Wall Banger/Live-Action TV/Doctor Who

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Stupid Moments

  • In the Doctor Who Christmas special, "The Christmas Invasion", the Doctor started a health scare which may have led to a leadership challenge and a vote of no confidence for PM Jones. The reason was that she ordered an alien ship full of slavers to be destroyed. The Doctor has his morals (even when they don't make sense), and it does end up being in character for Ten, but it still didn't come off right. Hell, his previous incarnation mentioned that Harriet Jones was supposed to be the guiding light for Britain in the future. She's certainly not going to be any kind of guiding light now that she's become Dalek fodder. Harold Saxon (A.K.A. The Master, the Big Bad of Series 3) replacing Harriet Jones makes this even more of a stupid move.
    • The worst thing about the Doctor's complaining about the destruction of the alien ship was his noting that it was leaving. The aliens had just proven that their word was worthless when their leader attacked the Doctor despite 'surrendering'. If the one had sworn on the blood of his species that they would leave and then immediately tried to kill the man who forced him to swear, who's to say the others would have stood by his word? Earth couldn't take the chance and let them go because they might come back and plan a less direct attack next time, one which would prevent any defence.
      • Even in the unlikely event The Doctor was right and Jones was wrong, and the Sycorax never came back to Earth, the universe is a big place and, in this show, is filled with many forms of sentient life. The Sycorax aren't suddenly going to become peaceful and leave other planets alone after this one (not very costly) defeat. Why make such a big deal about saving Earth only to let the Sycorax make a future attack another helpless planet without the benefit of The Doctor or Torchwood to step in and save them? Letting such an enemy go without even significantly weakening them kind of comes off as The Doctor just wanting to deflect them onto a different planet he cares less about.
      • Killing people under a parley flag makes everyone else vastly less likely to trust you in negotiations again, unless you can prove that they broke their word first -- which given the circumstances of the act would not be possible for Earth to do, seeing as how they just vaporized all the evidence. So the Doctor has a point. Admittedly, Harriet Jones also has a point. And both sides were horrible at communicating their points. Which is why this incident has an entry in Informed Wrongness that points out that this is one of the very rare cases when both sides in an arugment simultaneously qualified for the trope.
    • The original script for Last of the Time Lords had the Master explicitly stating that it was only because of the Doctor's stunt that he was able to become Prime Minister; the scene was removed with the idea that being turned into a House Elf and finding out the true identity of the Toclafane was plenty for the Doctor to feel bad about. Russell T. Davies says that he still considers this Canon; it's a pity it's not unmistakably canon.
    • The consequences of the Doctor bringing down Harriet Jones go far beyond allowing the Master to become Prime Minister: the death of the Master (and everyone in his cabinet) paved the way for the weak, corrupt government we see in Torchwood: Children of Earth. You know, the one that negotiated the deaths of millions of human children? And the Doctor wasn't there for Earth that time.
      • ...Which is exactly what Harriet Jones predicted would eventually happen if they just continued rely on the Doctor to show up and solve everything.
      • And it also suggests that the Doctor is fully willing to directly interfere in national politics if he's angry at a politician. Suddenly Torchwood's snide remarks about him seem a bit more accurate.
    • Furthermore, the Doctor's plan to end Harriet Jones' term is to whisper a rumor to an aide who has every reason to preserve his boss's career and has just seen the Doctor explain what he's about to do. That this aide would be so stupid as to spread the rumor after all that is unbelievable.
      • As if that's not ridiculous enough, she's ousted from power on Christmas Day. That's right, the government decided to call an emergency meeting on Christmas Day to remove the Prime Minister from office based on a rumor overheard by a personal aide not twenty-four hours earlier.
        • However, this can be viewed as a parody on the British people's obsession with rumours and gossip.
          • This troper assumed that what he whispered was a code of some sort, presumably set up by UNIT or someone in case the Doctor thinks someone's dangerous. Of course, it didn't work out well in the end, but it's not necessarily without reason.
  • Davros and his "The Reason You Suck" Speech. He tells the Doctor, "This is my final victory, I have shown you yourself!" Wait, what!? You are the leader/creator of an entire genocidal species, and you're making this speech from a ship that doubles as a superweapon, with which you intend to destroy everything in the multiverse that isn't you or your pet species, and you consider your "ultimate victory" getting your archenemy to feel bad about all his collateral damage?
