Here are my thoughts on the two most recent episodes of Doctor Who:

 

1) The God Complex: WORST. EPISODE. EVER.

It wasn't the most poorly produced. The production values on numerous first generation Doctor Who episodes were far worse.

It wasn't the most un-scary episode ever. In fact, it was quite creepy.

It wasn't the stupidest episode ever. There have been far more stupid ones.

And it wasn't the most poorly scripted episode ever. Many aspects of the script were far tighter and better crafted than in other episodes.

What it was was the most offensive Doctor Who episode ever.

Now, like almost any human product, there have been offensive elements in Doctor Who before. And the presence of such elements is guaranteed by the fact that the BBC is a bastion of political correctness that is determined to place the British public in a Vulcan Death Grip of Political Correctness. I mean, literally (-ish). They're trying to kill the country by putting it in a straightjacket of anti-family, anti-life, pro-homosexual ideology that is bound to lead to further social disintegration and demographic winter.

But while offensive elements have been present in and marred previous Doctor Who episodes, never before have I seen an episode whose CENTRAL THESIS is morally offensive.

SPOILER ALERT! (in case you really want to protect yourself from the central spoiler in this stinkburger)

This episode centers around a nightmarish, Twilight Zone-like building that appears to be a hotel, though it's not. People find themselves in this building and are then driven crazy with fear, being forced to confront their own (apparently worst) fears. When that happens they then experience some kind of values inversion and become calm, accepting of their fate, and even incredibly and bizarrely happy, exclaiming "Praise him!"

The him in question turns out to be a minotaur (relative of the old Doctor Who monsters, the Nimons) who then shows up and kills them.

The Doctor then deduces (though some of this goes by way too fast in the dialogue to be fully intelligible–something I've complained about before) that the hotel is actually a prison ship, built to house the minotaur, who had previously pretended to be a god on a planet that eventually grew secular and kicked him out, imprisoning him on the ship/hotel forever.

To keep him alive (for he feeds on worship), the ship plucks people of faith off different planets and then forces them into situations of fear so that they will use their faith to cope with the fear. When this act of faith is elicited, the ship (or minotaur or something) converts their faith into worship of the minotaur so he can consume it and remain alive in his eternal prison.

THAT'S OFFENSIVE. PERIOD.

Subverting someone's faith in this way may be way creepy, but as entertainment it's disgusting. The reaction of the Muslim girl in the show, not wanting to have the Doctor witness the event as her faith is ripped from her and subverted into a twisted parody just before her death, was entirely correct. That is an obscene situation that should never have been filmed.

Now, there were all kinds of other problems with this episode, too. A notable one is that Rory is immune to all this because he allegedly doesn't have faith in anything, despite the fact that they established non-religious faith counts as faith. I'm sorry, but if faith isn't understood to be specifically religious then everybody has it. Everyone has faith in something. The law of gravity. Their spouse. Deduction and induction. Something. Maybe they could have defined the concept of faith such that it would exclude Rory, but they didn't do an adequate job of this.

Another flaw was not showing us the Doctor's own (worst?) fear. If you're promising us that the hotel holds even his worst fear then you've got to show it to us. You've made a promise to the audience that has to be kept, and this episode didn't fulfill its promise.

We may guess that his fear had to do with the death of companions (or some companions), though that doesn't fit with what we already know about the Doctor. He's lost companions before and has shown greater fears than letting those close to him die (note, e.g., that the thing he feared most in The End of Time was the return of the Timelords).

Bad writing.

Because if that's the answer then they need to spell it out. They need to show us the Doctor standing over the dead bodies of Amy and Rory and River and saying, "I can't let this happen."

And then they need to tell us why that's so much worse than the Timelords returning or the deaths of previous companions.

It all just rings hollow. The Doctor has lost companions before, and yet he kept going. Now we are expected, without explanation, that the thought of losing companions is just unbearable to him, and so he must dump Amy and Rory off in the 21st century–without resolving the whole baby Melody issue!

Yes, I know they could treat the events of Let's Kill Hitler as resolving that, but that's not really believable. The shape of the overall season arc is just wrong. They need to give us more than what we've seen onscreen if they want to convince us that Amy and Rory are reconciled to not getting to raise their own daughter.

The ending of the episode thus feels forced. It's just a way to get the Doctor to turn into the lonely, grumpy, old man who's been travelling alone for 200 years and is willing to accept death resignedly in The Impossible Astronaut. 

This episode is trying to lay the groundwork for that, but it fails to do it convincingly.

Its central flaw, however, is that the central premise is baldly offensive and only goes to show the extreme spiritual poverty of modern day England and the moral and human blindness that prevented the producers from seeing just how offensive this episode is.

 

2) Closing Time: MEH.

Okay, there's actually a good bit to like about this episode. It was a lot of fun to have Craig, from last season's The Lodger, back. It was nice to catch up with him and his family, and there was quite a bit of funny stuff in the episode. This show also established Craig as an official companion, even if he's never travelled in the TARDIS.

That said, this episode was NOT as good as The Lodger. It had some cute bits (including little Stormageddon, who was especially cute), but did not match the brilliance of the original.

The Cybermen were not scary enough. They were basically big, threatening monsters that didn't say a lot. My memory is that the Cybermen were far more . . . something . . . in the original run of Doctor Who. In the new series, with its shorter stories, I haven't found them nearly so.

Also, anybody notice that this was the second episode in this half of the season that had a climax involving a young father on his own making a climactic redeeming, emotional response involving his son? This time it worked better than in Night Terrors. In that one the monstrous threat was creepy and the father/son dynamic rang false. In this one the monstrous threat rang false (or at least rather unimpressive compared to its past) and the father/son dynamic worked.

The straight-people-being-mistaken-for-homosexuals innuendos/jokes were annoying (these seem to be the British equivalent of flatulence jokes in American teen films), but at least they didn't make the central element of the story a slap in the face to every person of faith.

This episode just didn't provide the kind of oomph that we needed at this point in the season. This is the penultimate episode, the springboard into the final episode where the whole season's story arc is supposed to pay off.

Here's the thing: If you want the Doctor to walk into the next episode a bitter, broken, lonely man willing to accept death then you need to end on a dramatic downer. You need a long and slow decline over multiple episodes that finally leads to a crushing defeat that breaks the central character's spirit and drives him into the pits of despair.

You don't make the penultimate outing a comedy episode.

I must admit that the final few minutes of the show, with the flashforward to River Song, was effective, but the rest of the episode leading up to that seemed misplaced.

I just didn't want to see a broken, lonely Doctor having a last commedic hurrah before going off to his death. That's not how the shape of the overall story should work.

If you're going to do an epic, tragic story (even though we all know the Doctor won't really stay dead), you don't structure it this way. In Lord of the Rings, Sam and Frodo don't get a last commedic romp for 45 minutes before they scale Mt. Doom. (And that's a pretty close analogy, time-wise, since this season of Doctor Who is 13 episodes long and the complete, expanded Peter Jackson trilogy is about 13 hours long, too).

While the audience does need commedic breaks in dramatic situations, the penultimate chapter can't be commedy or it destroys the forward momentum and dramatic tension building to the climax.

Or at least it rings false. Or wrong. Or hollow. Or in some way deficient.

Thus, while there was a good bit to like about Closing Time, it was not a great story (it did not live up to The Lodger) and was imroperly placed in this season's overall story.

 

Coming soon: The Wedding of River Song.