Richard Curtis & Doctor Who
If you click on this link, you’ll see some thoughts on Saturday night’s Doctor Who (Vincent and the Doctor) which contain spoilers. This added comment will avoid them.
What prompted the post was my own reaction to the episode, and a number of negative comments that I’ve seen lamenting the direction that the series is taking. And in making the story small, even intimate (no threat to the world this week, just one Provencal village in danger), in making the drooling, near-psychopathic alien somehow almost poignant, and –heresy of heresies– in showing how resiliant the time-line is to change, Curtis certainly seemed to be deliberately flouting a number of conventions. But isn’t it about time some of the series’ conventions were flouted?
We’ve had five years of ever more grandiose set pieces. It’s about time Doctor Who lost some of the pomposity it accreted under RTD’s stewardship.
You’re a couple weeks ahead of the US. Must… not… click… link…
Seriously, as a DW fan since the early 1980s, it’s well past time some of the conventions were broken. Go watch some 6th/7th Doctor episodes some time. Those stories were frequently chained by decades of accumulated convention, and it showed. (Of course, the lousy writing also showed, but that’s a separate rant.)
The key is knowing what are the rules of your story, and what are merely accumulated conventions. I find that some of the most intense stories are the smallest.