    • Made stranger by the fact that the actions of the Doctor's companions might not be so bad. Is it really a horrible thing to inspire other people to stand up to a genocidal species devoted to the annihilation of all other life? Admittedly their efforts involved either threatening to blow up the Earth or the main ship but considering that these are the Daleks we're talking about that seems like a rather reasonable reaction.
      • Even more ridiculous, one of the companions show in flashback to have "died in [the Doctor's] name" is the Face of Boe. You know, a creature billions of years old who was already dying of old age when the Doctor met him?
    • Conversely, Davros' real stupidity seems to be the Bond Villain Stupidity of stopping his plot in its tracks to give that speech as opposed to just offing the Doctor. Besides, Davros, even in the Classic series, always treated the Doctor like an equal (albeit one crippled by morals), so its perfectly in character for him to attempt to break the Doctor's spirit by launching a broadside at his conscience, especially at a moment when he (Davros) feels he's practically won, and as much as Davros would probably hate to admit it, he gets off on turning the Doctor into a mewling pile of emotional distress as much as he gets a hard on over a chance to fuck up the universe.
  • The Daleks In Manhattan/Evolution of the Daleks two-parter has a plot device involving Dalek DNA being transmitted to human corpses through the use of lightning strikes conducted through the Empire State Building -- which, even in a series not known for its fidelity to hard science, is more than a little unbelievable. Worse, they claimed that this energy came from gamma radiation. Right, so gamma radiation = lightning, and lightning moves DNA and does a job that would take a dedicated team of geneticists decades to do. And the gamma radiation is supposed to be coming from a solar flare. This sequence takes place at night.
    • In a more mundane but still annoying moment, a very young(-looking) man and two women, one of them black, get into the unfinished Empire State Building by posing as "two engineers and an architect." Psychic paper or no, someone in New York in 1930 should have questioned that.
    • The real Wall Banger in this episode was just how terrible the makeup and acting of the lead bad guy was. A lot can be forgiven if it's cool and atmospheric, but this wasn't.
    • Then there was the Doctor's plan to hold onto the lightning rod to give the corpses Time Lord DNA mixed with the Dalek DNA for "that little taste of freedom." Putting aside the idiot science here, aren't the Time Lords the most static and hidebound species in the universe -- which is the reason the Doctor left Gallifrey in the first place?
  • Journey's End. Who the hell let Russell near the medicine cabinet? And he fed the characters the same pills he took. Uh, guys, you have not one, but two functional teleport devices. Think they might be helpful?
    • Finally: what happened to Donna. The Reset Button has never been used so cruelly.
      • Thematically, it's even worse. Wasn't Donna's whole character arc about how she learned that she was more than "just a temp," that she had worth and value after years of being degraded by her shrewish mother? What's the phrase Clone!Doctor used? "Shouting at the universe, because she thinks no one is listening." RTD, why didn't you have the guts to kill her instead of undermining her character?
      • Considering how often her death was hinted, it was obvious that they would find a way around it; but was there really no other way of giving her an awesome moment than by giving her a Time Lord's knowledge?
  • Going back (forward?) to the new series: the ending of "Love and Monsters." Ursula dies bravely; but instead of letting her sacrifice stand, the Doctor brings her back--but only partially, so that she's essentially a face on a slab of concrete. Possibly forever. The biggest problem? This is supposed to be a good thing. Head, meet desk. Almost as bad? The episode hints that Ursula and Elton still have a "love life" of some kind... Squick.
    • It's even worse when you remember "The Five Doctors," in which Borusa's terrible punishment for seeking immortality was getting it - by becoming a face on a slab of concrete...
    • It's also a bit disturbing to realize that the Doctor could have saved Ursula, and maybe a few of the others, had he not chosen to sit and listen to Elton cry over Ursula and then explain what happened to Elton's mother. If he had decided to try to separate "the last victim" just a little earlier, then Elton wouldn't be having sex with a paving stone.
