Doctor Who: In the Forest of the Night

Posted on October 26, 2014

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Jenna Coleman in BBCAmerica’s “Doctor Who” 

 

We’ve been doing our part singing the praises of the bold writing on this season of Doctor Who, calling it some of the most thoughtful character examinations in the history of the show. So let us be perfectly clear, blunt and straightforward: This was a terrible episode of Doctor Who. Not only was this easily the worst episode of Season 8, but we’d put it alongside the very worst episodes in the entire run of Nu Who. Regardless of the quality of the acting, directing and writing (the latter two of which are highly debatable), this episode was just so very wrong on a conceptual level. To us, it summed up all the very worst impulses of Nu Who in one episode; a reliance on precocious children, a full embrace of fantasy storytelling (by almost gleefully crapping on anything approaching believable science), mistakenly putting far too much importance on the companion, decisions and actions that make absolutely no sense in or out of the context of the story, a depiction of a worldwide threat that only affects people standing near The Doctor, a worldwide population that is apparently quite stupid, fearful and forgetful, and worst of all, a resolution that’s not only dumb, but actually stands as a paean to not acting and not thinking too much. Seriously. That was the message of the episode. Stop thinking and reacting to the world. Stop medicating children. Listen to the voices telling you to do things. Also: If children can’t be with their parents, it’s better to just let them die.

What the HELL? Was everyone involved with this episode so in love with the Blake references and the children’s storybook feel that no one stopped to note that it was crapping all over the very essence of Doctor Who? “I don’t want to see more things. I want to see the things in front of me more closely,” Look, that’s a really lovely thing for a former hardened soldier to say to the girl he loves. It might work wonderfully in a rom com or drama of some sort. It felt like a slap in an episode of this show, which has spent the last 50 years being ENTIRELY ABOUT the wonder of seeking out new things, of constantly learning and having experiences. It’d be one thing if Danny’s statement was meant to merely illustrate that he and Clara may not be right for each other (which is what we assume was the intention), but it’s also presented as something Clara (and by extension, the audience) needs to stop and consider. We’re comfortable with the examination this season of the ill effects of being a Doctor’s Companion and whether or not Clara is suited for it – or if any person is suited for it for any real length of time. All of that has been fascinating to us. But to question the very idea of thinking and exploring? That’s just so wrong for a Doctor Who script. The question should be “Is this kind of thinking and this kind of exploring good for X in the long run?” Not “Is thinking and exploring bad?” There’s a HUGE difference between those two questions and this script seems to have blurred it. Bad science on Doctor Who we can take, but an episode that dismisses the entire philosophy behind the show in order to tell a fairy tale is borderline offensive.

Oh, and we lied. We can’t take bad science on Doctor Who; not on this level; not when the rest of the episode is so bad. Trees springing up overnight, worldwide? An instant forest? Sounds like a job for The Doctor. We’re so there. Magical trees that use oxygen to fight fire and then disappear? That’s horrible. Who signed off on this? Oh, and by the way, good to know if we ever come face to face with a tiger, we can just use the flashlight app on our phones to fight it off. Honestly, if someone wants to defend all this, be our guest, but don’t feed us a line about this being a family show or an episode geared towards the kiddies. We can remember enough of what it feels like to be a kid to know that our 8-year-old selves would’ve been just as annoyed by some of this stuff – especially the disappearing trees and the light-sensitive tigers.

It’s clear this episode was meant to be a bookend to “Kill the Moon,” which also had the planet threatened by a celestial body and a resolution that came down to “Let things play out,” but we’re afraid any attempt to make a point out of the similarities fell flat. The takeaway seems to be that Clara is now comfortable with lying and willing to tell the Doctor to run away. For one, the point has already been well made this season (and especially last episode) that Clara has picked up a lot of the Doctor’s traits and has a much better understanding of what it takes to do what he does. This episode didn’t add anything to that idea. Second, her decision to let the children, herself – AND EVERYONE ELSE – die instead of getting on the TARDIS is totally nonsensical. Third, the fact that The Doctor ACTUALLY FLEW AWAY WITHOUT RESCUING ONE PERSON, knowing that, theoretically, he had the ability to save countless numbers of them is just … we mean …

Did anybody proofread this thing before they shot it?

We suspect the entire point was to show Clara’s growth (FAIL) and that she, ultimately, does not want to be like The Doctor at all. When she said she didn’t want to be the last of her kind, she was quite openly saying she’d rather die than wind up like him. It’s powerful, but we don’t entirely buy it. Even at the end of all of this drama, she was still hanging out in space, gleefully watching a solar flare envelop earth with nary a care that everyone down below might still die. We can buy that Clara isn’t self-aware enough to realize that she’s more or less exactly like him now, but we can’t buy that she’d look him in the eyes and tell him she’d rather die than become like him. That’s such a subversion of the Companion role that we have a hard time deciding whether the creators realize how damaging a thing it is for one of them to say – and how cruel she looked for saying it.

We’ve been very supportive of the show examining things from a darker side this season, but this episode felt like it shot for “dark fantasy” and “characters examining their actions” and landed on “Shitting on everything this show has stood for for a half century.”

Bah. We know we sound like outraged fanboys, but this was just so ill-conceived all around that we’re having trouble processing it.

 

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