Dave Cullen won't review the 60-year anniversary episode of "Dr. Who," but he does have some thoughts about what befell the once-beloved series (which, I confess, I never watched):
Canuck Paul Chato, by contrast, has no trouble offering his review:
Lastly, there's Nerdrotic with the most brutal and damning review of all:
ADDENDUM: the Critical Drinker's take came out after I'd already put this post together, but here the mad Scotsman is, now lumped in with the rest of the bunch:
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I'm surprised you didn't post the Drinker's take on the Doctor--he had a very good critique of the reimagining of the villain Davros.
ReplyDeleteUnlike you, I was a fan of the series, but I will admit I haven't watched it in a while. I never saw any episodes with the latest female doctor, for example. Not because I have a problem with the doctor being a woman. That's fine as far as I'm concerned. But if it's going to be all about how the Doctor is better because she's now a woman, and all the men who came before her sucked... well, maybe not.
The Drinker, though, focuses more on Davros, who was a wheelchair-bound villain in the original. In the new version, he's just a generic evil guy with no wheelchair. The show's creator explained that he was "uncomfortable associating wheelchair users with evil." The Drinker rightfully rips gaping holes in this argument, but I think the fundamental flaw here is much more simple: I'm pretty sure that nobody in a wheelchair wants to be defined by the fact that they are in a wheelchair. They want to be "Frank," not "that guy down the street in a wheelchair." But by saying that you can't put the bad guy in a wheelchair, isn't that exactly what you are doing?
I honestly do think that the backlash against "wokeness" tends to be rather overblown--we do need to be more sensitive about things that we weren't sensitive about in the past--but at the same time I can't deny that the media often takes things way beyond "being sensitive" and well into the realm of absurdity. The truth lies somewhere in between where the most vocal elements of the Right and the Left say it does.
I think the Drinker's video came out after I'd already put this one together. I could add his video here, I suppose.
ReplyDeleteOK, I've added the Drinker to the post.
ReplyDeleteBut if it's going to be all about how the Doctor is better because she's now a woman, and all the men who came before her sucked... well, maybe not.
I think this is close to the essence of The Message that the Drinker goes on about, and this is what right-leaning critics find so toxic about wokeness in general. Wokeness, despite its protestations to the contrary, isn't about a return to fairness and equality: it's about overcompensation, almost as a sort of culture-level act of revenge for perceived past injustices. Granted, some of those injustices might be real (example: the overused trope of murderous homosexuals from "No Way Out" to "Skyfall" and "This Is the End"), but many of them aren't (e.g., the stupid "male-presenting Timelord" gibe in the latest "Dr. Who" episode). Until wokeism embraces true fairness, I think it's fair to call it out every time it appears.
A more left-leaning critic like Adam Olinger (who's very funny, by the way) rolls his eyes at the anti-woke crowd because he agrees the "stop wokeness" thing is overblown. He claims to want to judge movies on their own merits in terms of simple things like craft and story. As a result, some of his criticisms align with those of rightie critics like Nerdrotic and the Drinker; at other times, he falls clearly on the other side of the aisle (e.g., his reviews of the initial episodes of "Rings of Power"). You might find Adam a fairer critic than the usual anti-woke crowd. Personally, I think his leftward lean influences his criticism more than he admits, but because he's so hilarious, I continue to watch his reviews.