    • Doubly disturbing is the way Elton was rescued -- the Doctor and Rose only tracked him down to let him know how annoyed they were. Nice, Rose, real nice: four people just died, there's a psychotic alien monster less than a metre away from you, a man's about to die, and you're giving him hell because he upset the mother whom you were happy to leave behind while you went joyriding through space and time with your boyfriend -- THE SAME TIME-DERAILING BOYFRIEND WHO'S HAPPY TO ACCOMMODATE YOUR PETTINESS!!! Yeah, these two make life so much better for everyone they encounter...

Elton: "Great big absorbing monster from outer space, and you're having a go at me?"

  • "Fear Her" featured, among other things, an alien spaceship that is powered by love. That is refueled by all the love surrounding the Olympics. The Olympics. While Rose exclaims, "Feel the love! feel the love!!" That episode is going to look doubly ridiculous come 2012 if David Tennant doesn't magically show up in the middle of the stadium to light the torch. (Though if he does, then that will be cool.)
  • The Doctor deactivating Harkness's teleport device/time machine. What's the point of that, besides making it a bit more convenient for Torchwood (the series - the organization would be severely annoyed) by making sure he can't time-travel easily? It's just an act of dickery on the part of the Doctor. Ten has a lot of these.
  • Ah, the Delta Wave from "Parting of the Ways". Rather than being "a high amplitude brain wave ....usually associated with slow-wave sleep" (thank you, Other Wiki), it's instead "a wave of Van Cassadyne energy. Fries your brain. Stand in a Delta Wave and your head gets barbecued" (thank you, Jack). So, not the kind of delta wave your brain produces when you sleep, then. This could be an instance of Did Not Do the Research; since it's a Russell T. Davies script, it most likely is, though Artistic License is possible.
    • The Doctor gets the superweapon ready, but he doesn't wipe out everyone's favourite race of omnicidal maniacs because that would mean killing the people on Earth. The problem is, when the Doctor proudly proclaims himself a coward and not a killer, the Daleks cruise into orbit and GLASS THE WHOLE PLANET. Good thing there was a literal Dea Ex Machina to stop the Doctor's idiocy from dooming the cosmos.
      • The Daleks glassed the whole planet before then; whole continents were being bombed, no doubt killing millions upon millions and leaving the survivors ripe for harvesting. That makes this even more ridiculous.
    • The RTD-flavour Doctor seems to have a penchant for letting omnicidal races go about their business on the off chance that they'll take a time out from trying to eradicate every living thing in the cosmos to try to be better people.
  • "The End of Time". Three words: The Master Race. *thud thud thud thud*
    • The Tenth Doctor's speech about how he doesn't feel any emotional connection to his next regeneration and how some random guy with his memories will walk away and he'll be dead. Utterly, utterly out of character for any Time Lord, and a lovely message of support for their successors from Davies and Tennant.
    • The Doctor rails at Wilfred because he is the one to "cause" his death before sacrificing himself to save Wilf's life. This is a Love It or Hate It moment: it's either the climax of the Doctor's facing death and fighting it before eventually doing the noble thing and sacrificing himself for someone else, or yet more evidence that the Tenth Doctor was an arrogant, self-pitying Jerkass who kept claiming the moral high ground when he didn't have it.
    • Five words: "I don't want to go". Really? What about the nine incarnations who came before you? Excellent job at ruining a Tear Jerker. Nobody asked him to go.
      • That little bit of Reality Subtext was awful in every way - ignoring the fact it flew in the face of canon (sure, the Dr has never shown a desire to regenerate, but he's never considered it an end before. Heck, even Parting of the Ways, written by RTD, acknowledges this), a) both DT and RTD were leaving willingly, not being dragged away, after an immensely successful and lauded run and b) it's not exactly making life easier on the replacements by making the last words of the previous, massively popular actor "I don't want to go". Also, it was whiny.
      • Three also regarded regeneration as death (justified, as the Time Lords effectively murdered Two by forcing him to regenerate, and the memories were still fresh), but he went out with a lot more dignity, not to mention Three was more emotionally stable. Ten was an emotional wreck by the time he regenerated, so the angst is justified.
  • When did the Doctor develop the ability to jump out of a spaceship, smash through a glass dome, and get up and walk away? The broken glass alone should've killed him, since he landed on it, and that floor he also landed on was hard. If Ten could survive that even for just a few minutes, then why did Four have to die?
