New Nu Who

I simply must have the obligitory David Tennant Tenth Doctor photo to start this, even though his time is done, just because I like it!

So, we are midway through Series 5 of Doctor Who. I still remain quite disappointed by nu nu who, but I may have to revise my opinion of WHY I am disappointed. First, it was because David Tennant was gone, and Matt Smith simply fell short in the acting department. I hate to pick on poor Matt. He is probably a perfectly fine actor, in something else.

After the second episode, I started to think that maybe the fault lay with the writing. What happened to Steven Moffatt? This was the man that gave us Blink and the Girl in the Fireplace. He is brilliant. And yet, the episodes were just average. Mediocre. Meh. Completely substandard, in my opinion. Of course, I seemed to be in the minority with this opinion. The vast majority was singing the praises of the Moff and new nu who, calling it brilliant, exciting, omg, the best ever! Week after week, I watched, and waited for this revelation. Unfortunately, it has not happened.

I want to be very clear on this: I WANT to love this show! I am a long time Doctor Who fan, but I freely admit that I prefer new who to classic who. I loved the direction that RTD took the show. And, of course, David Tennant is my all time favorite Doctor. Regardless, David left, and I was hoping to at least enjoy the series as I did when Chris Eccleston was the Doctor. Sadly, that is not the case.

This weeks episode, Amy's Choice got mixed reviews. Funnily enough, some of the people that have been singing praises were not as pleased this week, while I actually liked it a bit more. I was beginning to despise Amy after the past few episodes, even though I liked her at first. I thought her character was better this week. And Matt Smith didn't bother me as much. But I also find myself revising my opinion about why the series is falling so flat for me.

I think I have been looking at this the wrong way. RTD always maintained that when he wrote an episode of Doctor Who, he didn't think about the actor playing the Doctor. The Doctor was written the same way, regardless. Personally, I think that was BS. Some of those episodes would never have been written with Eccleston in the role. Many of the same writers are working on S5 that wrote episodes for Tennant's Doctor, who was an extremely capable actor. If they ARE writing the episodes the same way as before, then it really is Matt Smith and crew just falling short. If there was a different actor in the role, it might be better. (Conversely, if the writers were writing for an actor other than DT, Matt Smith might just be fabulous.) *sigh* It's convoluted.

Of course, speculating why it is falling flat doesn't really change anything. I will continue to watch each week, and hope this will be the breakthrough week for me. Maybe there will be a miracle.