Well, if you happen to look at the time of my last LJ post, GMT, you will see this is eating away at me to the point of severe insomnia. Reading the best book on narrative I've come across in a long time, maybe ever, has opened it all up again for me. I'll expand a little further. This would work better with diagrams, but they aren't my strong point.
Yorke argues that the classic underlying template for a story is the five act structure. Act One, The Call, via an inciting incident. Act two, resistance then eventual commitment to the Call. "I'll take the Ring, though I don't know the way." Act Three, the crisis - is the character going to stay with Ego or commit to personal growth? The choice is made, then tested in Act Four, before the final resolution mirrors the start and returns us, with changed protagonist, to the start of the circle.
All this is very familiar to narratologists. Yorke also points out that good stories have what he calls "a fractal structure." The central conflict is mirrored in every scene, even every beat. Here, right in this analysis, I see the ongoing problem with New Who. In Classic days every story was complete in itself and mostly, the Doctor was reset to zero. RTD reinvented the show by blowing all that out of the window and making it about his character, via the relationship with Rose. But he had no idea how big the relaunched show would get. It is okay to do a series arc if there will only be one series. But as things progressed, it became a multi-series arc. He kept trying to rework it without going back and mirroring the fractal structure he'd begun with. First it was about Doctor/Rose, then it was about Doctor/Master, then it was about the Doctor vs the whole bloody universe.
Expanding on my brief analysis of RTD-era DW, you could have seen Doomsday as closure of a sort. But to do this, you'd have to present the Doctor as learning something from his relationship with Rose, and ideally Rose feeling the same way. It's over, but they are better people, with no regrets. Instead, Ten wallowed in grief all through S3, which dliuted the impact of him meeting his shadow self in the Master, and hence closure was retrospectively denied to Doomsday and transferred to the return of Rose at the end of S4, which in its turn detracted from (a) the conflict with Davros and (b) Donna's arc. Narrative closure was repeatedly denied, and nobody saw that better than RTD himself.
It is possible, just about, to reset the Doctor between regenerations. RTD's failure to do that by concluding his story with a happy ending for the Rose/Doctor romance was a huge wasted opportunity. The genie was out of the bottle. It wasn't possible to forget that the Doctor had once been a real person in love. So Eleven began with a mountain to climb, and instead he was pushed into an iconic Doctor as Trickster mould. The show is now in the process of celebrating a backstory it has denied to its central character. He is in a shooting gallery filled with cardboard cut-outs who pop up from narrative E-space whenever it suits the story and then obligingly lie down again (I'm looking at you, River Song). Meanwhile, even as at promotes itself as a series of self-contained mini-movies, the story continues to cock-tease, denying narrative closure, using devices which make the characters more and more echoes of themselves.
And you know what happens when people are cock-teased for too long. They start to masturbate. We are now into the universe of empty fanboy wanking.
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Date: 2013-05-01 08:02 am (UTC)Yorke argues that the classic underlying template for a story is the five act structure. Act One, The Call, via an inciting incident. Act two, resistance then eventual commitment to the Call. "I'll take the Ring, though I don't know the way." Act Three, the crisis - is the character going to stay with Ego or commit to personal growth? The choice is made, then tested in Act Four, before the final resolution mirrors the start and returns us, with changed protagonist, to the start of the circle.
All this is very familiar to narratologists. Yorke also points out that good stories have what he calls "a fractal structure." The central conflict is mirrored in every scene, even every beat. Here, right in this analysis, I see the ongoing problem with New Who. In Classic days every story was complete in itself and mostly, the Doctor was reset to zero. RTD reinvented the show by blowing all that out of the window and making it about his character, via the relationship with Rose. But he had no idea how big the relaunched show would get. It is okay to do a series arc if there will only be one series. But as things progressed, it became a multi-series arc. He kept trying to rework it without going back and mirroring the fractal structure he'd begun with. First it was about Doctor/Rose, then it was about Doctor/Master, then it was about the Doctor vs the whole bloody universe.
Expanding on my brief analysis of RTD-era DW, you could have seen Doomsday as closure of a sort. But to do this, you'd have to present the Doctor as learning something from his relationship with Rose, and ideally Rose feeling the same way. It's over, but they are better people, with no regrets. Instead, Ten wallowed in grief all through S3, which dliuted the impact of him meeting his shadow self in the Master, and hence closure was retrospectively denied to Doomsday and transferred to the return of Rose at the end of S4, which in its turn detracted from (a) the conflict with Davros and (b) Donna's arc. Narrative closure was repeatedly denied, and nobody saw that better than RTD himself.
It is possible, just about, to reset the Doctor between regenerations. RTD's failure to do that by concluding his story with a happy ending for the Rose/Doctor romance was a huge wasted opportunity. The genie was out of the bottle. It wasn't possible to forget that the Doctor had once been a real person in love. So Eleven began with a mountain to climb, and instead he was pushed into an iconic Doctor as Trickster mould. The show is now in the process of celebrating a backstory it has denied to its central character. He is in a shooting gallery filled with cardboard cut-outs who pop up from narrative E-space whenever it suits the story and then obligingly lie down again (I'm looking at you, River Song). Meanwhile, even as at promotes itself as a series of self-contained mini-movies, the story continues to cock-tease, denying narrative closure, using devices which make the characters more and more echoes of themselves.
And you know what happens when people are cock-teased for too long. They start to masturbate. We are now into the universe of empty fanboy wanking.