    • The Doctor has to save Wilfred's life because he gets trapped in an isolation chamber that can only be opened one side at a time, and even then only if one person is in the other chamber. Someone has crossed an isolation chamber with a roach motel.
      • Hell, they could have handled with a long stick or some string.
  • The moment River Song announced that the trademark sound of the Tardis that we've all come to love over the last 40 years is the bloody parking brake. Are they seriously suggesting that the Victor Meldrew of space that was the First Doctor had enough humour and patience in his body to intentionally keep the brakes on after every trip for no reason? Are they also suggesting that the stoic Third Doctor, The Master, The Rani, and the Meddling Monk all left their parking brakes on? How about every time he's in a hurry to save someone's life? With one line, Moffat has made the Doctor out to be an obsessive compulsive idiot.
    • Notice the Doctor continues to leave it in place after that episode.
    • Given how in the classic series other TARDISes made a similar noise, the whole parking break business becomes a little suspect. Unless you really want to assume that the entire Time Lord race has no idea how to correctly operate their own technology.
  • The Octopus Cyberman Head. Since when has this ability even been alluded to in either of their incarnations? What is the point of cyber-conversion if the suit has an independent AI that automatically tracks down the nearest brain?
  • The Doctor "Keeping Score" in museums. The Doctor is a Sufficiently Advanced Alien with a time machine and an intuitive sense of history, and he picks on people who have to work at it for not being as good as he is. That's like a programmer from Valve turning on Team Fortress 2's God Mode and then teabagging everybody's corpse.
    • When the Tenth Doctor first met River Song, he was amused by the concept of an Archaeologist. Hey Doc, you've been one step away from becoming one yourself every single time you've lost the Tardis. Remember that? (And the First Doctor would have loved the idea...)
  • River Song intimidates a Dalek. River Song successfully makes an emotionless, pitiless, malevolent space Nazi beg for mercy. And she does it during the season that took pains to reestablish the Daleks as a real threat after four seasons of Villain Decay under RTD. This establishes River Song as Moffat's pet character.
  • Why they were using tanks to shoot the Racnoss Webstar down? They clearly missed more than a few shots, which would presumable have to land somewhere within the city.
  • From the original series: Peri's "death" in the "Mindwarp" segment of "Trial of a Time Lord". After two seasons of getting generally abused and being denied the real character development that would've softened that abuse, Peri gets the daylights knocked out of her for the whole story, then is murdered in a cruel and utterly disrespectful way. Then they proceed to resurrect her...via a shot from still store and a couple of lines of dialogue. The departure manages to be both quite vicious and thoroughly lame.
  • In The Five Doctors the Second Doctor realizes that Zoe and Jamie are illusions because the Time Lords wiped their memories shortly before forcibly regenerating him into the Third Doctor. Now that would be a perfectly valid and reasonable piece of logic if... there was no way he could possibly know this. Their memories were wiped about five minutes before the Doctor was exiled, meaning the only way he could have that knowledge is if Borusa Time Scooped the Doctor straight from that chamber on Gallifrey - which we know didn't happen because we saw the Doctor get kidnapped from the Brigadiers retirement party.
    • This gets us into the tricky, unsteady ground of the "Season 6B" theory. Basically, stuff like this (The Two Doctors as well) implies the Time Lords might've used the Second Doctor as some sort of time agent between the trial in "The War Games" and "Spearhead from Space". Don't really know if the BBC considers it canon or canon-ish or whatever.
  • The end of "The Day of the Moon". No, Doctor, it's not Christmas and yes, the Silence are bastards, but you give them the chance to redeem themselves even though you know they won't take it because you are the freaking DOCTOR and this is what you are supposed to DO. And you damn well don't give us the start of a planet-wide mass lynching and call it a happy ending.
  • The villain in "The Underwater Menace". What's he going to do? Destroy the Earth. Why? 'cause. What's really horrible is that they had an opportunity to actually make this work (have him start to raise Atlantis by lowering the water level, but he doesn't realize that rapidly lowering the water level will give everything in Atlantis nitrogen narcosis; which will mean that the entire CITY will be as nutty as he was, leaving the Doctor to be the Only Sane Man.)

