The Parting of the Ways

This is not my last Doctor Who rant for the summer. Not by a long shot.

As I write this, the last episode of the latest season of the BBC program Doctor Who is airing in the UK. For those of you who keep tabs on this kind of thing, this episode is A Big Deal. Not only does it conclude the season, it should also serve to wrap up the loose threads to the ongoing Bad Wolf storyline, kill off the Doctor again, and between these two somehow finesse an epic war for the salvation of Earth in the year 200,100.

Needless to say, one hour is not nearly long enough for all of this. When I first started watching the new series, I was really happy with the hour-long compartmentalized episodic format. Earlier Doctor Who episodes were all "part 8 of 12" or so, making it impossible for Yanks like me to see a single story from start to finish. If you wanted to catch one story, you'd have to track down as many as a dozen tapes in order to get every piece. It was maddening.

But only now in this late hour do I see the error of my ways. A one-hour episode is great for a single story. Captain Picard can outwit the Devil in a courtroom drama in 60 minutes. Buffy can save Sunnydale again. And let's not forget that 60 minutes was plenty of time for both Duncan MacLeod and Nick Knight to have a complicated story arc both in the present and concurrently in their own flashback sequences.

But 60 minutes just doesn't cut it for the Doctor. The writing on the show indicates a very broad spectrum of plots. Doctor Who has never been the kind of show where everything ends the same way as it started and each episode goes out with a joke, followed by a freeze-frame of the principles all laughing, and then an "Executive Producer: James L. Brooks" thrown at the bottom of the screen. Given this liberty to create a dynamic universe where stuff that changes stays changed, the writers, Davies and Moffat, have fast and slow episodes alike. In one episode he can fight noncorporeal invaders from another dimension on Christmas Eve alongside Charles Dickens, and in another he's plotting to launch a cruise missile into 10 Downing Street while he's still locked inside, just so he can prevent World War III.

One episode feels like they're really stretching to fill time, and the other seems forced and too fast-paced. The same, I think, will be true of "The Parting of the Ways" when I finally see it. It is simply too much stuff to cram into one episode. It could easily fit into one of the old 10+ episode arc, and to watch the modernized, modularized version, it just seems somehow wrong.

It will be, quite possibly, the first episode of Doctor Who that I approach with serious "I don't want to watch this" trepidation. I don't want to see it. There's every chance that the war is going to feel tacked on, Rose and Jack are going to be left in grave danger for the entire summer, and perhaps worst of all, Christopher Eccleston is going to move onto greener pastures.

And as a direct result, the world is going to get thrown topsy-turvy well into next season. Who could want this? Who could welcome such a thing?