If The Doctor Were A Dinosaur, Would We Still Wait For Him?


Apato-second?
Yes, that is the Second Doctor as rendered as a dinosaur, I believe an Apatosaurus, though it's hard to tell. He is rather generic. And right now, he's the only thing keeping me from my head exploding off the top of my neck. Because Stephen Moffat was talking to someone again, and he said this:
The more Doctor Who becomes a perennial, the faster it starts to die. You’ve got to shake it up, you’ve got to keep people on edge and wondering when it will come back. Sherlock is the prime example, as far as that goes. Sherlock almost exists on starving its audience. By the time it came back this year, Sherlock was like a rock star re-entering the building! So keeping Doctor Who as an event, and never making people feel, ‘Oh, it’s lovely, reliable old Doctor Who – it’ll be on about this time, at that time of year’. Once you start to do that, just slowly, it becomes like any much-loved ornament in your house – ultimately invisible. And I don’t want that to ever be the case.
I'll start by clarifying that it was not Moffat who decided when Doctor Who would air, it was the BBC. So this could all be down to Moff trying to come to his own terms, and justify the wait in his own mind. But, he said it, and he has to live with it. I've disagreed with things Moffat has said before. And I disagree once again. I feel that what he's saying here, that expecting something to happen makes it less exciting when it does, in fundamentally false, and that goes double for the Doctor.

Has your birthday, Mr. Moffat, never been exciting to look forward to? How about Christmas? Smaller, how about the bloody weekend, after a long week at work? How passive do you get sir? Would the weekend be more exciting if you never knew when it was going to come? Would Christmas? I believe that a regular schedule is important, in all aspects of life, including entertainment. People have date nights, new movies open on Fridays, TV shows in the US begin in September, and end in May (mostly). Regularity does not breed apathy, it nurtures reliability. I, for one, would much prefer the Doctor fresh and new every spring, or summer, or fall, so long as it happened every year at the same time. Something I could circle on my calendar, that I could look at and say "only two more months, only two more weeks, only two more days."

Of course people are going to break the door down when a break is prolonged, Doctor Who saw this itself when it returned in 2005. But that's because it was like taking the smack away from a junkie: too long can be too long. And too long can breed descent and insurrection. Risk it at your own peril.

Hit the jump for some more Doctor Dinos, and the link to see them all.



Pachyce-fifth-osaurus

Allo-fourth-us

Archeopt-eighth
Via The Mary Sue, and What An Art.
Share on Google Plus

About MR. Clark

Adopting the descriptor of "successfully unpublished author", MR. Clark began writing things on the internet in 2012, which he believed to be an entirely reputable and civilized place to find and deliver information. He regrets much.

0 comments :

Post a Comment

Newer Post Older Post Home