@dentarthurdent Sarcastic but a fairly valid generalisation, I fear.
Silly me. I thought sarcasm was par for the course for the internet.
Anyway: “Pathetic special effects and rubber monsters” could be applied to most of classic Who’s run, for sure, but that’s doing bit of a disservice to the ingenious craftsmen who were able to cook up all sorts of sights and sounds on a ludicrously thin budget. For example: Pyramids of Mars might come off stodgy to some American fans today, but the lack of CGI at the time forced the writer to rein himself in, however unknowingly, in favor of a “substance-over-style” approach that still holds up. For crying out loud, all Sutekh really does is sit on his damn butt for most of the story (anonymous hand holding down his pillow notwithstanding), but the quality of Gabriel Woolf’s vocal performance MAKES the character awesome despite of that fact.
Compare Pyramids of Mars to Empire of Death. RTD is abundantly clear that Sutekh isn’t sitting on his butt anymore. Knowing full well a guy with a plastic doggy mask won’t cut it for 21st century audiences, RTD reimagines Sutekh as a gigantic, quadrupedal jackal from the bowels of Hell. More money for the budget means more genuine spectacle rather than creeping around an old British mansion for most of the running time. Everything Sutekh promised he’d deliver in Pyramids of Mars, we get to see in Empire.
And it’s legitimately terrifying. The sequence featuring the Doctor talking with a nameless woman reminded me of Tela Barr’s The Turin Horse in terms of raw, existential horror. That’s exactly what Sutekh’s intergalactic holocaust should be like: Something that frightens on an intellectual as much as a visceral level.
Sadly, it’s all downhill from there, with RTD having to hit the reset button to undo the bad guy’s work, Thanos-style. In addition, the script is crowded, noisy and messy the same way most contemporary entertainment is crowded, noisy and messy. There just isn’t enough time to go into the finer details of Sutekh’s backstory, or Ruby’s, or UNIT’s. (Hence why RTD dismissed Sutekh’s Egyptian background with a head-scratching “cultural appropriation” joke.)
It seems as if there’s a give and take to everything. A lower budget means more effort put into the screenplay. More money means more effort put into the visuals for a prettier experience, and yet one that still rings hollow. I guess it’s impossible to have the best of both worlds.
I mean, what’s stopping RTD from revisiting this idea over and over again? Is this going to be a recurring thing now, with the Doctor “splitting” like an amoeba every time he’s mortally injured? If I was in Kate Stewart’s shoes, I’d start looking at the Doctor as less of a friend, and more of an ungodly abomination. But that could just be my inner Conservative talking.
