(no subject)

[tinroof]

Herewith breaking my Dreamwidth silence to list all the ways "The Hungry Earth" and "Cold Blood" were collectively one of the most infuriatingly pointless things I've ever seen Doctor Who do.

There be spoilers.

• Completely depthless villains. The Silurians (or at least, the female Silurians) want war because they, uh... want war! Humans are scum! Insert pathological failure to recognize logic or restraint here! Granted this is pretty much par for the course as far as Doctor Who is concerned but considering what the serial goes on to do it's just insulting for the triggering cause to be so... stupid.


• I repeat: the female Silurians. While on one level I acknowledge that this is a nice little cultural reversal there, on another level I lost all ability to feel sorry for the diplomat the instant he said the words "go play soldiers" in that insufferably patronizing tone. Gee, maybe there's a reason the females were so ANGRY all the time.


• Remember, kids, the fact that Dr Lizard Mengele over there vivisected a conscious adult human is completely made up for by the fact that he was kind enough to keep the child he'd abducted and held captive for medical research alive. The Doctor said so! It must be true!


• The Nevada Desert, the Sahara, and the Australian Outback are not uninhabited. It's okay, though, I understand why you might have made that mistake. It's only brown people, after all.


• The whole thing with the mother and tasering the hostage to death and, honestly, I don't even know what to say about this. It's like, yes, you don't taser a fucking hostage to death, and you also don't deliberately try to goad your [terrified, ignorant, civilian] captors into killing you to set off a race war. Pretty much everyone on both sides is a bunch of morons except you know what, I actually can kind of see why someone might think a GIANT FUCKING DRILL coming down on their heads was a good reason to initiate hostilities. Sure, they never stopped to check whether the humans even knew they were down there, but it's still a GIANT FUCKING DRILL ABOUT TO SERIOUSLY DAMAGE THEIR CIVILIZATION. You can understand them being rather tense about the whole thing, unless you're the writers in which case it's apparently all their fault.
  
  Oh. I'm sorry. All the women's fault.


• Speaking of drills, was it just me or did anyone else manage to completely miss what they were actually drilling for? Considering that "no one has ever drilled this deep before!" bit I am leaning towards "the hell of it".

But this is really only the background. So far we have a pretty awful two-parter, but this is Doctor Who! It's not like there are any lasting repercussions that we're going to have to live with as a result -

• RORY. YOU FUCKING KILLED OFF A REGULAR CHARACTER, LITERALLY ERASED HIM FROM THE ENTIRE REST OF THE SHOW, BECAUSE OF A STRING OF EVENTS LARGELY CAUSED BY PEOPLE BEING HORRENDOUS IDIOTS?
  
  WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT. Look, there's a pretty sad dearth of male companions on Doctor Who as a whole. I don't mean that in a "what-about-the-mens" way, I mean that in a "the fact that the Doctor's companions are predominantly female gives the whole thing a fairly uncomfortable heterosexist vibe" way, and for some reason, whenever there's been a male companion in the new series they've either done something stupid, or disappeared, and it frustrates me. I liked Rory because he was so aggressively normal, he was a nice guy in a weird situation and he wasn't always comfortable with that but he was willing to give it a go because it made his girlfriend happy. He was a good character with a perspective worth keeping in the show, and now he's Gone Forever and his girlfriend doesn't even remember him because apparently It Needed To Be More Depressing or something.
  
  What, as writers, made you think this was a good call? Narratively speaking? Because frankly - I stopped watching Dollhouse because of a particularly dick move they made re: character deaths. If you don't do something COMPLETELY AMAZING to make this narratively relevant and not just a massive "fuck you" this may well be the last season of Doctor Who I ever watch! I don't mind if you kill people, but I sure as hell mind when it happens FOR NO GOOD REASON at the end of a serial that wasn't even APPROACHING coherent or meaningful.
  
  Death is serious, and this is escapist sci-fi. I know people die for stupid reasons in real life. In fiction? You have to try a little harder than that.


• And now the future of the human race depends on one kid going around telling everyone to be nicer to each other? Oh yeah. Because that turned out so well the last time.