Subject: Er, are you lot high?
Author:
Posted on: 2014-05-14 16:01:00 UTC

I'm a connoisseur of both Doctor Who and woefully bad SF; Love and Monsters is both, and not in the fun way. The things you bring up as mitigating circumstances for one of the worst episodes ever made (and definitely the worst Nu Who episode) would be fine... if they were actually the case. Are you seriously trying to suggest that Doctor Who just "wasn't ready" for a chase scene at the start of an episode ripped straight from an episode of Scooby bloody Doo? D'you think that we needed time for the series to settle so that fans would willingly accept a monster designed by a nine-year-old? I get that the whole Doctor-lite structure was used to great effect elsewhere, but the episode was an absolute abortion and no amount of misguided "oh, but it had ideas" hand-wringing is going to change that. I'm sorry, it's just not.

Russell T. Davies made the worst episode of Doctor Who that has ever aired. Worse than Delta & The Bannermen. Worse than The Horns Of Nimon. Worse even than Fear Her. The concepts are uninteresting, the episode looks atrocious, none of the comedy works, and I don't watch Doctor Who to see Danny from Hustle playing ELO covers with his sodding garage band. But the worst part?

Uncle Rusty didn't learn from his mistakes. He continued to make episodes that featured boring slapstick, stupid bit-part characters that somehow got an episode to themselves, and atrocious ideas for both monster design and episode themes (cf. the aforementioned Fear Her, another RTD-era episode which features all of these things). He still considered it acceptable to write abject turds like Gridlock and, well, the worst excesses of Torchwood. As a writer, he operates on a vastly lower level than Moffat. If you disagree, fine, but for goodness' sake don't hold up Love And bloody Monsters as an example of RTD's incredible writing talent.

Reply Return to messages