Didn’t we finish this talk yesterday?
So Russell T. Davies, joining the list of people who won’t stop defending the indefensible to the fans who will never be convinced crap is made of gold, gave a teaser to his planned Doctor Who Christmas special. Given his history with Christmas episodes I’m satisfied with him never making it. I’d rather get the Star Wars that Lucas offered to Bob Iger, and there are reasons the prequels only get credit for not being the sequel trilogy.
Davies’ comments comes from an excerpt in The Guardian from his upcoming memoirs, The Queerest of Folk: A Life in Television, a reference to his popular gay sex show. I’m assuming because I have zero interest in watching that show. You can read the full article if you want, but even considering nitpicking every dumb thing he said just from a skim was giving me Seduction Of The Innocent flashbacks and that’s already a summer I’m never getting back.
Instead, I’m going with the relevant details given in a summary by Digital Spy of the article. That gives us the part I really want to comment on, and that’s enough to make an article when I’m having one of those weeks where my time has been cut down to do pretty much everything.
In an excerpt from his new memoir The Queerest of Folk published in The Guardian over the weekend, Davies revealed a little bit about the story he had in mind.
“I pitched it to the BBC, and they loved it,” he said. “An olde-worlde English village intercut with a huge, mysterious spaceship, an outer-space festival called Winternox, and lots and lots of Daleks, with something very unexpected hidden away … Oh, yes, I liked it!”
I’m sure he did. That’s all you’re getting, folks. A planet with a not-Christmas, Daleks, and “something…hidden”. Very vague. It’s a statement that sounds like he wants to get people interested in making the BBC make the episode whether Bad Wolf Productions is involved or not. I’ve seen it quite a few times since doing this website. “Here’s this great idea I had. Wouldn’t be great if they let me do it, folks at home with email and social media access? Hint hint wink wink.”
Davies explained that even though the special was announced in October last year, he didn’t even get the contract to write the script until March of this year, and by that point it looked untenable to get everything together in time.
He then confirmed rumours that there had been discussions about reworking the Christmas special into an Easter one, and that became part of his plot idea.
He said: “For a while, I became obsessed with the notion of a Christmas story transmitting at Easter, because, as part of the plot, time was out of joint. The Doctor running around shouting: ‘It’s not really Christmas!’ A bit meta, but fun.”
Or just make it Easter themed. Since it’s an alien planet and he hates Christianity, have a rabbit god or something using Japanese mythology as a guide. Also, it’s time travel to a world with a different seasonal cycle, like how in Australia it’s summer at Christmas. Winternox, or whatever it was changed to…Harenox, perhaps, probably wouldn’t be happening in December anyway. I guess he just wanted to ruin more Christmas symbols, like the never explained Santa “pilotfish”, the also never fully explained Christmas Tree Of Spinning Death, the attacking alien ship that looked like a Christmas star blowing up a London that now evacuates the city every Christmas to avoid being dead on New Years, or a burning fat woman being the Star Of Bethlehem. Yeah, we need to keep Davies as far away from Christmas as keeping Simon Furman away from female Transformers.
“It really existed to please the fans, except the irony is, it was exactly the sort of episode that fans would not be pleased by.”
Never stopped you before, Russ. Look at the majority of your return.
With that in mind, and aware of the financial difficulties currently facing the BBC, he went to the broadcaster in early May and was the one to suggest dropping it.
“I think they’d been waiting for me to say it,” he continued. “We’d all been too polite with each other, them not wanting to let me down, me not wanting to let them down. But this new plan sets the show free.”
Press X to doubt, but I’ll give him the benefit. “Oh yes, I told them we should drop it for the fans’ sake.” Again, look at what he did in his return and how it was defended by Davies and Ncuti “Touch Grass” Gatwa while David Tennant was busy trying to be on the “right side of history”. You embraced the derided “the Doctor is the source of all regeneration and William Hartnell was no longer the first Doctor, just the first we met” retcon of the Timeless Child. You took potshots at the fans who didn’t embrace your queer agenda with the gay Doctors and replacing a comic character with a trans person that got drawn into your Rose obsession. You decided Davros was an insult to the physically disabled and completely altered him. When did you ever care what the fans wanted in favor of your “cool kids”?
That does leave the issue of the Billie Piper regeneration unresolved, which is a potentially confusing thing to explain for a new era looking to bring in a new audience. Davies, however, thinks that the whole thing can be easily dealt with, noting how the 1996 TV movie’s ‘revelation’ that The Doctor is half-human was just ignored afterwards.
Just admit it was a mistake and poor Billy Piper has to live with it. At least the “half human on my mother’s side” bit was a plot point. This was just a lazy way to get people talking without actually doing anything good, and possibly making trouble for the next guy, which I discussed yesterday. The half human thing had potential, but nobody else saw it that way and that’s fine. The Rosegeneration, on the other hand, needs to make sense, like when Romana took on Astrid’s form, or the Doctor himself took on the face of the man from Pompeii he was talked by Donna into rescuing the family for. You comparing a cheap conversation gimmick to events that actually mattered to the stories they were in. Romana was called out by the Doctor, while the Capaldi face was a message to himself to try to be a good man. The Rosegeneration has more impact than the Sixth Doctor happening to resemble a jerk security agent because the showrunner liked the actor, even though one of the higher-ups hated him for unprofessional reasons.
I still believe nothing of value was lost. Davies’ Christmas special track record is insulting, his solution for the Rosegeneration is to ignore it, when he’s responsible for that and the other narrative issues caused by his second run. Even the Timeless Child could have itself been retconned by making the “Fugitive Doctor” the Timeless Child but not the Doctor, except that would go against both Davies and Chris Chibnall making the Doctor the most important person in the universe and not just the most important to the story, which Davies did from the first episode of his first run with the Time War. Even Steven Moffatt made the Doctor go from traveller who stumbles upon danger into an intergalactic legend that nobody wanted to mess with. Folks, I’m still glad he’s gone and hopefully there won’t be a third run for him. Two was bad enough.
