“Doctor Who” Trailer Better than the Episodes Themselves?
This morning at the sprightly hour of 6 a.m. the trailer for the upcoming series of Doctor Who was released, which you can watch at this link or at the bottom of this post. It was exciting, dark, fast-paced and full of lots of rather delicious looking villains but the cynic in me couldn’t help but wonder…is this trailer going to be better than the episodes themselves?
The keyword in press releases and creator interviews for Doctor Who in the new era has been “EPIC.” The desire to make individual episodes and the series as a whole large and cinematic is understandable, blockbusters excite people and get them talking and Classic Who was all about the huge narrative arcs that spanned over lots of episodes and were resolved at the end of the series. It’s precisely those narrative arcs that I’m concerned about. The Moffat era thus far has been so concerned with visuals and the fairytale mythos so emphasised in Doctor Who publicity that they’ve forgotten to write really good solid stories with clever episode arcs. To be frank, I barely enjoyed the most recent series, with a couple of exceptions for The Doctor’s Wife and Closing Time (but that was mainly because of Stormy) and I don’t want to sit through another series of Doctor Who feeling like I’m watching a first or second draft someone’s mixed up all of the pages for.
It’s my hope that I’ll be proven wrong, that the work will be put in to make the Doctor’s rage a natural consequence of the narrative of Series 7, just as Davies masterfully did with the Time Lord Victorious at the end of the Tennant years. Perhaps, too, I am being unfair: we’ve only seen two trailers so far, after all. Still, it’s been a consistent theme of the past couple of years that the excitement I felt watching the teaser trailers did not correlate with my reaction to those episodes and what’s more, the trailers introduced characters I didn’t actually care about when the episode rolled around because the groundwork wasn’t there.
Still, it’s a beautiful trailer, excellently edited and…yes…a little bit epic. Let’s hope the series delivers all that’s promised in a trailer full of cool spaceships, excited!Doctor, angry!Doctor, New York, alien revenge and sharp, dramatic soundtracks.
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I think Moffat has always had a great eye for stunning visuals, and if there’s one thing his series has going for him, it’s that. However, I just don’t CARE about these characters anymore—they all retread the same emotional ground over and over again. So it’s like, “Okay, if we can’t hook them with characters, how about…EXPLOSIONS????”
At least it looks cool?
