Lake/Flood reaction post

[dbskyler]

I absolutely loved this two-parter up until the end. It was riveting, with great stakes, and a fascinating dilemma, with a ghost twist and a time paradox twist . . . and then it was as if the writer ran out of time, and it was all just suddenly resolved. The Doctor's dead? Nope, his "ghost" was a hologram. Clara is next in line to be killed? Nope, the list of names was meaningless. It was like one huge shaggy dog story. Then, there were the plot points that didn't make sense or got dropped:

-- How can hologram Doctor release the ghosts from the Faraday Cage? Or was he a hard light hologram?

-- The whole "flood" thing was hardly touched on. There was no mystery to why the "town" was flooded, so when it turned out to be the Doctor to cause the flood, it really didn't matter at all. Oh, and it was pretty convenient to have the "town" actually be a fake-Russian-village training ground for the military, so no one was around to be killed, wasn't it? And speaking of convenience, that whole damn holding back all the water sure was handy. The land was considered valuable enough to build a damn to protect it, but not valuable enough to do anything with it other than build a training ground that gets totally abandoned? Or did the military drain a whole lake and put it behind a damn just to get some space to build a training ground? They couldn't find anywhere else to build it? Where's a disused quarry when you need one?

-- In part one, there was a lot of talk about what the ghosts were, and whether they were really ghosts or not, but then it was completely dropped in part two. Was the Fisher King actually able to rip people's souls from their bodies and turn them into transmitters? Or were they simply transmitters created through the process of killing someone, that just happened to take on the form of the dead person? It turned out to not really matter in the end. Don't give us ghosts but then not follow through on them.

-- They made a big deal about Clara and the Doctor staying in touch by phone, then never used the phone again. The whole phone thing was just an excuse to get everyone out of the Faraday Cage to go recover the phone when it gets stolen, which was okay, but then if you're going to go through all that, THE PHONE MUST GET USED. Why wasn't it part of the resolution? Which leads me to my next point:

-- I watched the episode a second time, and I couldn't figure out when the Doctor figured out that he wasn't actually dead. That's a problem. In fact, I think most of the "shaggy dog" feeling of the episode for me comes from the fact that we didn't get to experience the Doctor resolving the episode; instead it all just magically happened. The really frustrating thing is that I think it could have worked if we had just been allowed to take the ride along with the Doctor. Let us see the moment when the Doctor thinks his way out of it! Even better, let Clara be part of that resolution! Use the damn phone, that you made such a big deal of, and let Clara give the Doctor crucial information, or simply ask him why his ghost appeared before O'Donnell's ghost when he's still alive at that point in the past. That could have been a huge clue that he wasn't actually a ghost, and been the turning point where the Doctor starts to believe he has a chance to survive. That would have turned "shaggy dog" into "emotionally satisfying."

Oh well. I did really like it up until the end.

Comments

[pedanther]

I don't think it's a case of the writer running out of time at the end; I think he deliberately held back or hid parts of the plot so that he could try to impress the audience by presenting them with a complete solution in one go. (One of the reasons it's so hard to spot the point where the Doctor figured out he wasn't actually dead is that the writer has deliberately hidden it; after the Doctor thinks up his plan he goes on speaking and acting in ways designed to make the first-time viewer think he still believes he's doomed.) I agree with you that this is not very satisfying, and that it would be better to let the audience go on the characters' journey.

This preference for showing off the author's clever plot at the expense of the emotional journey is kind of a recurring problem of the Moffat era. "The Wedding of River Song" does a very similar thing, right down to hiding the moment where the Doctor gets his future back so it can be sprung on the audience at the end. And come to think of it, jblum's most recent LJ post is all about how that story would have been better if the audience had been allowed to take the ride along with the Doctor.

[dbskyler.livejournal.com]

I don't think it's a case of the writer running out of time at the end; I think he deliberately held back or hid parts of the plot

Now that you've said that, yes, I think you're right, it must have been deliberate. Reverse engineering an answer is neither impressive nor clever, though. It's even been done before, in "Bill and Ted" (there's your clue right there that it's not ultra-clever), and in Doctor Who. In "The Big Bang," the Eleventh Doctor went through a whole sequence of reverse engineering ("How did you know to come here?" etc.), but it worked in that episode because it was done quickly, with humor, and it was used to solve plot logistics, not to solve the central dilemma of the episode. Once you start reverse engineering your way out of problems, you don't have a show, because you never have any real stakes -- you can always go back in time and make every seeming setback turn out to be an illusion. Why not make it turn out that Adric didn't die after all?

That was an interesting post of jblum's; thanks for linking it.

[pedanther]

P.S. But I think I know how the hologram Doctor could open the Faraday Cage. The Doctor says that he created the hologram by hacking into the base's systems and using the same hologram projector they used for hologram Clara last episode. While he was at it, he could easily have programmed the base's doors to play along with the hologram's attempts to open them.

[dbskyler.livejournal.com]

Yeah, or he used his sonic sunglasses, handwave, handwave. There's always a way to come up with an explanation, but we got no explanation at all. But as they're making us explain it ourselves, I'm sticking with "hard light hologram.";)