PS Creativity > Reviews > The New Series > Love & Monsters

Love and Monsters was a story that completely destroyed my faith in Russell T. Davis as a writer. He'd written some weak stories in Season One, but then he gave us Parting of the Ways and Tooth & Claw, which suggested that he had improved and matured much as a writer. Put it another way, I've never doubted his potential for doing great things for the series, up until I saw Love and Monsters.

If I could have begged just a little compromise with Russell T. Davis as an increasingly overzealous producer with too much control over the series, if I couldn't get him to change the finale and if I couldn’t have asked him to scrap Love and Monsters then I'd beg him to at least swap it in running order with Tooth & Claw. Just so that we could have got the worst out of the way first and then had the season go up in quality from there. I'd prefer to have Tooth & Claw after The Satan Pit, since it would be a nice way of coming back from outer space to planet Earth but still keeping it exotic and adventurous rather than dragging it all the way back down to the council estate.

Love and Monsters is the first in a row of four contemporary Earth episodes that make up the last third of Season Two. I've said before that for a season that had expanded into new territories of alien worlds, black holes and parallel universes, this was woefully anticlimactic. The initial premise for the New Series was that Rose travelled with the Doctor because her home life was so dull, and I'd say that if the starting point of a story is a dull setting, you shouldn't make a bookend out of it, especially if you've revisited it half a dozen times already. But I feel that just maybe the Army of Ghosts/Doomsday climax might have worked if they'd kept up the sense of adventure and travelling to other times and alien worlds immediately before the finale. A return to Earth for the final battle might have worked if it had been played as an unusual emergency return for a grand catastrophe that involved Rose's family and the world (this earlier, more permanent return home kind of spoils that). Furthermore, Tooth & Claw has a reference to the more sinister side of Torchwood which would be a nice mid-season shake up of the initially uninteresting enigma. But more than anything, ultimately I'd rather have a good story like Tooth & Claw near the end of the season. I can watch Tooth & Claw many times and still enjoy it, but Love and Monsters is a story I will never watch again.

Love and Monsters has been defended as an experimental story which allows it to bend the rules in much the same way as The Mind Robber and Greatest Show in the Galaxy have. The thing is though that both stories are classics. The Mind Robber to me exceeds Doctor Who’s standards for intelligent, inventive writing and behind the sofa moments. In-fact there are moments of psychological horror in episode one that match up to anything in The Impossible Planet, even 40 years later. Likewise Greatest Show in the Galaxy is years ahead of its time, with a look and style that must have heavily influenced The League of Gentlemen, and thematically speaking it anticipates themes of 60’s counterculture nostalgia, victimisation and crushed individuality in a vacuous and mean-spirited modern age that would crop up later in Mike Leigh's Naked and in Our Friends in the North.

At 45 minutes length Love and Monsters was never going to be as epic or ambitious as either of them, but did it have to be so awful as to make such a crass contrast to those classics? It's kind of like when the unpleasant characteristics of the Sixth Doctor are excused by drawing attention to the darker portrayals of the first two Doctors, and people seem to forget that William Hartnel wouldn't be unpleasant or cranky with his companions out of the blue for no reason, and that Patrick Troughton was a full rounded missionary character and that his ruthlessness and duplicitousness came from who he was, instead of the patchy, superficial nastiness of Colin Baker's cipher of a Doctor.

Getting back to the episode at hand, one aspect of this 'experimental' approach is that it is a story seen through the eyes of a regular joe and in which the Doctor and his companion barely appear. The story basically concerns a bunch of ordinary people on contemporary Earth who are gathered together over the enigma of this mysterious fleeting legend of the Doctor. I would say that this goes against the tradition of Doctor Who, in that the show's events are supposed to be seen through the eyes of the companion.

It's a tradition that has been broken only twice before- Mission to the Unknown and The Deadly Assassin, but in neither story did we get the effect of being left with a jaded view of the Doctor and companion. The thing is that we've seen shady streaks to the Doctor and companion before, but we've never been away from them long enough to cease empathising with them. It's like with the film Taxi Driver, in that the camera rarely turns away from Travis Bickle and some of the original scripted scenes were he is absent were cut out because if the camera took itself away from Travis Bickle for too long, then the audience would lose sympathy and end up hating him.

This is a story in which the Doctor and Rose rarely appear, but when they do appear they behave so reprehensibly that I find myself turning away from the New Series. I'm not the only one since I know a few fans who have come to despise the Doctor concerning the 'mercy killing' issue, and I'd say this is largely because in the predominant absence of the Doctor's presence, his actions don't invite our empathy.

