purplecat | NuWho Rewatch: Love and Monsters

I warned NLSS Child before we started watching this that a lot of people hadn't liked it. At the end she wanted to know why people had disliked it so much and, to be honest, it is difficult to understand the vitriol it created in some quarters.

I think the dislike can be attributed to three overlapping causes:

The Doctor and Rose don't appear much.
The story is basically about fandom and although it is portrayed with much affection, there is criticism of the obsessive BNF.
The monster was designed by a child in a Blue Peter competition and could be considered a bit rubbish, if you were so minded.

So, if you think that Doctor Who should be focused on the Doctor, or you feel protective of the way fandom is portrayed in the media, or if in some sense you think Doctor Who is sufficiently serious that it should not be influenced by kids competitions (and there are a lot of fans who think or feel one or two things on that list) then it is easy to be alienated by Love and Monsters.

Which is odd really because it is, I think, a rather lovely, bittersweet and mostly affectionate piece of story-telling. It's not just about fandom, but in general about being in a group of friends and how groups of friends can get disrupted and torn apart by one individual. It has some great funny moments. NLSS Child loved the scene were Jackie works her way through Victor Kennedy's list of infiltration moves and even though NLSS Child has no real comprehension of fandom, she understood and was saddened by what happened to LINDA.

The monster is a bit rubbish in appearance, but no more so than the Slitheen which, to be fair, lots of people didn't like either.

We're obviously well-used, now, to Doctor-lite episodes. That said, I note that recent seasons have tended to opt for a pair of episodes, one of which is Doctor-lite and one of which is Companion-lite which suggests that the powers that be are not entirely convinced of the show's ability to present stories in which the main characters only appear tangentially (the success of Blink presumably notwithstanding).

I liked this as much second time around as I did the first. Compared to the previous time Dr Who had attempted to portray fandom (The Greatest Show in the Galaxy) it is much more generous. It also has a much wider resonance for anyone who has watched a group of friends fall apart.

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I think it bothered me less on first broadcast than on subsequent viewing, although I'm not sure. I can see the metaphorical point being made, but it does seem like objectification of Ursula. Without that one line, I would have been a lot happier about Ursula's fate - I think I said in the review that it makes it too real for the fairy tale presentation to work.

I should also say that I strongly dislike the theme that has emerged in Doctor Who since the New Adventures, if not the eighties, that the Doctor is frequently unpleasant and meeting him is often a negative experience. I do wonder why it has become so prominent in the series in recent years. I don't watch much other TV (only Sherlock, really), but I can't imagine there are many TV shows that suggest such a negative view of their main character, certainly not family programmes.

It's an interesting question. I think it was understandable in the New Adventures. Their readership was basically teenagers who are notoriously keen on "dark" and "angsty" (there was a very interesting write up of the whole White Wolf Vampire background which pointed out that it was basically mapping the teenager's viewpoint on the experience of being a teenager onto the Vampire legend - you are a creature with new-found experiences and powers which are all a bit scary and you are dominated and controlled by even more powerful, arbitrary and old-fashioned entities). So I think it was understandable that the New Adventures wanted to introduce edginess into the stories and, in particular, the kind of edginess that tends to appeal to teens.

I think Doctor Who is in the awkward position that it has such a long history that the trail of carnage is kind of obvious in a way it isn't with shorter lived shows. Whether choosing to highlight that carnage or, in some sense, suggest the Doctor bears some responsibility for it. I thought Love and Monsters had a more positive take on this than many of the episodes, but that may be because it was choosing to tackle it much more head on than many of the episodes do.

EDIT: Come to think of it, though, although people joke about the high death rate in Midsommer, Oxford (cf. Morse and Lewis) and among Jessica Fletcher's relatives (Murder She Wrote) I don't think any of those shows has ever confronted that - though it can't be said I've ever made a point of watching any of them, merely watched occasionally if they were on.

EDIT 2: Though I think some of the Batman comics have suggested that the existence of the Batman encourages the supervillains in some way.

Edited 2015-01-11 12:29 (UTC)

I was a teenager who didn't like the NA's approach! But I admit my emotional needs as a teenager were probably different to others'.

I haven't seen Morse on TV, but I've read all the novels (I understand the adaptations are often very different and many of the TV episodes are original). A number of the novels do deal with Morse being emotionally involved with either the victim or the killer; the last novel in particular hinges on whether Morse deliberately sabotaged an investigation to hide the fact he had an affair with the murder victim. But there is no real indication that Morse is responsible for murders, merely that he's monstrously unlucky in love. And, of course, as a detective, it's understandable he deals a lot with murders (one book has him sulking over being assigned a missing person investigation, which he considers below him).

Yes but murder rates in the UK are very low. There were 640 murders in the whole country in 2012. I can't find numbers for Oxfordshire, but if there were more than 10 murders in the county per year I would be very surprised (there were 6 murders with guns in Manchester in 2009 for comparison).

I didn't know that! Dramatic license?

Well obviously *g* The shows wouldn't work without the weekly murder. I was basically agreeing with you, these are all long-running shows with a death rate that is widely joked about off-screen but never really acknowledged on-screen. So there is no reason why Doctor Who couldn't take a similar approach and with more justification since the Doctor turns up in times of crisis.

Good point about Batman! How did I miss that? (Eyes shelf full of Batman graphic novels.) Although off the top of my head, I think it's a theme that comes out more in the Christopher Nolan films more than the comics.

I've not read a lot of batman - I think maybe Dark Night Returns makes this point.

Of course, a lot of batman is aimed at the same angst-ridden teenagers the New Adventures were, rather than a family audience.

You are right about The Dark Knight Returns, and about the audience. Incidentally, I think I prefer Batman to the NAs, not least because Batman has moral red lines he won't cross, particularly regarding killing; the NAs, I felt, had the Doctor kill for the greater good far too often.

I think the the red line in the NAs was supposed to be "never cruel or cowardly" though you could argue that it was inconsistently applied.

Interestingly I'd say that in NuWho the Doctor has frequently been cruel particularly the 10th (when on a revenge trip) and the 12th (as part of his (?assumed) persona of not understanding people's feelings)

That would be why I don't like the tenth Doctor and have mixed feelings about the twelfth!

NuWho Rewatch: Love and Monsters

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