Many apologies for not making a blog post for a while, but this rant just hit me. This last October, I wound up being attacked by a virus. And I'm not talking about Hexadecimal or Megabyte, but a cold bug. So I decided that I wanted to just watch Netflix and veg out. But I had a problem: there really wasn't anything I wanted to watch, but I had remembered that this last summer, I was giving Doctor Who a try and decided to watch some more. I wound up watching from the fourth or fifth episode of the first season of the reboot to the last episode on Netflix within a week. How does this tie into this topic? Because it was the show I was talking about when I started tearing into how writers should not throw away perfectly good characters until there's nothing else they could contribute to the show.
So of course, there will be spoilers up to The Angels Take Manhattan (season 7, episode 5) so if you don't want any spoilers, please stop reading here since I will be using that episode and those before it as an example. Okay, so with that out of the way, let me explain how such a pet peeve has been executed and how this has become a pet peeve of mine.
In the simplest of terms, the Main Character has decided that the other characters who has been hanging around him will die or have terrible things happen to them based on past experiences. So the Main Character leaves them behind with no way of following him and ensuring that their lives will be comfortable. So you would think that these folks are finally gone, having been put on a bus and living happily, safe and sound. But we need our Main Character to be completely snapped in half and there are no such thing as happy endings to an arc with any traveling group. Because somehow, we need to have the next person to befriend our Main Character to fix him. This is exactly what bugs me.
Why? Because if he knows that if he keeps dragging his friends who have become family to him around, why would we see him pulling them along on an adventure? It goes completely against his character development. Not to mention that they are still quite usable as characters at this point. Not as Main Characters, but guest characters.
How? Well, it would be nice for our Main Character to get a new friend while not in a completely broken state. Give the poor guy some hope that there could be happy endings for crying out loud! And they could be usable for when he does get broken, he's got someone to turn to. Besides that, we'd have someone capable of pointing it out to our Main Character when he starts going down the dark path. When you have a character continually fighting monsters, it becomes very easy for the character to become what they're fighting against. And sometimes, past characters who aren't dead who mean a lot to the Main Character are a necessity to snap our Main Character out of it.
In more specific terms, by having the Ponds traveling with The Doctor after he gives them a house AND a car, it goes against his reasoning for forcing them out of the TARDIS to begin with. And how long was he without them before he changed his mind? Two stinking episodes. It takes him two episodes to drag the Ponds with him. Well, two episodes plus several mini-episodes in which he drops by the Ponds or checks in with them. But if he really worried about them, he shouldn't have gone against his better judgment. And the writers shouldn't have had him go a bit out of his character for the sake of making the fandom upset.
The writers finally ended the Ponds' interference with their plotlines by forcing them to die off-screen. Not kidding. They died off-screen with a very flimsy reasoning against allowing the Doctor to see them. How flimsy is the reasoning? The Ponds were hurled into 1938's Manhattan and the Doctor is all upset because he couldn't see them because the Weeping Angels are messing with time too much in Manhattan. Yet, the Doctor himself did spend time in 1938 during last year's Christmas Special, “The Doctor, The Widow, and The Wardrobe”. So that means that it's obviously a localized effect that is continually in effect. What throws this whole thing out of the window was that the Tenth Doctor was able to go to 1930's Manhattan with no issue. So assuming that it's a localized effect that happened after the Tenth Doctor's visit, again, there's no issue for him to land the TARDIS on the edge of the instability and travel the rest of the way like any other human. Boy, what a plot hole!
So really, what did the death of the Ponds accomplish? We get a broken Doctor. That's it. The main character being emotionally shattered by permanently losing his family. Any interesting stories? Not unless you like to see a character whose life is literally just one long line of traumatic events. Which at this point, is actually getting old and tired. No wonder he had a psychotic break at the end of Waters of Mars.
But what kind of stories or events that would have happened if the Ponds never went on any adventures after they were dropped off? Well, for one thing, The Power of Three would have still happened. Not to mention that they could still be a good jumping point for adventures happening during their lifetimes. For example, an adventure hook could involve the Doctor visiting the Ponds and then notice something wrong going on. Or they could call the Doctor, telling him of something weird going on that they've noticed. Another use for characters like the Ponds would be someone for the Doctor to go to when he's breaking or broken or when he needs shoulders to cry on. Yet another use would also be when he would get another companion and the Ponds do call on the Doctor or the Doctor visits them, they could advise the new companion too, similar to passing the torch.
This kind of thing bugs me because it becomes quite clear that Moffat (current showrunner for Doctor Who and sadistic writer of the first degree) killed off the Ponds just for the emotional impact on the fandom (who really should be seeing this coming at this point) and just to traumatize our main character with no regard of whether or not they could be used as further tools in the background at least.
With shows who focus more on character deaths for no reason other than to get the fans to cry and to shatter the psyches of the Main Characters for no reason than to do so, I'm starting to not care about the characters because I know that they will die and die horribly and for no reason than to cause the fans and the main characters to get all weepy. I give the new companion maybe a season before she kicks it. And yes, I'm saying that I have yet to see the newest Christmas Special.
See ya later!
