I’m done.

This new era of Doctor Who is a dumpster fire and it won’t improve. I was cautiously optimistic for Series 11. It would be a huge change for me, but I hoped for the best. Even though I started watching Doctor Who with Series 1 of the 2005 reboot, I picked up the show in 2012 and watched everything until that point back-to-back. I saw the change from Eccleston to Tennant and from Tennant to Smith, I saw the departure of Russell T. Davies and the arrival of Steven Moffat, but these changes had already happened. It’s different when you observe these things after the fact, without the hype, from an emotionally safe distance.

The first big change I watched in “real time”, so to speak, was from Smith to Capaldi; but even that change wasn’t huge, because much as I loved Matt Smith’s Doctor, the creative team behind the scenes remained the same. It was still Moffat’s show, with whatever that entailed. Capaldi to Whittacker was my first big change in “real time”, with Moffat and the old staff moving on and being replaced by Chris Chibnall and others, both in writing, production, set design and music.

Series 11 was a disaster. Many people cite identity politics as the reason for that series’s problems and while those were certainly present (though in a different manner than most people think), the biggest problem was in the execution as a whole. Forgettable stories, terrible scripts, unnoteworthy music. The characters were one-dimensional on the heroes and villain sides both; too many companions that didn’t let the show breathe and Whittacker’s Doctor lacked presense and a consistent personality. There was only one episode I really liked in Series 11, “Demons of the Punjab”, and even that was a quality episode, relative to the season it was a part of, in spite of the Doctor, not because of her.

With so much negative feedback, I had hoped Series 12 would be better, but the New Year’s premiere shattered any hopes I had left. I won’t bother with a review of the show, as my brain is hard at work trying to tape over the experience, so this is just me venting.

Chris Chibnall is a terrible writer. At this point, I’m not going to give him any benefit of the doubt. I never disliked his previous episodes in the show, but these were under different showrunners (Russell T. Davies and Steven Moffat) and it goes to how how integral a good showrunner is to television. Even in this episode, his plotting is attrocious. Things move too fast, there isn’t enough time for the story to breathe. Entire chunks are arguably unneeded, something that was painfully noticeable in his episodes last season as well. The whole bit in MI6 could have been heavily trimmed (if not outright replaced with something else) with little change to the actual plot. There’s too much in Chibnall’s episodes that feels like filler, even when it isn’t really. That entire opening provides a minor start to the story, but otherwise it seems to primarily exist for funny James Bond references and to include the always fantastic Stephen Fry.

The dialogue is typically stilted and the characters don’t gel well with each other. Once again, there’s too many of them. The Doctor still has no presense in her own show. Whittacker’s take on the Doctor, combined with the terrible writing, seems to be about flailing around like an idiot, awkwardly swinging that sonic screwdriver and sounding like a dad trying to make contemporary jokes to fit in with the kids.

The villains are a trash fire as well. Luminous beings that shit bright light beams to disintigrate you, assuming they don’t just rewrite your DNA instead. They can also take control of your car, which they do only once in this episode and never repeat a similar feat, because that one time is only in service of a surprisingly boring set-piece. With no consistent rules and no explanations, they fall flat, they don’t present any sort of real stakes to the story. The mystery surrounding them could’ve been interesting, but by the end of the episode they’re playing second banana to the Master’s reveal, defusing any tension and retroactively invalidating their presence in the story. Red herrings are a valid storytelling technique, but red herrings only work if they can get the audience invested in them, so that pulling the rug from underneath their feet can have an impact. When you break down their actions in this episode, they make no sense considering the reveal at the end. A good twist is one you can see coming if you look hard enough, but one you never see because the storytelling actively misdirects you. Pulling something out of your ass at the last minute isn’t a twist, it’s the storytelling equivalent of a jump scare. This entire episode is amateur hour from start to finish.

Finally, I’m just going to come out and say it; Jodie Whittacker is a terrible Doctor. I never expected I’d say this, but here we are. I’ve watched every single Doctor on TV and even when their shows would be stinkers, I always liked the actors. They all took the character and made it their own, standing out among the rest of the cast, making the character defined and dignified.

