"We will give you anything you want. Because we are terrified of you."
RTD is writing again for what proves to be a dramatic finale that hits hard and delivers its political subtext relatively well for current television. The human race is indeed out of control, what with the climate catastrophe, pollution, threats of nuclear war, unregulated AI and other such nonsense, all in the name of profit- however nice individual humans may be. And the dog eating scene... yeah, we all know which orange individual is being referred to there. Nice one.
The plot here, if we look at the broad thrust, is quite horrifying. The Sea Devils seem to have won. Humanity has an impossible five years to implement the terms, or the Sea Devils will melt the ice caps, causing mass floods and even more carbon emissions. But some have a plan, Severance, to stop them, and it's particularly pernicious. Not only is it genocidal, it cruelly exploits the love which Barclay has for Salt, using him as the unwitting vector for transmission... and then we get the Sea Devil bodies washing up on the beach. 90% of all Sea Devils are dead. Humanity has won. And we are truly terrifying.
Some may criticise the virus as deus ex machina. I wouldn't. "Severance" is seeded well in advance. But one other possible criticism is how similar this is, plot-wise, to the resolution of H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. There's a thin line, sometimes, between homage and just simply lifting something, and I'm not sure which side of the line to place this.
There's much else, though. Kate Lethbridge-Stewart has been deepened considerably as a character within this series. Grief-stricken, obsessive, workaholic, capable of blackmail to avoid being signed off work, her threats to the prime minister are great stuff... but will this be built upon later? I like the reference to the Doctor's absence, though- "I save the human race, but I don't shape the human race". And the scientist's comment that "from the moment homo sapiens meet a new species, we slaughter them.". Indeed. What hope for the Sea Devils, after the fate of the Neanderthals, Denisovans and countless other hominids that went before them?
Salt and Barclay may get their happy ending to counterbalance the bleakness, as Barclay grows gills(!) and goes to live in the sea. But he's abandoning his child, and that sits very badly with me. This, the War of the Worlds issue, and the need for Kate's character development to actually be followed through on, are real worries for me. But there's no doubt that this is a hard-hitting and impactful finale.
I used to be fine with Kate Stewart but later appearances have ruined the character for me, along with UNIT in general.
ReplyDeleteWhile it’s true that Kate’s out of character behaviour in The Giggle and 73 Yards wasn’t really her fault because she was essentially mind controlled, the latter’s big dumb reset button ending meant there was no real acknowledgment outside the episode of all the betrayals Ruby endured, which makes her subsequent interactions with those other characters rather hard to swallow from an audience perspective; The Giggle at least showed Kate apologising to Shirley for the ableist slurs.
It also doesn’t excuse UNIT’s use of child soldiers (e.g., Morris), violating their staff’s bodily autonomy and privacy by chipping them, sending the repeatedly traumatised Ruby alone and unprotected to deal with her armed, violent, psychopath abuser, or them ganging up on Ruby to gaslight and pathologise her when she tried to remind them about Poppy without even apologising when they realised she was right. The show doesn’t problematise any of these things, presumably because the creative team had it in for Millie Gibson for whatever reason and found it amusing to make Ruby the kicked puppy of this era.
You make a solid case against how UNIT was presented in the RTD2 era, quite a few of these things I hadn't really considered but... yeah! Not a good look from a writing perspective that UNIT is shown to behave in such unethical ways so frequently, especially in the 2020s where there's a culture of much greater ethics in the workplace than was the case a generation ago.
DeleteRTD wrote some excellent individual stories in recent years, but the format of the show this time was fundamentally flawed in all sorts of subtle ways. Neither of the companions, in particular, were written well. Aside from the mystery box stuff, Ruby was really quite generic.