So, Doctor Who - Voyage of the Damned.
"In a production system with fixed and variable inputs, beyond some point, each additional unit of variable input yields less and less additional output. Conversely, producing one more unit of output costs more and more in variable inputs."
This is the law of diminishing returns, and it applies wholly to the new Doctor Who. Each new series has been less than the last, and each Christmas Special has been bloody awful.
It's almost as if they come up with a collection of dialogue that they way to include, then figure out a way to include them and fit the premise of the story around these pre-determined factors. The end result is incredibly patchy, feels very poorly-written and poorly-acted and leaves one wishing they'd never decided to resurrect Doctor Who.
David Tennant cannot be held wholly responsible, though his portrayal of the Doctor is in every way inferior to Christopher Ecclestone's brief tenure. Not even Russell T Davis is wholly responsible, though his rampant fanboyism has certainly contributed to the decline of the series (if I hear one more random character spout forth about how "wonderful" the Doctor is, I shall be physically sick). Production values have been consistently high (for the BBC doing Sci-Fi)... The problem is that they've lost, by degrees, the essential storytelling prowess that made even the worst of the old Doctor Who watchable.
I wasn't particularly inspired by the trailers for the upcoming mini-series, or the trailer for the new series of Torchwood. Diminishing returns applies to something that starts out crappy just as well as something that starts out brilliant. Adding Martha Jones to Torchwood almost certainly won't improve it... And whatever character James Marsters is playing will forever be compared to Spike, even if he's not a vampire.
Bit of a shame, but there we go...
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