Awful Special Effects

  • The Bubble-wrap monster from "The Ark in Space" (1974) - apparently an alien insect larva, this is clearly a man wrapped in green-painted bubble-wrap shuffling along the floor. That said, it's considered a good story.
    • This serial also features a space station built out of a hypodermic syringe and a donut.
  • The giant rats from "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" (1977) - the only letdown in an otherwise cracking serial, these floppy cloth rodents are just as phony-looking as they sound. Tom Baker even admitted they weren't the high point of the BBC's production values.
  • The Myrka from "Warriors of the Deep" (1984) - intended to be a terrifying marine sea-monster, the effect was more "slowly shuffling marine pantomime horse".

Stupid Stories

  • The Sixth Doctor episode "The Two Doctors". Humans are compared to, and treated like, cattle to make a Family-Unfriendly Aesop. "Go veggie!"
  • "Terror of the Vervoids" came just one season later and had evil mutated plants revolting because they instinctively fear people will eat them. Take That, vegetarians! That'll teach ya to eat grass!
    • "Terror of the Vervoids" was interesting until the monsters were revealed. It's like their heads are penises!
  • The Twin Dilemma (1984) - Colin Baker was to have a rough time as Doctor, and his introductory story did not bode well. Although based on an interesting idea -- have the Doctor be emotionally unstable post-regeneration and turn violent and unpredictable, with a resulting spiky edge that would colour his character later -- but thanks to some poor writing, he instead just comes off as an unlikeable Jerkass, in many ways antithetical with what most believe the Doctor should stand for. This culminates in a wildly out-of-character scene in which the Doctor attempts to throttle his companion Peri; while this is intended to demonstrate the Doctor's irrationality, it still left a poor taste in the mouth for many and the fact that this portrayal ended up colouring Baker's entire tenure (to the extent that to this day people judge his entire character on this scene) just makes things worse. Even by the standards of Doctor Who monsters the Gastropods, the slug-like bad guys, look painfully silly, and the titular twins who form two of the story's central characters are usually ranked among the worst-acted and least likeable characters ever to appear in the series. And they decided to clothe the Doctor in the notorious multicoloured coat, which many fans argue increased the increasing perception of the time that the show simply couldn't be taken seriously.
  • Time and the Rani (1987) - Likewise, Sylvester McCoy would not have an easy time of it, as again reflected in his debut; things were chaotic behind the scenes in preparing for this story, which is reflected in the frantic, jumbled and nonsensical plot which involves the Rani kidnapping geniuses from all around the universe for reasons which are never made entirely clear, coupled with a lot of running about and shouting. McCoy's Doctor fails to make a good first impression, lumbered with a sense of humour which, consisting as it does mainly of a tendency towards annoying malapropisms and pratfalls, can't help but fall flat. The Lakertyans, the race the Rani has enslaved, are also widely criticised as being a dull, uninteresting and unconvincing lot, and the Tetraps, her slaves, continue the ignoble tradition of poorly realized Doctor Who monsters. The music (also widely regarded as being a nadir for the series on this front) also dates the story firmly in the 1980s, much to it's detriment.
  • Fear Her (2006) - Seriously, ask anyone in the Who fandom; they will tell you that Fear Her is simply awful. The general consensus seems to be that the writer wanted to tell a story that simply wouldn't fit inside the 45 minute time limit, leaving behind the shreds of... something. It contains, in no particular order, a girl making things disappear by drawing them, a picture of that girl's father in her closet, aliens who live on warmth and love, the Doctor running down the street with the Olympic Torch (in what is clearly late winter, no less) screaming "Feel the love!" and some really, really awful line delivery. And then it ends with the Doctor going all serious for a second, completely at odds with the rest of the story I might add, leading into the finale.
    • The story also shares an astonishing number of plot elements with The Idiot's Lantern a much better story which aired less than a month earlier. Both taking place in a suburban London street where people are disappearing right before a major national event, both featuring a subplot involving an abusive father, both ending with a celebratory block party, and both featuring an alien who traps people in a two dimensional space. While repetition of plot elements is inevitable in a series as long-lived as Doctor Who, you should still try to avoid them as much as possible (and you should probably avoid doing an outright rehash of an episode from the very same season.)

