doctor whoisit

So last week marked the end of the latest season of the revamped Doctor Who.

The season has been a pretty good one. There weren't any proper stinkers as there have been in previous seasons. There were a few things I was disappointed about, though.

First off they buggered about with the theme tune in a totally unnecessary and, frankly, rubbish way. It sort of took on a drum-and-base feel at the beginning and in my opinion ruined it. I can understand wanting to tweak things to signify the beginning of a new era, and I can see that a tweak to the music is a lot cheaper than tweaking the visuals or totally revamping, but they really should have left well alone.

Also, I have to come down in the camp of not being a new fan of the new Daleks. The new ones are bigger, which is okay, but they're also colour-coded. I can't remember what they're supposed to mean (this is part of the problem - unless the colour coding 'makes sense' based on what they are you're likely to forget it) but the idea presumably is that each colour corresponds to a type of Dalek.

Which is another part of the problem - part of what the Daleks are about is that they're meant to be a reflection of that part of Nazism that was concerned with racial purity. Daleks see themselves as the best race and a pure race, so they want to exterminate all other races. But surely that means genetically they're all nearly identical, meaning specialisation should essentially be un-necessary - they're all equally good at everything.

But also, the Daleks are now a veritable riot of rainbow colours (taste the rainbow indeed) and a bright yellow Dalek is just not as scary as a utilitarian metallic one.

One thing I think has been a struggle this last year is the relationship with the companion. I think there was a decision to be made about keeping the idea of the companion and Doctor loving each other (or unrequited love) and going back to the old days where it was more about a platonic friendship.

So you ended up with a bit of an odd situation at one point where Amy basically threw herself at the Doctor... on the very night of her wedding to Rory. The problem with this is I'm not sure that really reflected very well on her. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for complicated relationships, but did it really fit with how she was depicted throughout the rest of the series? I'm not sure it did.

My last niggle was the whole paradoxes thing. The eventual conclusion of the story played a fairly typical trick of making it so that 'none of it had ever happened' but the problem is that just creates even more paradoxes.

I dunno - I kinda didn't mind that in the RTD era, but I think I was expecting a bit more in the ways of reliable hard-SF chops from Moffat. I guess the real point there is that it's a Saturday teatime entertainment show, not a proper hard-SF show and never has been.