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A Christmas Carol
. . . 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.
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. . . that. No. No, sir. Does he have any idea how television works, these days? At least 20% of his audience wouldn't have watched the special on Christmas Day. Television isn't tied to a fixed schedule anymore, Moffat! Even I know that, and I'm just a stupid TV student. Argh.
Disregarding the fact that this is the age of the BBC iPlayer and illegal downloading (and I don't know how you can disregard that, as the executive producer, since Doctor Who and Torchwood are always used as examples for shows that are being watched on the iPlayer by a large part of the audience), it also ignores the parts of the audience that don't celebrate Christmas. The UK is a pretty multi-cultural country, with a rather large non-Christian population. So Moffat isn't writing his show for them? Apparently. He's only writing it for the people who celebrate Christmas, and celebrate it exactly the way he celebrates it. SIGH, MOFFAT. I really sort of want to hit him with a stick.
a better argument for Abigail's impending death would have been that multiple freeze-thaw cycles denature and eventually destroy proteins
That would have worked. But then Abigail dying would have been the Doctor's fault! For unfreezing her. And we can't have that, since it would make the decision difficult and ambiguous and things wouldn't be neatly black and white anymore, and the poor audience might get confused. Although knowing Moffat, he would have probably simply ignored that implication. Since that is what he seems to do with plotlines and implications in his episodes that he doesn't want to deal with.