The 13th Doctor is a non-character. Nothing about her works; the look, the performance, the writing, even that stupid-looking TARDIS. The Doctor’s appearance was always eccentric, but it ultimately worked, because it was reflective of the Doctor’s character and that regeneration’s personality. Even Colin Baker’s terrible mismash of a clown suit worked in the end, because the 6th Doctor was an obnoxious, unlikeable eccentric (at first, at least). Baker owned that fucking suit, even when it was actively working against him.

Whittacker looks like a goddamn hipster. Not the actor’s fault, obviously, but whoever was in charge of costume design was way out of their league on this one. The pants that are always shorter than they should be, the suspenders, that irritating earing, the colors that mix as well as whiskey and cigarette ash; it’s a forgettable look straight out of Hot Topic, not exactly what a 2000+ years old Time Lord would wear. It’s telling to me that post-regeneration 13, when she was still rocking that Capaldi suit, was the most memorable this version of the Doctor has been, visually. That TARDIS that looks like Richard Donner’s Krypton pissed inside a box doesn’t quite reflect the Doctor’s new personality, either; it’s as unremarkable as she is.

I don’t know how much of this is on Whittacker. I haven’t seen her in anything else and I’ve heard she’s a capable actor. The writing very much fails her, consistently. I rarely blame actors, but I just don’t know whose fault this mess is. Whittacker plays the Doctor like a cheap immitation of Matt Smith’s Doctor (and Smith was my favorite Doctor, mind you) and a mix between a Mary Sue (the overly-kind, practically-infallible, universally-revered character more than the self-insert) and a plot device. I could find a word to describe every single Doctor in the history of this show, but I would be hard pressed to do so with 13. The character, as she is now, is merely an extension of her Sonic Screwdriver. I wish Moffat or even Russell T. Davies would return and write an episode; just a single episode, to see what they can make out of her Doctor, to see who I’m supposed to blame here.

Perhaps I’ll return and marathon Series 12 after it has concluded, but I honestly doubt it. I’m very much done with this, until the entire creative team changes. It needs new writers. It needs a new musician. It needs better editing, because that’s still all over the place. It needs to cut down on the companions. It needs restructuring.

As it stands, as far as I’m concerned, Doctor Who ended with Capaldi and Moffat. It may resume, once we get a new creative team. Who knows, perhaps better writers can make something out of 13 in Big Finish audio dramas and we can pull and “8” on this Doctor as well. Until that happens, I just can’t be arsed to tune in week after week to be bored to tears for nearly an hour.

As a side-note, the community should be very fucking careful with the standards they’ve set for this show. This season opener was well-received among fans and if they legitimately liked it, more power to them, I’m not going to take this away from anybody; but in almost every case I’ve read, there was this caveat that they went in with extremely low expectations. This should not be the standard for Doctor Who, or indeed anything, ever. You don’t want to be overly forgiving of bottom-tier episodes like “Spyfall”, just because they seem a little less of a clusterfuck compared to Series 11; if this is your new standard, then this is about as good as the show will ever get and despite its ups and downs over the years, we all know that Doctor Who has produced some stellar work in television and genre fiction.

Fuck this.

PS: What’s with that rendition of the Doctor Who theme? Why is it such an assault on the senses?

The Star Wars prequels are bad movies. They’re pretty terrible by any measure of film-making that exists. Despite the absolutely inane, insignificant and forgettable sequel trilogy, the prequels don’t magically transform into good films. Whatever I’m about to write below does not absolve them of the terrible dialogue, awkward acting, dated visuals and silly plotting of the Prequel Trilogy.

Having said that, a re-viewing of these films recently did bear some fruit I did not expect, both in terms of mere entertainment, as well as appreciation of some of the more subtle elements and goals of these films. I hadn’t seen unedited versions of the Star Wars prequels since 2012, which was my first foray into anything Star Wars. I remember I had marathoned all six movies at the time and I didn’t really like any of them all that much; but the prequels were the worst. I almost fell asleep during Attack of the Clones and it was some of the more bizarre choices (like focusing on Anakin and Padme’s shadows during a discussion, only for the camera to zoom out and include them in the shot three seconds later anyway) that kept me awake.

Ever since, I have grown to love Star Wars (thanks to a re-viewing of the original trilogy and the unexpectedly good collection of videogames, from Republic Commando to the legendary KOTOR II), but I always made sure I watched fan-edits for the prequels. Even those became tiresome after a while, as they failed to address the more glaring problems with these films.

