Welcome to my perfumed garden

Because, the thing I love about Doctor Who is that there’s so much potential, a multiverse of ideas and concepts, yet the overriding theme of New Who seems, to me, to always be dragging everything down to the mundane, the everyday, to over-emphasise the human and generally ‘soap it up’.

That’s not to say I dislike the human perspective when it works to throw the Doctor’s story into sharper relief. I adore Donna - and River herself, I actually kinda like, I wasn't joking when I compared her to Lintilla; she’s spunky and intelligent (aside from the clear and present idiocy of a  time travelling archaeologist! LOLZ! What the heck is the point of that?!) and if we really, really have to ship (though I really, really wish they wouldn’t. Shipping on Who is the stuff of fanfic, it has no place in canon in my firmly-held opinion) I’d rather it was with River; she’s 1000 times more interesting than Rose or Martha. Interestingly, the ones whose knickers are most twisted over River seem to be the Rose shippers. Well welcome to our world, children. This is how Rusty’s obsession makes the rest of us feel.

But getting back to the episode itself, to the writing (because Moff can write, he's shown that over and over, so why did his brain go off for a fortnight in Benidorm this time around?) It’s the lack of ideas that made me so angry with FotD; the lack of freshness and genuinely out-of-the-box thinking that this show so badly needs. 

Why have a library as big as a planet when all the action took place inside one small part of it? It could just as easily have happened inside a small, suburban library.

Why set it on another planet at all? Not that there’s anything wrong with that (at least it wasn’t London or Cardiff) - by all means, put it on another planet if it pleases you, Moff, but give us a reason for having it there!  And give us a reason for the books! Billions, trillions, gazillions of books, a library planet - Whoa! How exciting is that? Fantastic idea! Only, it played no part at all in the central-core of thought for this eppy. A whole planet of books and not one of them featured in the plot! I was constantly waiting for some wonderful, book-related twist that never happened.

As far as the Vashta Nerada were concerned, this story could have been set in a forest – a dark, creepy fairy tale forest would’ve been more effective, imo. Bring in a gingerbread cottage or a fairytale castle or something to house the computer… frankly, it could have been set anywhere where there’s wood. Why a library, if you’re not going to use its fabulous potential for the plot?

And... the kid’s a computer. She’s saved everyone to the data-core. Yeah. OK. Didn’t we all guess that before the end off last week’s eppy? I know I did. In fact, I’d guessed pretty much the whole plot in its entirety with the single exception of the kid being a relative of Steve Pemberton’s... whatever his name was (he wasn’t exactly well developed as a character so who cares?) - but meh. Yeah. OK. I’ll give him that for the unexpected but it wasn’t a particularly interesting bit so - going on with my rant…

I was expecting surprises. I was expecting to be proved wrong about my rather obvious assumptions so, the predictability of everything from River Song’s death to everyone being saved and the computer and – oh, the bloody whole episode, really, was especially annoying because (and I guess this is my naiveté talking here and for which I apologise) we’d all been led to expect so much more.

But none of the above was half so annoying as the utter tedium of Donna’s dreary, mundane, Earthbound life - which Moff then proceeded to inflict on dynamic, adventurous River Song in her ‘afterlife’ (which was nothing of the sort, of course, but was absolutely in keeping with Rusty and Moff’s avowed atheism -  and equally as annoying as it would be if they were rubbing God in our faces). That, and the muchly implied,  subtle-as-a-hammer-to-the-skull,  Deep and Meaningful Relationship (with a capital R) between the Doc and future-River - and I’m getting the very clear message that to Moffat, the only road to happiness, for humans and aliens alike, is a comfortable home, a steady heterosexual marriage and a couple of kids...

Which (and I say this as one who's been utterly sick of RTD's tenure; I was one of those squeeing loudest when SM was announced as new supremo) fills me with the purest gloom for the future direction of this show. I can see the most awful wank a-brewin’ here.

Gods, I hope I’m wrong, otherwise I may have to break my 45 year Who-habit and find something new to occupy my time. I guess there’s always the EDA’s...

And here’s something I never thought I’d say; it almost makes me wish that Lawrence Miles had got the head-writer gig. The man’s an arrogant wanker (and I’ll never forgive him for what he did to Fitz) but at least he has ideas.