Stupid Characters

  • River Song: On one hand, the character has already died, meaning she must survive long enough to meet the Tenth Doctor in the Library (thus limiting the suspense about whether she'll survive or not). On the other, she's become Steven Moffat's pet character, being that she's been revealed (as of the end of the sixth season) to be the future child of Amy and Rory, who has Time Lord powers, romances the Doctor (and ends up marrying him), is an assassin who was trained to kill him until they fell in love, knows more than he does about the TARDIS and the one who gets to break all the rules. In addition, during "The Impossible Astronaut", River describes herself as a "young, impressionable girl" when she met the Doctor - this guy who just drops out of the sky and knows every last thing about he, and feels like she'll die if the Doctor ever doesn't remember her (meaning that she'll never meet him again). As of "A Good Man Goes To War", we find out that she was a baby when the Doctor first met her and would have likely played a large part in her growing up. She proceeds to have a romantic and implied sexual relationship with him. Add in the facts that much the same thing happened to her mother (with a fail on the sexual relationship part) and due to stable time loops she doesn't actually have a lot of choice in the relationship, and that the Doctor is a lot older and more worldly than River. Is this what the Doctor does to young girls? Could he have just gone for the 'spoilers' route?
    • Though being brought up to be a psycho killer may take its toll on a person.
    • The comment about dying can be taken as a figure of speech, and even if it's not, she may be THAT obsessed after being brought up to be, well, focused only on that one guy (and her entire life does revolve around him, even her career choice is done only for him).
    • As for knowing that she'll live, (a) time can be rewritten, and (b) we often know that people will live (in all the times the Doctor "died" did you believe he'll never come back?). There are other things to the story beyond a resolution to a conflict that appears to be deadly.
      • The Doctors personal timeline can not be rewritten as he is a fixed point in time - remember the Reapers? the only way she could live after the Library is if the Doctor goes back and recovers her Green Data Thing from the Library's main computer and installed it into another body somehow. I sincerely doubt the near immortal Vasta Nerada would be fooled by the whole fear me trick again.
  • Adric: (Matthew Waterhouse, 1980-1982): The idea behind Adric -- a maths genius big on intellectual knowledge but low on practical skills -- is an interesting one, but most fans tend to consider him a failure at best, and a hated Load at worst. The way he's written tends to make him come across as unlikable, arrogant, petulant and snotty, later episodes which stress his gullibility and incompetence tend to make his supposed genius something of an Informed Attribute, and -- perhaps most damaging -- the actor who played him was a Promoted Fanboy with very little acting experience who, to put it mildly, failed to distinguish himself in the role. His Heroic Sacrifice at the end of the story "Earthshock" does tend to be raised as a Rescued from the Scrappy Heap moment for him, but it's arguably a case of too little, too late for many.
  • Melanie Bush: (Bonnie Langford, 1986-1987): Again, Melanie is a companion with a lot of potential; not only is she a computer programmer, suggesting that she could be very useful, but she also arrived at a point where the Doctor's relationships with his previous companions (and vice versa) had for a good while been at best rather sour and interspersed with lots of petty bickering -- Melanie and the Doctor were obviously good friends, which at that point was quite refreshing. Unfortunately, Melanie is something of a throwback to earlier companions in that she doesn't seem to do very much except scream at monsters; this, in an age where science fiction audiences had already been introduced to strong female characters like Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor, was not a particularly impressive move regarding gender roles. Furthermore, this is also a case of the role arguably being miscast; Bonnie Langford was primarily known for pantomime and musical theatre, and approached the role in a similar fashion, which many audiences viewed as inappropriate. The fact that she was also the companion for what are widely considered two of the worst seasons in the show's history (which, it should be stressed, is also for reasons beyond her performances) also doesn't help her case much either.
    • After the series tried hard to shake its reputation for being filled with Screaming Girlie stereotypes, we have an annoying, useless character whose personality can be described as "she has a whiny voice and she screams really loud and really often". She's blamed for the waning of Doctor Who in the 1980s more than Colin Baker is.
Back to Wall Banger
Back to Doctor Who
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Wall_Banger/Live-Action_TV/Doctor_Who?oldid=1703847"