With Disney’s trilogy having now concluded (or crashed and burned, depending on your point of view), I decided to watch all six movies again, as originally intended, as originally released. As this has always been the case with the original trilogy, those films didn’t hold any surprises for me (outside of a growing distaste for 60% of Return of the Jedi). My time with the prequels, however, turned out to be a surprise.

I don’t know if it’s the oversaturation of prequel memes on Twitter that have desensitized me over the years to the more horrible parts of those movies. The Clone Wars cartoon has certainly helped retroactively create a lot of context and investment on those characters and the world they inhabit; that much I knew when Yoda landed with the Clone Army on Geonosis in Episode II and I cheered. It wasn’t because the Clones do anything of value in the prequels (they’re mostly background decorations in the movies), but I’ve grown to love these guys and empathize with their struggles throughout the years thanks to The Clone Wars.

Whatever the case, I was surprised to find myself generally enjoying these films. The bad parts are still bad, but I’m so used to them I was able to look past them. Most imporantly, I saw the prequels back-to-back and I didn’t feel like I had wasted roughly 7 hours of my life; that’s a positive in my book.

It’s the little things that made my time with these films fairly enjoyable. For example, Jar Jar is rightly maligned, but if you ignore the insulting and incomprehensible speech patterns, his introduction really isn’t that bad. Before he turns into complete slapstick comedy, he’s a fairly straight alien creature that has some actual relevance to the plot. Including this weird-looking CGI monstrocity is a terrible idea for a film, but it falls well-within the standards of genre fiction; after all, what’s the point of a space fantasy, if all the aliens look like your neighboor at best, or like your other neighboor with the weird skin condition at worst?

I realize this is a wordier way of saying “if this movie were a book it would be fine”, to which the appropriate response is “no shit, Sherlock”, I’m just trying to explain my reasoning here; that being that there’s something solid underneath the massive amount of bullshit and sloppy execution. People say Lucas is good with plot, which I can’t really agree with, but he definitely has a solid vision for the story he wants to tell. He may not plot it out particularly well and he may have trouble with pacing, but he knows what he wants to do.

It’s at that point in my watching through these movies, I really started enjoying some of the more subtle (and perhaps unintended) elements of these films. Lucas is better with character than most people give him credit for; his heroes aren’t terribly interesting or complex, but they have some dimensions to them and they’re rarely unrelated to the story.

Anakin, the centerpiece of this trilogy, has a complete arc in the prequels. I believe that’s part (small or big) of the reason that many favor the prequels over the sequels, what with Rey having the personality of a butter knife and her arc being an incoherent mess thought up on the spot. Jake Lloyd’s performance is obnoxious (as is everybody’s, honestly) and it’s largely so because of Lucas’ obsession with making these movies for, like, thirty different audiences. Between the highly marketable podracing and Lloyd’s cringe-worthy “yipee”, it’s obvious he was playing to the under-8-years-old with kid Anakin.

The character, however, does have some meat to him. His trauma of being a child slave, the obsession with his mother (which he then projects onto Padme), his need to be recognised for his skills and not merely used in the service of others are purposefully written into the character from the moment Lloyd utters that retarded “angel” line at Padme and they all have the makings of a solid character. It’s easy to completely forget the lines that connect the dots or, indeed, miss the dots themselves when the material is as terribly executed as it is in these movies; but the lines are there and inducting a young child slave into a rigid, monastic order that’s sworn into sacrificing and slaving for the lives of others has the markings of a disaster in the making.

It’s fascinating watching Anakin trying to believe in the oath of the Jedi despite his obsessively emotional personality throughout the trilogy. He buys into a lot of their bullshit, but he can’t get rid of attachment. He does want to succeed and a lot of his actions are motivated by emotion, both healthy and toxic. His early life as a slave drives him to seek power, but world conquest isn’t in his agenda; it’s the feeling of helplessness in his life that’s at the core of his arc. When the time comes to take a seat in the Jedi Council and the Council won’t make him master, he feels used, a slave again only to different masters. The Council aren’t unlike Watto in his eyes, using his skills for their own purposes and denying him not only power and recognition, but most importantly the ability to help the woman he loves (be it Shmi or Padme). Even his really creepy monologue about a fascist dictatorship to Padme, in what has to be the worst come-on in the history of fucking, is predicated on the fact that too much indecision causes people to die needlessly; or, in his personal experience, prevents an all-powerful Republic from reaching the Outer Rim systems that sell mothers and their young boys into slavery.