As I said, traditionally Doctor Who is seen through the eyes of the companion, and last year the writers seemed to really understand this tradition and in Rose, they gave us a viewpoint that made the old fans and the newcomers alike feel as though they were experiencing the enigma of the Doctor and seeing the wonders of the universe for the very first time. So much so that in Parting of the Ways, her desperation to get back to the Games Station holds a lovely mirror of our impatient eagerness to tune in next week. The thing is with Rose, as we all know Rusty aimed to give her a strongly defined background and character that would set her apart from the old companions who were supposedly 'ciphers' by comparison. The thing is that in the first season Rose is her own unique person, but not at the cost of the 'everyman' aspect to her.

But come Season Two and Rose became more distinctively defined and she began to show some rather unlikeable and self-centred qualities in her attachment to the Doctor and her cliquish hostility to others. She developed a bad attitude that was probably not shared by most of the audience. There were hints at this 'bunny boiler' characteristic to her in the original script for The Long Game but thankfully much of that didn't make it to screen. But come Season Two, when she insulted Sarah Jane or humiliated the father in The Idiot's Lantern, we didn't all feel like willing participants and she lost some of her identification appeal for me.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that I see Parting of the Ways as the Logopolis of the New Series. It's a turning point and it's a high that can't be bettered, and it's pretty much going to be downhill from there. In which case I see Love and Monsters as the Time-Flight of the new series, the jump the shark story that runs the uneven but promising follow-on season to the ground.

Parting of the Ways was the story that saw the Tenth Doctor come into being and saw Rose reach her full development as a character, and to me it was the start of the worst Doctor-companion dynamic of the show. As much as Parting of the Ways seemed to show Rose naturally develop from the empathising stage to the all out spiritual, it subtlely hinted at her jealousy too when she clearly felt threatened by Lynda's fondness for the Doctor. So I suppose much of this season, like Rose has felt divided between the spiritual and the redundant domestic, and as such Rose's behaviour has drifted between compassionate and heroic on the one hand and bitchy and outright bullying on the other. In this particular story she acts so thuggish and psychotic that she justifies every bemoaning critic who denigrated her into the stereotype of a common chav.

Basically Elton, the main viewpoint of the story, through this group of 'superfans' ends up involved with Jackie, reminding us that no matter how far out the series goes, we'll never escape the domestic rubbish. Actually Jackie is fairly endearing but in her final moments she gets some melodramatic rubbish to deliver that only demonstrates how poor and artificial RTD's writing has become since last year. Rose takes offence and decides to go and pick a fight. I must say again that I find this to be a horrible reflection, and even a reinforcement of how in modern society women can get away with being a lot more socially and sexually aggressive than men can, whilst men walk on a minefield, and certainly it is always acceptable to punish men who allegedly overstep the mark with violence or harrasment. When Rose comes to embody this, she embodies much of what I hate about society today. She becomes, in a word, vile!

But even worse is that the Doctor gives her a free taxi ride in the Tardis so she can go harrass somebody. I consider this to be fundamentally un-Doctorish behaviour. Even in the Doctor's darkest incarnations of Patrick Troughton and Sylvester McCoy, both Doctors that really lived up to the title of the Ka Faraq Gatri and annihilated their enemies utterly, they would still put a firm restraining hand on their respective hot headed side-kicks.

The thing is the Doctor for the New Series has been a different kettle of fish to his past incarnations from day one, when he blew up a department store. In some ways the new Doctor has been made distinctive from his predecessors and in some way that's been a good thing. It's even allowed us to see the Doctor go through a changing perspective on an increasingly savage universe and work through his baggage and disillusionment with eccentric coping mechanisms. But you know how sometimes particularly obnoxious behaviours and quirks of the new Doctor seem to have been added gratuitously, simply so that Russell can delight in offending the parochial fans? Well this is to me the most offensive example, it's just unacceptable and nasty that the Doctor should be a willing participant in such petty cruelty. And to draw back to my point above, this is a story in which we see little else of the Doctor to counterbalance with more humility, so the shit sticks. Is this Russell's way of making the lead characters popular, by rubbing in our faces how obnoxious and mean spirited they can be? Well it works for most popular Rappers so I guess why not for the Doctor?

When I pointed out how unrealistic it was that Rose would pick on Elton whilst he was being menaced by an alien, some have said in defence that actually the Doctor and Rose's behaviour was a ruse to throw the alien in the fold of the group off balance. That the Doctor and Rose both had an ulterior motive in trying to act calloused and aloof whilst sneakily saving the day. If so it is probably the most horribly manipulative and crass moment in Doctor Who since the Sixth Doctor tortured Peri in Mindwarp for no reason other than to shock the fans. When the Doctor was dupicitous with his companions in An Unearthly Child, Evil of the Daleks, The War Games, The Silurians and Curse of Fenric, it was tied in with saying much about the characters and the desperation of the situation and wasn't smugly done with gratuitousness and it certainly didn't go beyond shady into full blown psychotic behaviour. Here it simply is the Doctor being nasty for its own sake

So the Doctor had an ulterior noble motive did he? But what was the Doctor's plan, to simply give a rallying call to a bunch of people he's never met before with a single sentence? It makes me laugh at the very idea that the Doctor had a plan or that the resolution was credible, and the crap resolution does make us feel cheated of 45 minutes that proved to be about nothing.

