A Christmas Carol

[teyla]

. . . the hell.

I went in hoping it would be halfway decent. Since it's a standalone episode, and Moffat used to be able to do standalones quite well. Blink, Girl in the Fireplace, they have their issues, but they're enjoyable enough.

The fish were fun. And the Christmas shark was amusing. The Doctor getting constantly distracted by Christmas-y type stuff was a nice touch. The whole thing about him going through the chimney BECAUSE IT WAS THERE was very Eleven in a good way.

But.

Since when is it okay to go back in your personal timeline?

There's a reason that time travel rule was introduced into the show. Because if you have a character who can go back in time and fix everything by changing the past, you have a super-godmode-y character who's just entirely uninteresting. Because he can fix everything. And he gets as many tries as he wants, because he can always go back and try again. Every conflict becomes redundant, and seems imposed on a meta-story level. (Which this one definitely did. Why the hell couldn't the Doctor just break the weather machine? He could have always fixed it again afterwards. One of my favorite scenes in Who was always Mickey in School Reunion pulling the the big computer array's plug. It's a machine. It uses external power. You can always pull the plug.)

What the Doctor was essentially doing was breaking the laws of time. Sure, it's been done before in the show, but this is post-RTD era. And in the RTD era, it was established that breaking the laws of time = PROBLEMATIC. It was one of the central themes of the entire 4.5 seasons that breaking the laws of time should never be done lightly. You can do it as a last resort, but if you fuck it up, Oods show up and predict your death. And only one season later, Eleven goes and casually breaks the laws of time because he feels like it? That de-values every conflict that happened in earlier episodes that was based around the fact that some things can't be done, or shouldn't be done, in time travel. (Father's Day, for example, to name an episode that wasn't written by RTD.)

The other big thing that bothered me about the episode was that . . . why was it that only Abigail could do the singing? I mean. Maybe I was missing something, but as far as I understood, all the Doctor needed was someone singing so he could amplify the sound waves and use them to break the cloud layer. Why did it have to be Abigail? I mean, obviously it had to be Abigail in order to make for a neat, clean, Christmas-y bittersweet ending, but aside from that? No reason somebody else couldn't have done it.

There were a ton of little things that bothered me, and I'm not even going to address the blatant sexism, because--well, because then I'll never shut up. But the two big things that I felt broke the episode's consistency were the laws of time thing, and the thing about the singing. The entire episode just didn't hold together. Which was unfortunate, because the idea was neat. And I liked the fish.

ETA: Also. I just realized. That episode described a society based on poor people selling their relatives to be stored frozen in a basement, and . . . nobody had a problem with that? That is very upper-middle-class. Complete with the whole "yes, they're poor, but they're still happy!" cliché. Ugh, Moffat.

Comments

[teyla]

Abigail was *literally* "The Woman in the Refrigerator."
And the Doctor was totally okay with that. Wooh, a basement full of frozen people! Let's . . . unfreeze one of the pretty ones and have her be your Christmas girlfriend. Eleven = Patrick Bateman? :/

Also, Eleven is not being written as asexual. At least not intentionally. In the light of this episode, with all the references to marriage and the Doctor going "I wish I could get some, but I can't, because I'm a dude in a box", that claim doesn't hold up anymore. Which means that Moffat just eradicated the last tiny bit of queer representation in his version of Doctor Who. Sigh.