-A porn episode? Not possible on BBC. Although an episode that deals directly with intensely sexual themes may not be a bad change of pace.
It would be a bad change of pace.
Doctor Who is not for us adults, first and foremost. First and foremost, it's for children. There's nothing wrong with
Doctor Who addressing sexuality, as it has ever since the Series One. But just like its depictions of violence should always be mediated, so too should its depictions of sexuality. It should never be that intense.
You say "guts", I say "gimmicks".
If they EVER let Hack Whedon near Doctor Who, the show would be dead to me. I need proper writing, not pop-culture-laced,choreographed tweeny fights...
You have no idea what you're talking about.
I dare anyone to watch "The Body" (from
Buffy 5x16), or "A Hole in the World" (
Angel 5x15), or "Objects in Space" (
Firefly 1x15) and claim with a straight face that Whedon is a hack. Or, for
Buffy: "Surprise/Innocence." Or "Becoming, Parts I & II." Or "The Wish," or "Amends," or, "Bad Girls," or "Graduation Day, Parts I & II," or "Hush," or "Restless," or "Fool for Love," or "The Gift," or "Once More, With Feeling," or "Selfless," or "Conversations With Dead People." Or, for
Angel, "Five by Five/Sanctuary," or "Dad," or "Waiting in the Wings," or "Soulless," or "Peace Out," or "Home," or "Lineage," or "You're Welcome," or "Shells," or "Power Play," or "Not Fade Away." Or, for
Firefly, "Serenity," or "Our Mrs. Reynolds," or "Out of Gas," or "The Message."
Fact is, Whedon's work resembles what most
Doctor Who fans around here claim they want DW to be more like. Whedon's work is smart, is melancholy, is marked by smart and deep characterization, is always thematically resonant, and it's very much written for adults.
I agree that Whedon really shouldn't write for
Doctor Who, but that's because his tone is too intense for it. He doesn't mediate himself for child audiences. He goes for your adult heart and breaks it.
Yes, I've pretty much seen every Doctor Who episode ever made. The Five and Three Doctors are "anniversary shows", not gimmicks.
Anniversary episodes are gimmicks. Good gimmicks, but gimmicks nonetheless.
So, unlike subpar material that relies on weekly gimmicks in an attempt to save itself from irrelevance, Doctor Who just tells a good, solid story. No puppets, or musicals.
You
do realize that in seven seasons of
Buffy and five seasons of
Angel -- that is to say, out of
254 episodes -- you just tried to argue that Whedon relied on gimmicks by citing a grand total of
two episodes?
A gimmick can make for a good story. Nothin' wrong with gimmicks. "Monsters that can't move if you see them" is a gimmick, but "Blink" is wonderful.
Why do Buffy and Star Trek have more guts than Doctor Who?
I don't know enough about Buffy to comment, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that one reason why it might do episodes like a musical or whatever is because with a season of 20 episodes they can afford to have throw-away or filler episodes.
You're speaking from ignorance.
"Once More, With Feeling,"
Buffy 6x07, the musical episode, was
vital to that season's arc. It introduced, advanced, and resolved several important character arcs -- from Anya's and Xander's song "I'll Never Tell" revealing their reluctance to get married, to Giles's decision to leave Buffy and Dawn in "Standing in the Way" to Tara's discovering that Willow had used magick to make her forget a bitter fight in "Under Your Spell/Standing (Reprise)" to Buffy revealing that she was listless and dissociated and depressed because she hadn't been rescued from Hell upon her resurrection -- she'd been torn out of Heaven itself, or so she believed -- in "Something to Sing About." The
Buffy musical was
important -- it was
not just a throwaway.
To be fair, however. "Smile Time," the
Angel episode in which Angel and Spike are transformed into puppets? Yeah, that was just for fun. A sense of frivolity that, thankfully,
Doctor Who is absolutely
not above, as evidenced by episodes like "The Shakespeare Code" or "The Unicorn and the Wasp" -- episodes that are also just for fun.
Why do Buffy and Star Trek have more guts than Doctor Who?
I'm sorry, but that claim is just as ridiculous as the critiques leveled at Whedon's shows.
First off, it's apples and oranges. You're comparing two shows aimed at adults to a show aimed at children. You'd to much better to compare
Doctor Who to something like
Batman: The Animated Series or -- if we stretch our pallet a bit to include formats other than the continuing hour-long television serial --
Harry Potter. The difference in who their audiences are will quite naturally affect how they present their stories, in what manner they mediate their presentations. You might as well try to compare the Helen Mirren film
The Queen to the Disney film
Beauty and the Beast, for all your comparison here makes sense.
Doctor Who has plenty of guts, too. I mean, it's a mainstream show aimed at children that encourages them to idolize as a hero a man who's openly LGBT -- that's
huge. And while it certainly retains its own tropes, it's also that experiments hugely with its own genre. It's a show that can go anywhere and do anything. How many TV shows have one episode that's just pure fun, where they're dealing with alien witches and Shakespeare, and then another episode where they're in 1913 England at a military academy, examining themes of militarism and imperialism? And then go and do a straight-up horror episode the next time? Or feature a story about the Human race, facing its own inevitable extinction, choosing to pervert themselves into genocidal monsters? And then follow that up with a disaster movie pastiche? How many shows can go from Charles Dickens and ghosts to questions about existential crises and personal identity in a post-war environment? How many shows go from a fun romp with werewolves in Victorian Scotland to an honest-to-goodness love story that ends in tragedy? From a goofy Agatha Christie pastiche to a dark and brooding story about love and loss in a world where shadows want to eat you?
How many shows constantly deal with the issue and meaning of death --
while their target audience is children -- as often and consistently as
Doctor Who?
I dare anyone to watch "Human Nature/The Family of Blood," "Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead," "Dalek," "The Waters of Mars," "The Girl in the Fireplace," "The Shakespeare Code," "Utopia," "Father's Day," "Midnight," "Turn Left," "The Eleventh Hour," "The Time of Angels/Flesh and Stone," or "Vincent and the Doctor," and try to claim to with a straight face that
Doctor Who doesn't take risks, doesn't experiment, doesn't have guts, doesn't tell deep and mature stories (even
if they are mediated for child audiences).
And, by the way, mediating something for a child audience doesn't devalue it, or make it somehow "less" than an un-mediated work. Mediating it just means that it's presented in a way that allows minds that are less-developed than adults to assimilate themes and ideas that might otherwise be emotionally overwhelming. It's a way of helping children to grow, by helping them gradually confront things they'll need to confront in life, but to do it in a way that they're ready for. It's a wonderful and responsible thing for a storyteller to do.
