“After 1989 we had, for years, a current Doctor,’ Shearman continued. “Now, everything that is ever going to be produced in Doctor Who terms is going to feel retrogressive. At least with the New Adventures and then the BBC Books [original novels published in the nineties] you thought, ‘It’s the current Doctor – McCoy or McGann’. No one’s going to start writing Doctor Who books with a Billie Piper Doctor, because no one knows what that means. In a funny way, the closing moments of The Reality War seem to put a full stop on things. We didn’t have that before.”
Shearman's work for Doctor Who has mainly been the audio plays. He wrote by far the best of them, particularly the Eighth Doctor story Chimes at Midnight and the Sixth Doctor story Jubilee, which he adapted for the Ninth Doctor in 2005 as "Dalek". The Big Finish audios were one of the pieces of supplemental media created in that period between the end of the classic run in 1989 and the beginning of the new era in 2005. I'd say he's absolutely right--fans could feel like they were experiencing a continuing story, even under the threat that that story may end up being retconned (though it wasn't, at least as far as the Big Finish audios are concerned). This time, they can't. If anyone tries to write the Billie Piper Doctor, they'd be obliged come up with some kind of explanation for her, to establish her personality, whether it's a mix of the Doctor and Rose, just Rose or just the Doctor, or something else entirely. So any audio plays, comics, or novels that come between now and the show's return can only be things filling in gaps between past episodes. It may truly turn out to be the nail in Doctor Who's coffin.
Apparently Doctor Who executive producer, Jane Tranter, has decided to take offense to Shearman's comments.
That’s really rude, actually, and really untrue . . . It’s a 60-year-old franchise. It’s been going for 20 years nonstop since we brought it back in 2005. You would expect it to change, wouldn’t you?
This kind of makes me wonder if the Billie Piper Doctor was her idea. Arguably, the gist of Shearman's comments are precisely opposite to how she characterises them--he's saying the problem now is that the story can't change because no-one knows how to go forward.
It's too bad because I'd say Shearman would make a hell of a showrunner. Yes, he has a penchant for the super weird and conceptual and many would argue that the problem was too much of that kind of thing in the recent run. But his stories generally felt grounded and built up slowly to their weirdness by establishing characters and clues.
It would be nice if they decided to do a season of the Eighth Doctor next. Of course they won't but fans have wanted that since 2013. I guess that would be pretty retrogrssive, though.
I would argue the trouble really started with the bi-generation. It makes the obvious path now to go with the David Tennant Doctor who's still around and make the Billie Piper Doctor his companion. The obviously politically correct idea of making the Doctor and companion equals in this way is really lame. Of course, it also doesn't really make sense but I bet that's what they were thinking. The same line of thinking was basically behind Donna and the new Rose's stories.
Here's what I would do. Get a new showrunner, someone well outside the clique, and start the show with someone totally new in the role, stuck on earth in, oh, let's say the 17th century (you know that's my favourite). Have a whole new set of stories, leaning toward a gothic tone like Tom Baker's second season, and slowly bring in clues to explain what happened. Have visions of not only Rose but the Doctor as other past companions and maybe eventually reveal the problem was something contaminating the regeneration process so that it was continually regurgitating familiar faces for a while which the Doctor escaped by finally generating a new face. The story could be a metaphor for the show itself, I guess.
No comments:
Post a Comment