Flashes of Mythos

Well the Chrimbo Doctor Who was pretty rubbish even by the low standards of the new series. The Ood used to be really exciting and scary. Now they're boring. Bernard Cribbins used to be embarrassing. Now he's boring and embarrassing. The John Simms Master used be entertaining in a camp sort of way. Now he's just boringly embarrassing in a camp sort of way. Even David Tennant looks as if he's just going through the motions.

In fact I was asleep long before the climax, and only really woke up at the end when Timothy Dalton announced, in camp, spittle-flecked, un-Time-Lordly tones, that the Time Lords were back. Well, whoop-de-doo! Unfortunately if their return is anything like most of the revivals we've seen so far - the Master, Davros, the Daleks most of the time and even the Cybermen some of the time - then let's not get our hopes up. There'll be a few special effects shots. A bit of campness from David Tennant. And that'll be more or less it.

I always sigh when fans seek to transcend their innate "fan-wank" tendency by condemning the series' mythology. It is true enough that any series that's only interested in its own imaginary universe is always bound to disappear up its own rear end. But that's exactly what the new series started doing in its second episode, when Rose gives her mum a 'phone call from the space station at the end of the world. And besides, as with The X-Files, it's frequently the case that it's the "mythology" episodes of a series that are the best ones. (OK, this isn't actually true for the new Doctor Who series. None of the Dalek stories could possibly touch Steven Moffat's stuff, for example. And as for dodgy Sontarans vs. UNIT, drivel - let's not even go there! But I think the point is generally true.)

In the old days, however much quality and even character motivation (and all that) might have varied from serial to serial, at least each new serial was new and imaginative (and this even when, towards the end, there were only four serials to a season). Story arcs were minimal, and only popped up when they actually added to the excitement of a story (e.g. in the case of Fenric, where the villain's implicit revelations about a handful of the Doctor's recent adventures add to the thrill of his confrontation with the Doctor instead of distracting from it). Nowadays though almost every episode has be knitted into some sort of tight but silly narrative involving prophecies and Ood and Time Lords and, quite probably, Daleks and Cybermen and the Slytheen as well.

Well bollocks to the lot of it! The only times when the new series actually sounds half-way decent nowadays is when there's some occasional dip into the mythos - by which I mean the old mythos, of Gallifrey and Skaro and so on. So in yesterday's episode it was the Master's wittering on about his father's estates on Gallifrey that made my ears briefly prick up. It didn't add much to the plot. But it did for a moment suggest that there might be more to the new series than just chavs and modern TV cliches.

More importantly, there's always been a sense with the series' mythos throughout the show's history that when the individual writers refer to it - and, hopefully, expand it - they're dipping into the show's "collective unconscious". To take one fairly obvious example, although it was never written down or publicly announced that the Doctor should be "a bit like a Buddhist holy man", or indeed that he was really 750 years old, these things very much in the characterisation that William Hartnell had in mind when he played the Doctor back in the early 1960s, and to a certain extent they were still there as part of the Pertwee and Tom Baker characterisation(s) in the late '70s.

The point here is that it's this mythology, and indeed his Doctor Who collective unconscious, that really holds Doctor Who together - that somehow connects Totters Lane junkyard with whatever bollocks the BBC are putting on in the New Year. So really it's these occasional flashes of mythos that give the viewer a sense that the show will actually carry on - and indeed that there is some scope out there for it to be if not quite as good as it used to be then at least better than this s**t!