Spoiler alert – if you haven’t yet watched the Dr. Who episode about spiders, this will ruin it.
If you have, this will… ruin it.
Story rules for writers – it has to make sense and every scene matters. ‘The dwarf in the suitcase’ is the usual term for something left in the back of the story that achieves nothing and is just a distraction.
This particular episode of Dr. Who was as viciously infused with PC as the rest of the new batch. Nothing to do with the actors, it was all down to the writers.
We had the irrelevant addition early on. Mention of a same sex marriage (the other partner never appears) that had no bearing on the story right at the start. Nothing wrong with same sex marriage as far as I am concerned, but it was simply not relevant and did not need to be mentioned. It did nothing to the story line.
That same character then went into mysterious tunnels and recorded her ‘confession’ on her phone before being caught by a giant spider. It was irrelevant. Nobody in the story found the phone, it added nothing, it was pointless. Should have been a deleted scene.
Then we have the humanity. The Doctor hates guns (despite Doctors 3 and 4 at least having a close connection with a Brigadier and the UK army) so nobody was allowed to shoot the spiders. Instead the Doctor sealed them in a room with no spider food. There, the Doctor thought, they would have a humane death as they ate each other until the last one died of starvation. Yeah Doc, very humane.
The final big spider, the ‘boss’ in the game, died of a bullet to the brain from a man who was, well, an arse. This doctor hates guns (of course) and denounced the arse as an utter arse because the spider was already dying.
Yes, it was. It had grown way too big for spiracle-oxygenation to work. It was dying of asphyxiation, slowly, in agony, and nothing could stop it happening. A bullet to the brain was indeed, as the arse said, a mercy killing. The PC anti-gun Doctor would have let it die in pain.
The plot had more holes than a cheese grater. The arrogant arse was an American with a chain of hotels and other business interests who was going to run for President of the USA. A Trump parody? Could have been, but they couldn’t help themselves. He declared he hated Trump and was opposing him. So the bad guy was a Democrat. Oops!
The spiders they had found outside the hotels were instantly forgotten. As were all the mass of spider activity anomalies that led them there in the first place. Nobody bothered clearing that up.
The episode had some great CGI but the story was a mess. It will be improved if they can get writers who write SF rather than propagandists who want the PC message shoved in at all costs. Dr. Who could still be a fantastic show, hell I have watched it since 1963, but this latest ‘political message doctor’ is wecking the storylines.
It is not supposed to be real. We know it is not real. It is fantasy, it is a bit of fun.
Get your fucking politics out of our relaxation time.
There isn’t a straight couple left in Holby City. And not much of a story line either, since that homicidal megalomanic got away with it and took off.
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I don’t watch TV apart from Dr. Who. I’ve followed the show from the beginning. The new PC-infused storylines are getting ridiculous.
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Yes and Stormzy’s music is a magnet for creepie crawlies – that explains the Momentum crowd 😉
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I’d better not play it here, there are plenty of spiders already.
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Didn’t Dr Who go down the ratings hole last time it became a political tool?
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It went into the wilderness for decades. Could be heading that way again.
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No it isn’t. Viewing figures are up:
https://tellymix.co.uk/ratings/381147-ratings-doctor-who-strictly-come-dancing-and-x-factor-viewing-figures-4.html
They should have moved Doctor Who to tea-time on Sundays a couple of years ago. Maybe then they could have squeezed a couple more seasons out of Capaldi’s Doctor.
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This does at least explain why the universe is not overrun with Time Lords. If they can change sex as well as appearance and travel in time, then we can confidently expect that all of Time Lord society is very definitely Not Talking To every other bit of that society, until the other bit apologises for the insult that occurred in the past of the insulted segment but in the future of the blamed segment.
All of Time Lord society will be like this, so they just won’t breed and since they can travel in time, will not have bred at all (paradoxes, paradoxes…). The Doctor is not just the last Time Lord, he/she is the only one that ever has been since they evolved from monkeys.
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There is a school of thought that reckons the Time Lords turned into the Angels…
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The Doctor had a daughter (and at the start, a granddaughter) but the only time we saw anything approaching a wife was River Song – who he did not have children with. The daughter appeared in one series but died without (apparently) regenerating – although the Master did that too and came back as a woman.
The first Doctor left his granddaughter on Earth in the 1960s and she’s never been heard from since.
There was also a Timelord called The Monk who the Doctor left stranded in Viking Britain. Since they seem to be able to live for thousands, if not millions of years the Monk should still be around. So that’s two loose-end Timelords just in the UK!
Not everyone on Gallifree was a Timelord. The ordinary people could apply to join but the ordinary ones didn’t have regeneration. It’s never clear how long the ordinary people could live.
The show has left a hell of a lot of loose ends lying around. It would be nice to see some of them tied up at last.
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I also have watched it from the very beginning.This series I watched the first two episodes and then switched it off halfway through the spiders.I will not put up with political propaganda in what should be a lighthearted but still slightly scary story.As you say, there were more holes in the plot than could be endured.No more Doctor Who for me.
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It’s beginning to feel like watching Sylveste McCoy send the show into limbo all over again. I’ll stick to it for this series but if they keep up the mega-PC infusions then it’s not likely to have a next series.
There’s plenty of mileage left in the franchise, but they are making it impossible to watch now. You can’t get ‘into’ the story, you just end up placing bets on which bit of PC they’ll force in next.
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You know how good intentions lead to unintended consequences?
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Spotted all the nonsense about spider size, 21% oxygen and lungbooks and spider blood meaning even a cat sized one was far too big to breathe. It is so very PC to the point of irritation to the point of me not caring what happens to her crew of misfits. Your suggestion of an SF writer not a propagandist writing scripts is very sensible. Far too sensible for the BBC as currently staffed.
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The bird eating spider is about the size limit these days – although I’ve heard that when the planet’s atmosphere contained a lot more oxygen than it does now, they could get a lot bigger. So, of course, could all the insects they preyed on. Even then, the span of roughly a dinner plate seems to have been the maximum.
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