Love & Monsters & Fans

I think I'm developing a love/hate relationship with the new Doctor Who series. On the one hand, I love that the Doctor has returned to television with a new look and a proper budget, and I am also generally pleased with the quality of most of the scripts. On the other hand, I am dismayed that Russell T. Davies doesn't work harder on recapturing the mixture of menace and whimsy that maked the high-water mark of the old series and the tendency of the new to indulge some of the worst vices of modern television-- not the least of which is a tendency to wallow in popular culture.

"Love & Monsters," the latest episode is a grand example of this. I was not happy when I read that Davies described it as "an experiment," and that some previewers predicted that it would infuriate traditionalists, but I was willing to approach the story with an open mind. This is a pity, as it would have saved me a lot of time.

"Love & Monsters" did not infuriate me so much as underwhelm. The fact that the story had a narrator, the hallmark of weak writing, didn't help, nor did the non-linear plotline that killed any hope of suspense or surprise stone dead. Nor did I tune in to find that the Doctor and Rose were absent from nearly the entire programme in favour of aforementioned narrator Elton, a tame working-class type (Is there any other sort of character in this series? It feels like Eastenders half the time.) who is obsessed with meeting the Doctor. As the story progresses (for want of a better word) we follow Elton as he joins a group of fellow misfits who share his obession and they form LINDA (London Investigators 'N' Detective Agency); a group dedicated to tracking down the doctor, but which is actually more of a social club for these members of damaged humanity to share cake and art projects while pursuing romances. Things seem to be going so well in that department that they forget all about the Doctor until a mysterious Mr. Kennedy shows up, who, to no ones surprise, turns out to be a man-eating alien from outer space bent on finding the Doctor for his own nefarious ends.

This is not a bad story, though not to my tastes. It's a very sweet tale (I hate sweets, by the way) with loads of sentiment and comedy and until the villain shows up like a massive speed bump it comes across as a nice little character study. Trouble is, this is not a Doctor Who story. If it were, the whole thing with LINDA would have been set up (albeit an insanely long one) and Mr. Kennedy would have been the pay off. Instead, Kennedy's appearance brings the whole story to a crashing halt from which it never recovers. Had the alien menace been jettisoned and the LINDA plot pursued to its logical conclusion (that its members did not need the Doctor, but each other), it would have been a much stronger story.

And that is the problem. Doctor Who relies heavily on the science fiction element to work. Remove the sci fi from 90 percent of the stories and they'd fall apart. Do this with "Love & Monsters" and it gets much stronger. It did not need Kennedy. It did not need the Doctor. This is not a poor science fiction story, it's a reasonably good Play of the Week struggling to get out. So, why the blazes did Davies make this thing? Was it ego? Is he out of ideas? Does he not want to do Doctor Who anymore and this is a cry for help?

The answer, oddly enough, comes from a Jay Nordlinger column in National Review:

I saw that William Shatner is joining the TV Hall of Fame, and I wanted to say a brief word about him. I don't know much about Shatner (Captain Kirk on Star Trek) but I do know this: I was on a television talk show with him, several years ago. I had just seen Trekkies-- a documentary about Star Trek fans-- and discussed it with him in the green room. He spoke wisely, sympathetically, and even touchingly about those "Trekkies." He said, and I'm paraphrasing, "We soon learned that it was not about us -- it was about them."

In other words, the conventions (for example) were not centered around the actors in the TV series; they were centered on the participants; their curiosity, their enthusiasm, their sense of family. The actors could show up or not. It mattered little, or not at all.

This is a perfect example of the rationale behind "Love & Monsters." This is not a Doctor Who episode, this is a Doctor Who fan episode, which explores "their curiosity, their enthusiasm, their sense of family." This is a laudable goal, but it's taking what should be a minor plotline or, preferably, an in-joke and blowing it out of all proportion. It's the sort of thing Star Trek indulged in throughout its later incarnations and is the sort of audience repellant that Doctor Who emphatically does not need.