world that he can exploit to scare the pants off us and sometimes it works and sometimes it half works but most of the time it just gets us illogical so called science fiction and bad TV with boring results. This is probably one of those later times.

 

Then, we get the same trick pony he’s used before with both River and the Doctor: a hooded figure in the past turns out to be the monk…not the monk, the Doctor who’s summoned. Sigh. Why? Why does he need to start out like this? It’s patronizing and boring already.

 

The Doctor, rather than act like the Doctor we know from 1963 to 1989, one TV movie and seasons one to four of the revised show (or the novels, comics, audios, etc) is acting like a serial killer stalker. He’s painting Clara as if she’s his whole world and he has to find her (and in hindsight, the prequel’s a bit creepy, too). Moffat tries to make us think something grand is happening but it’s not. There’s nothing here, nothing of substance. Which is what his Doctor(s) generally are.

 

Clara is NOW working for a man who needs a nanny to cute little Artie and snappy, clever Angie. I like kid characters, I really do so I don’t mind them yet. Artie is reading a book by Amelia Williams SUMMER FALLS. Moffat does this thing where he puts things in that seem to be important but are just as vapid as the rest. And he expects us to still care about the shallow Amy. Jenna’s a good actress so she sells this brilliantly and this might be okay if Clara settled into this life and this life style and it stabilized. Or if the writing makes us care.

 

So is it ever explained why the password to the family’s wi fi is is the first letter of every word to Clara’s saying RUN YOU CLEVER BOY AND REMEMBER? I bet it isn’t. Does this make any sense? Clara has to ask Angie for it so did Clara make it up and just forget? The Doc clearly doesn’t remember her voice. He’s talking to her from the present day and he’s in 1207. Why? How?

 

Oh and BTW, Clara clicks on the funny symbols rather than her boss’ family name. She’s not being careful. Sigh.

 

Okay, the joke about the monk making the sign of the cross when he hears it is a woman on the phone is funny. None of the rest of this is funny, interesting, or scary. Or remotely real.

 

The Doctor comes to her front door. Oh that’s clever. Wait, no, it’s really not. Then comes the first stalking scene. The idiot Doctor embarrasses himself…and us. He makes Clara say, “Doctor Who,” over again because he enjoys hearing it said out loud. We’ve crossed from poor into excruciatingly bad. I mean Moffat expects us to buy this crap?

 

A company that’s using wi fi to upload souls (yes, in DW) features next. Ms. Kizlet tells an aide that her other cuter, younger aide, an Asian man named Alexei should be killed after his holiday. She’s controlling people’s minds from her tablet. Okay, that’s a cool villain.

 

The Doctor, who’s lived thousands of years at this point, thinks it’s the best way to get to speak to Clara: show up in monk’s clothes, knock on her door, say stupid stuff and then never leave, banging on the door for an hour? He’s a superficial moron who’s badly written. No getting around it.

 

He then gives her stupid answers to reasonable questions. Moffat writes the dialog like he thinks it’s funny and clever and it’s neither of those and it’s not like anything anyone would say in these situations who wants to solve problems. It’s as if he’s just writing for Doctor Who and he’s gotten away with it for so long he just keeps doing it. HOW did they let him stay in this job this long?

 

The Doctor saves Clara from being uploaded. Uhm, is that how the evil corporation is doing this? No one notices walking upload station robots? One thing that this episode excels at is the music: Murray Gold hasn’t yet lost his touch and the music is still wonderfully excellent and nice to hear.

 

Someone told Kizlet about the Doctor: the client (probably the Great Intelligence, which, for once, makes some kind of sense).

 

Okay. The Doc licks a leaf in Clara’s book. I guess she lives with this family. He also smells a cookie box and bites one and leaves it in the dish. Earlier, he talked to himself. He’s serial stalker.

 

I must admit for a few minutes I was into the whole Clara pulled into the TARDIS during another attack, this time the company using a plane to hit them and the Doc uses the TARDIS to go the plane to save it. It’s all done as a joke and far too fast and the pilots wake up and don’t have a million questions and seem able to FAR TOO quickly be able to fly the plane after waking up. It could have been something wonderful.

 

Instead, the Doc appears on the street and collects money for appearing out of thin air. WTF? Is Moffat serious about this?

 

The only explanation I can think of is that he was in serious writer’s block and/or burn out and had a basic premise written down before that but then just cranked this crap out.

 

Really.

 

Is that motorcycle from the TV movie? It IS cool he rides it outside but to do this in front of all these people is just not like the Doctor. It’s not him at all.

 

And since when does he NOT take the TARDIS into battle? I guess since it fell into Dalek hands? Makes sense.

 

And what was that I said about the music? Ba da da da da? While taking is girl out on his bike? Really? Gosh.

 

I’ll give it this: this looks movie quality visually. The scenes as they drive, then take coffee are amazingly good looking.

 

“I can’t tell the future. I just work there,” is a direct STAR TREK movie rip off. And…it’s funny. Yes, I wrote that. It’s funny. And it works.

 

Okay so how were the people on the plane put to sleep?

I have to admit I’m not hating this like I used to and sort of even like it. I like the Doctor’s plan and I even like the drive up the side of the Shard. It’s still a bit of an annoying story but I’m not hating it like I used to. There’s something about seeing it again. Despite some of the stupider scenes and a sociopathic infantile Doctor, this is not terrible. Matt’s not bad given what it is.

 

UNIT being called in makes sense.

 

Not sure about Kizlet’s mommy and daddy lines.

 

Oh and UP THE SHARD is one of the best pieces of music from the new series which is superior in the music department to the old classic series, which is the reverse for the STAR TREK/STAR WARS/DC franchises (Marvel too if you ever saw the 1960s SPIDERMAN cartoons and their wonderful jazzy music).

 

Okay so like TIME AND THE RANI and PARADISE TOWERS and maybe even DRAGONFIRE and ATTACK OF THE CYBERMEN (nah?), I’d have to say my perceptions of this has changed. I count it now as one of the not so bad stories and better than I remembered stories. I also see why Clara didn’t rush off with the Doctor immediately even if we all would have. I liked it which is more than I can say when I saw it on BBC America.