Of course the execution cripples all of the above. Anakin is inherently unlikable from the start, be it because of the dialogue or the fact that by Episode II, the dude looks like a mix between Harvey Weinstein in a business meeting and Hitler in funny robes. It’s hard to empathize with such a character, even when they fall. Another irritating failure in execution is the reason behind Anakin’s fall; was he seduced by Palpatine’s promises that he could save Padme? Perhaps, but in the moments leading to his fall, Anakin is still a loyal supporter of the Republic and his actions appear to be motivated by duty; he’s actually loyal to the Republic even after he is christened “Darth Vader”. Palpatine seems to have legitimately convinced him that the Jedi are a threat. It’s not great, but it is one of the better parts of this trilogy to see Anakin conflicted, trying to reason with Windu before he disarms him (and inadvertently causes his death).

I like this, it gives the character some more layers than his weird and off-putting obsession with that teenager that flirted with him once when he was 8. What I don’t like is how the reason for his fall is vague, but not vague enough to be interesting and at the same clear, but not clear enough to create a cohesive narrative.

The failure of the Jedi to do their damned jobs also caught my attention; it’s a critique not only of ideologues, but in a funny twist it’s also a critique of George’s previous work. The Jedi were built up in the original trilogy to be unblemished heroes that were unfairly hunted down by the Empire, but the prequels challenge this notion. This helps with the world building and, ironically, adds a little more grey to this universe than the original trilogy did.

Obi-Wan was probably the least capable person to train Anakin; the two are too much alike, but still not enough to be of any help to one-another. Obi-Wan is careless, headstrong, flippant in the face of danger. He’s not exactly a model Jedi himself. Obi-Wan isn’t really a character in The Phantom Menace, but there’s a really nice moment of subtle characterization I really like in that movie: during the final confrontation with Maul, when the characters are seperated by that forcefield, Maul is pacing up and down, waiting for his chance to strike, emotional, determined. Qui Gon, on the contrary, meditates; detached, at peace, one with the Force, like a proper Jedi. After Qui Gon dies and Obi-Wan is locked behind that forcefield, he doesn’t meditate until it goes down; he’s warming up, gets ready for his chance to stike, emotional, determined. Obi-Wan is young, he’s attached to his master and the emotions that bond generates; he draws strength not from the Force, but from his emotions. He’s very unlike a Jedi Master and yet, he is tasked by Qui Gon to be a master for what’s probably the most imporant Jedi in the history of the galaxy.

There’s a very nice transition from Qui Gon to Anakin; between three Jedi that are linked by the Master/Padawan dynamic, three generations of Jedi that share a lot of traits, but which become stronger with each generation until they burst into something hopeless and sinister. Qui Gon is a Jedi that does not see eye-to-eye with his peers on etiquete and procedure. He’s one with the force, fully on board with the essense of the order, but not necessarily its more worldly aspects. This is what he passes on to Obi Wan, but Obi Wan is even more spirited and less mindful of the Jedi rules and stipulations and he is often driven by emotion. This is what he passes on to Anakin, but Anakin cannot remove himself from attachment, fear, passion and all other human emotion that makes him vulnerable. Obi-Wan’s leniance on certain aspects of the Jedi code was directly responsible for Anakin’s fall. Besides, even though it’s never overtly confirmed, he must’ve known about Anakin and Padme’s relationship and he allowed it.

There’s a direct line from Qui Gon’s dismissal of the Council’s orders to Anakin’s dismissal of the entire Jedi doctrine when he’s at his lowest, once that Yoda hints at in Attack of the Clones. Despite the inept execution, it makes for a thematically sound cautionary tale of what lack of mindfullness in people with power can lead to.