Alright, granted I've skipped to the ending.

The opening chase sequence has come under much criticism for its Scooby Doo slapstick. Many said that it took them out of the story because it was so artificial and self-mocking. There have been comical chases before in the show, such as in The Seeds of Death, but they've always tried to create a sense of realism and tension. The fact that this one deliberately tore up its own believability like a cartoon, that it broke the fourth wall at the worst point puts it in the anals of worst moment for many. Myself, I just treated it like any other bad Russell T. Davis moment and turned myself numb to it (one of several reasons why Season Two just hasn't felt as penetrating as Season One or Classic Who). But I would definitely say that it showed a terrible flippancy of writing that seemed to define the whole story, a sense that no-one cared about making it good anymore, reminiscent of the mid-80's years of the show.

And it also reflected something else, something nasty. It was as if the show was sneering at itself, deliberately living up to the 'endearing' stereotypes held by the mainstream about of the old show's supposed pantomime campness. How else could I explain why with such a huge budget they were delierately making Doctor Who look sillier than ever?

Then we start meeting the group of super fans and for the longest while the episode is actually quite endearing, touching and even intriguing in moments, and I do like the ELO bit. The characters are goofy and yet likeable in a Bridget Jones kind of way. Like the best comedy, it can make amusing light of our own embarrasing moments and quirks but in a way that makes us comfortable with them, mainly because in the group, such a supportive and empathising environment is crafted, and when gradually the group get knocked off one by one, it is actually quite hard hitting and sad. I had been quite enticed by the trailer at the end of The Satan Pit and so for the first half hour of the episode, it looked to me like this would be a good episode, if not quite the greatness of School Reunion or The Girl in the Fireplace.

So how then did it end up in my selection of worst Doctor Who ever, alongside such dreck as Warriors of the Deep, Time-Flight, The Twin Dilema and Trial of a Timelord? Is it valid for me to put the worst of New Who with the worst of Old Who? After all, unlike much of the dreck I mentioned above, this one at least was only on for 45 minutes, and I just said only the last fifteen minutes of it were bad, something I couldn't say about The Twin Dilema.

But the thing is, the last fifteen minutes of the story aren't merely bad, they're actually quite mean spirited too. The fellatio reference is not the first sexual overtone that Russell T Davis, or indeed Doctor Who has given us, but it is the most crude and sickening and turns the episode into what's virtually a porn film, because the reference is so specific and direct and inescapeably visceral and carry that same air of forced horny willingness on the part of the taker (which is why it feels mean spirited), and it's completely gratuitous. Yes it's only a line of dialogue, but it's complimented by suggestive directing that refuses to let the reference fade and in dwelling on it, I'm left feeling very nauseaus.

I had the longest argument with a fellow fan about this scene in which he suggested that the line wasn't as strong or as offensive as I found it to be, and he asked me to consider previous sexual references in the show. The thing is the references to rape in The Time Meddler reflected the horrors of the time in which it was set, the necrophilia line in Revelation of the Daleks was ambiguously worded but played a part in characterising Tasambeker's loneliness and pathos and the hidden lives in this plastic etiquette of the future. Russell T. Davis recieved plenty of criticism for his sexual content throughout the season, but I could go with them as long as they remained light and nicely reflective of the characters and the society they were in. For instance, in The Christmas Invasion, Jackie's "What else has he got two of?" is an entertaining moment that reflects her character's curiosity, the moment in End of the World where Jabe asks if Rose is the Doctor's prostitute is actually fairly crucial to the story's themes of classism, and that one line conveys both the snobbery and exploitation of future society. Likewise the "dancing" references in The Empty Child characterises sexuality of the future in a clever and wholly ambiguous way.

But the blow-job is simply there for its own sake and whilst the above references leave us to our own imagination, this one certainly doesn't. Okay the kids won't understand what it means but the parents will be shocked, and that's probably what I find equally offensive about it, that it seems put there just to shock people, and that's just such crass stuff, especially in Doctor Who. It reflects a poor writing that's not merely undisciplined but completely out of control, making me think the worst of what's to come next year when such sickening lewd material will appear out of the blue in the show. And to go back to my point about the eyes through which the story is seen, it is something that makes Elton, our identification figure suddenly seem perverse and repellant (to some of the viewers anyway) and it's so vile that I will never watch this episode again.

