A Christmas Carol

The plot of 'A Christmas Carol' recreated in the far future with Steampunk visuals and flying sharks.

I did not have high expectations for this story, but I have to say that even I was surprised at how bad this was. This has to be the biggest load of garbage we have ever seen from the BBC Wales series. What surprises me most is that this story seems to be getting so many positive reviews and on comment threads, critics of the special are being dismissed as 'scrooges.'

Critics of the BBC Wales series have harboured hopes that the producership of Steven Moffatt would be a major improvement on the RT Davies years. Well, A Christmas Carol has satisfied me that Moffatt has all the faults of Davies and more.

As with so much of the BBC Wales series, this story has been written with visual impact in mind. Moffatt wants a visual spectacle, so the plot is purely subordinate to making the wonderful things he has imagined happen.

A Christmas Carol is built around an utterly contrived attempt to re-create a classic story. It fails in this because it tries to translate the basic plot of a fairy tale-like story into a sort of science fiction disaster movie. Dickens' story was about the individual grasping with his conscience; it was about the responsibility of one man to his fellows in the human race. This Christmas special is about the Doctor trying to prevent a disaster by manipulating somebody.

There are two basic problems with the situation that we are given in A Christmas Carol. The first problem is that there is no plausible motive for Sardik's unwillingness to do anything for the spacecraft in peril. So he is a nasty, mean-hearted old man, but there seems little indication that saving the spacecraft will be any great loss to him. It seems unlikely that the Doctor could not easily find ways to persuade him to act, either through bribery or pressure. Does Sardik really want people to die merely out of spite?

Secondly, the Doctor's strategy of saving the spacecraft fails to work both in terms of continuity with the history of the show and purely on a narrative level. In narrative terms, it is jarring to see the Doctor leaving the scene of a life-threatening adventure to travel back in time and have a long series of light-hearted adventures over a long period. While time travel presumably makes that possible, it seems to trivialize the significance of the disaster and rather makes one wonder that the Doctor could not come up with a more immediate answer to the situation. However, what is even more worrying is that the Doctor's strategy is such a departure from the way Doctor Who normally works.

Steven Moffatt has shown a worrying tendecy to use time travel as a plot mechanism. We saw this in his spoof Curse of Fatal Death, though nobody would have taken that seriously. More recently, he had the Doctor interfering in his own timeline in The Big Bang, despite his insistence that this was not possible in Parting of the Ways. I'm a 'Rad' fan and all for experimenting with different kinds of stories, but completely re-writing the way Doctor Who works is not a good idea. Throughout the history of the show, the Doctor enters a difficult situation and he gets on with dealing with it. He never travels back in time and alters the past. If the Doctor can do this, he has a 'get out of jail free card.' We can no longer enjoy him as a protagonist. If he can do this, he is nearly a god. Are we to just ignore the fact that the Doctor has never worked like this before? Are we to ignore the fact that the Doctor has said that you can't change the past, as he did in the Hartnell era (a notion which while not carried through consistently, still makes sense within a lot of later stories)? Are we to imagine that the Doctor's alterations to the past would not have massive and unpredictable results, such as the machinery for controlling clouds no longer being available?

A Christmas Carol even features the Sardik the boy meeting Sardik the old man. I know the notion that meeting your self causes an explosion, as seen in Mawdryn Undead makes absolutely no sense, but surely the fact that we never see this happening in Doctor Who (except in multi-Doctor stories) indicates that it really is a bad thing? I don't think we can just ignore the way time travel works in the continuity of the show and imagine that the Doctor can do anything he likes. That is just too easy and if it continues, we may see some seriously lazy script-writing.

This story features the greatest use of Steampunk visuals in a Doctor Who story. Personally, I am not a big fan of Steampunk. It is all just a bit too knowing and consciously cool. There is something of an air of unreality about Steampunk, given that it is trying to visualize a past/present/future that never was or is likely to be. Surprisingly and refreshingly, however, the crew of the spacecraft are wearing very retro-futuristic uniforms. This makes a refreshing change in BBC Wales Dr. Who. I have commented before about the tiresome tendency of the show to always make the future look like contemporary earth.

In my mind the casting of Katharine Jenkins was a seriously bad idea. Clearly, the woman is quite unable to act, but this is hardly a surprise given that she has never played a serious dramatic role in her life. At least when they cast Kylie Minogue, they had somebody who had some considerable acting experience.

Finally, seeing a carriage pulled by a flying shark as though it were Santa's sleigh just made me want to throw up. Far too much icing...