I quite like that aspect of the prequels. Once you peel back all the bullshit that drown these films, there’s some fairly stong themes and characters underneath. The Jedi make for terrible parents, which directly leads to their failure as peace-keepers of the Republic once the war begins. They prove insufficient to handle their growing power; how could they not, when for all their skill, their blind devotion to that “ancient religion” makes them rigid and terrible at adapting? They can’t even take care of their own. Anakin does try to find solutions, answers, things to soothe his screaming fears. He goes to his masters, he consults Yoda when he believes Padme will die right when she’s about to give him the most precious gift anyone can give to a man; all he gets in return is platitudes, meaningless philosophizing about death and the natural order of things which does nothing to ease his mind.

The scenes with the younglings are unintentionally cynical to me. I’m sure they only exist because Lucas wanted to have little kids swing baby lightsabers (and then murder them for shock value), but all I can see is a group of functionally identical zealots-in-the-making with nothing to seperate them or attend to their individual needs. The Jedi took a boy slave; they saw his attachment to his mother and never accounted for it. They refused to train him and when they allowed it, they never tailored their training to his specific needs. Empty teachings is all they provided, through a teacher that barely seemed to adhere to them himself, all before they threw that boy into a full-scale war that threatened the last few things he was taught to protect.

Another thing I noticed (and I can’t even understand how I missed it before) is how the Padme/Anakin relationship is written. They’re intentionally supposed to mirror Romeo & Juliet. It’s obvious in retrospect, but the execution is so bad, I think I just zoned out whenever these two were on-screen before. From they’re being forbidden to be together to their mutual “death”, they’re space Romeo and Juliet. They even have a balcony scene in Revenge of the Sith, not to mention that their musical cue (“Across the Stars”) uses similar sounds to the iconic theme of Franco Jeffirelli’s wonderful film adaptation of Shakespear’s play. I wager that’s the reason their dialogue is so uniquely terrible; Lucas was trying to write poetic, Shakesperean dialogue for them, what with lines about how painful unrequited love is and whatnot, but he’s just terrible at it.

Anakin’s fall has always bugged me, as it did many others, because it was about Padme. Even if politics were part of the reason, the third act focuses firmly on Padme and Anakin’s quest for ultimate power to save her and protect her. It cheapens Obi Wan’s implications about what being “seduced by the Dark Side of the Force” means, but I found that it works thematically, because it contrasts Luke’s triumph at the end of the Return of the Jedi. Luke is confronted with a very similar dilemma; his friends are going to die, his sister will be lost to him after the Emperor gets to her, so he has a choice to make: join the Dark Side and save them or don’t and watch them all fall. Luke perseveres in the end, he doesn’t take the easy way out, he stays true to being a Jedi and to representing everything his friends had fought for. Anakin failed that test; he took the easy way out, his fear of losing the one he loved made him submit. I don’t like it; but it works thematically and retroactively adds an extra layer to Vader’s turn at the end of Return; it’s not only love for his son, but also redemption for past mistakes. Vader didn’t raise Luke, but every father feels content when their offspring grow up to not repeat the same mistakes he made, to be better than he ever was. I can appreciate that.

The prequels are bad movies. Watching Star Wars is sort of a Christmas tradition for me now, but I doubt I’ll watch these unedited again any time soon. They’re stupidly long (clocking at a minimum of 2 hours each), with questionable plotting. What I hate the most are all the stupid excuses to shove in yet another action sequence to sell toys or just turn the movies into glorified tech demos.

But I believe enough time has passed that now I can appreciate some of the more subtle elements, whether they’re intentional or not. Lucas may had wanted to shoot these movies in front of a blue screen out of sheer laziness, but there is something bold about doing three whole films in almost entirely CGI in 1999; it may be the standard, at least for action, nowadays, but it was fairly new technology at the time. The actors give it their all with the shoddy material they have to work with; particularly Ian McDiarmid, who deliciously chews the scenery, but also Ewan McGregor, who seems to be having a blast as Obi-Wan, be it when he’s smarmy or when he is handed a glow-stick to swing around.

With the amount of samey, safe blockbusters that assault the silver screen nowadays, there is something fascinating about the Prequels. These aren’t movies that could have been made today; there’s just too much strangeness in them for any of the big studios (particularly Disney and, to a lesser extend, Warner Bros) to greenlight. In this climate, after having seen what guaranteed crowd pleasures really are in this day and age, these films have some values despite the titanic problems that surround them.