But the sickness doesn't just end there because wrapped up with this is the fact that the deaths of the group are then treated with gross humour, and it doesn't just undercut the gravity of the suspense, but it's almost as if the story is revelling in and mocking the victims as sadistically as the alien is, and so the grotesque alien becomes disturbing for all the wrong reasons. The humour has been touch and go throughout the episode. I quite liked the "Glom" joke and the first meeting with Jackie, but ultimately the humour becomes the downfall of the story and the comical final chase sequence is among the most ghastly things about this story.

And then of course is the bullying nature of the Doctor and Rose. I make secondary emphasis of this because in this story we've come to really care about Elton and we see him as a tragic figure, unhappy with life and very sincere and compassionate but ultimately a misfit who's place of belonging is in a private group that the outside world ignores, which makes his plight similar to that of the victims in The Greatest Show in the Galaxy, that he's preyed upon and victimised because society has ignored him and no-one knows or cares that he is in danger. But to then have the Doctor and Rose seemingly join in the crucifying and make no apologies later is just horrible and makes me turn away from the series as a whole, not just the episode.

I think also the fact that the superfans are an allegory for Doctor Who fans makes me see the episode in an even meaner light. It's funny because in the first half of the episode the fans are portrayed endearingly. So much so that I didn't think in terms of it being anti-fan until recently. It's certainly not as blatantly snobbish and mocking of the 'misfits' as Buffy the Vampire Slayer is, but it is in a more underhanded way. When the second half of the story presents the fans with having perverted and stalkerish characteristics, and the characters are brutally punished for who they are as the comical nature seems to gloat over their suffering whilst the Doctor and Rose look on unsympathetically, then I start to know what some of Russell's gay critics meant when they held up Bob and Rose as representative of a writer who would sell out his fanbase in an instant to a mainstream audience by presenting those fans in a stereotypical light. It's as if Russell was so offended by his fan critics that he was being belligerent to the fans, reminding them of their place as social misfits by putting them in a story where even the Doctor treats them with the kind of remorseless contempt that school bullies used to treat us with for being fans. As if reminding us that in the public eye we're undesireable weirdos unless we can prove otherwise. It's kind of like when rappers Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube defend their misogynistic lyrics by suggesting it should be taken as 'constructive criticism' for women.

If that sounds like a far fetched and fanatical suggestion of Russell's agenda for the fans then read this about the episode from the man himself.

"That's one of my jobs on DW: to extend its remit, all the time, beyond sci-fi into all sorts of storytelling. Not for fandom - they probably won't like it, cos they'll wonder why UNIT doesn't arrest Ursula or something - but for the millions of new viewers."

I can practically hear him sneering at us. John Nathan Turner may have been a worse producer but at the end of the day he was a better man because he never baited the fans this way, no matter how much stick they gave him.

And that's why it is for me one of the worst Doctor Who stories ever. Because it starts endearing and touching and then turns thoroughly lewd, mean and gloating and completely rubbishes all over its characters that we've come to care for.

I never quite believed that I would ever rate New Who this low. I might have disliked World War III and The Long Game, but I could never have put my hand on my heart and said that either was as bad as The Twin Dilemma. Russell T. Davis has ultimately precided over an era of such consistent quality and good production values that only Philip Hinchcliffe from the old guard can measure up to him, and Love and Monsters was the only really bad story of Season Two (New Earth was quite dodgy but it has grown on me enormously).

Is it arbitrary to want to turn off to the New Series just because of one episode? Perhaps it would be just as arbitrary as the behaviour of many curmudgeonly fans that rip any New Who to shreds because it's not up to the highest standards of Doctor Who, as though in the good old days of the show, outstanding stories like Evil of the Daleks, Inferno and The Robots of Death were the standard bar rule rather than the exception.

But Love and Monsters really magnifies the negatives of New Doctor Who and then adds some more that really plumb the depths. So we don't just get a redundant domestic story but we get it right after an epic and challenging space adventure, just to emphasise how mind numbingly tedious it is by comparison. From The Idiot's Lantern onwards, The Tenth Doctor and Rose have suddenly morphed into the worst Doctor and companion team in the show's history and this story shows up how obnoxious they are even further by looking at their smug little clique from an outside perspective. And then there is the other examples of ghastliness like the ridiculous alien and the blow job that make me want to shower after viewing. Coupling all this together and not only do I shuddder at the thought of watching this again, but I am so terrified of seeing more like this in New Who that I won't be watching anymore. Because I know more will come since the writer of this nasty little episode has far too much creative control over the series with which to indulge himself, and this story has proved how far he will take his sordidness.

No, I think for my fix of New Who, I'll strictly stick to the Big Finish adventures with the 8th Doctor and Charley (they are a much nicer Doctor-companion pair aren't they) and with the new Sarah Jane Smith series. Yes I know the latter series is by Russell T. Davis as well, but even he can't spoil the charm of Sarah Jane Smith and since it's a kid's show, I know I'll be spared any references to blow-jobs.

Originally posted by transvamp on March 8th 2006 at 10:59am.

click here to return to The New Series reviews