What The BBC Thinks About Dark Water Complaints

Andrew Reynolds is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

For the fortunate amongst us, who have never suffered through the heartbreak of losing someone through our formative years, drama helped normalise death.

It gave our inevitable decline a redemptive quality; be it following a character who set in motion his/her own end through their own misguided actions, and the inevitable brushes with salvation along that journey, or the near brush with death that lead to a watershed moment for a lost soul – it all served to make that final moment seem less frightening through exposure.

We got to see the impact of death as though we were ghouls at our own wake. The drama continued in spite of a characters demise or to those who could distinguish the inner workings of television; it gave us the sense that it wasn’t so much the end of a person, more the end of an entire way of looking at the world.

Each show has a point of view and it’s in the final moments of a characters onscreen life or the closing of one outlet of this business we call Show, that the artifice seemingly faded away; and that in itself could be a frightening, and occasionally frustrating business – especially if you’re a fan of The Sopranos.

Writers talk about it all the time: ‘We owe it to our viewers to give the show a proper send-off’.

There’s a complicit contract here. Production staff, bound by longevity and the conventions of drama, must create a satisfactory ending on both counts and we, the audience, demand a death befitting the lives we have seen play out before us, be it character or show.

That’s not to paint all viewers as spoilt roman emperors itching to downturn our thumbs at every weak-willed character we grow to hate but in some ways, that’s where teledeath can take us.

It allows our complicity in the very act itself because we have decided what form our drama takes by the very act of making a choice to view it and, with the predominance of Social Media, the very notion of ‘interactivity’ with a show has changed.

Almost instantly, we can register a complaint and have it justified by the number of others who share our opinion.

So when we are confronted by a concept of death that chills us, that genuinely frightens us like the frankly brilliant idea that the dead can feel pain and therefore beg to be buried in Dark Water, we can feel betrayed.

For a start, it breaks what we expect when it comes to Saturday night telly and death. This isn’t an orderly from Casualty putting an arm around our shoulder and telling us, thanks to an accident at the Deptford All Women’s Clay Pigeon Shooting Finals, Auntie Beryl won’t be making it to our third wedding anniversary celebration, nor is it DCI Barnaby giving us a sense of closure by capturing the increasingly desperate Pinking Shears Slasher in the murder capital of Britain, Midsomer.

If anything, it leaves us with a sense of hopelessness – there is no silver lining (unless you count the shiny new bodies handed out by Missy), the afterlife has been breached and the dead are in pain. This is not a concept we were prepared for. This is not an idea we find palatable. This is cause for complaint.

As of writing, the BBC have received 124 complaints directly to the corporation with a further 9 submitted to Ofcom – all about the scene in Saturday’s Dark Water suggesting the bodies of the dead could feel pain while being cremated.

Their full response reads:

“Doctor Who is a family drama with a long tradition of tackling some of the more fundamental questions about life and death,” said the statement. “We were mindful of the themes explored in Dark Water and are confident that they are appropriate in the context of the heightened sci-fi world of the show.

The scene in which a character reveals 3W’s unconventional theory about the afterlife was preceded by the same character warning the Doctor and Clara several times that what they were about to hear could be distressing.

When the Doctor does hear these claims, he immediately pours scorn on them, dismissing them out of hand as a ‘con’ and a ‘racket’. It transpires that he is correct, and the entire concept is revealed to be a scam perpetrated by Missy.”

Here, context is everything. While it may seem strange that 124 complaints from a show that regularly has up to 7 million viewers has garnered a response from the BBC, those were direct complaints to a public body – they are duty bound to address them.

The more pertinent question would be: How do these numbers compare to other shows? How many direct complaints do other shows get? Is this out of the ordinary? What do numbers like these mean in the age of Twitter and Facebook?

In terms of death and drama, the most interesting point here is despite characters acting as proxies for our own concerns about the issue and explaining that it’s not only a gruesome idea but, as pointed out later, a bit of a scam; we still felt the urge to complain about it.

There are always going to be unpalatable themes but there’s no reason responsible dramatists shouldn’t be able to approach them and satisfy those two previously mentioned terms: longevity and dramatic conventions.

Doctor Who has always been even handed when it comes to presenting disturbing ideas in a tasteful, satisfying way – it just seems odd that we still feel the need to complain even when due care has been shown. That’s not to say its right to challenge viewers more that nothing should be off the table if it is handled tastefully and due care is shown.

An Ofcom spokesman also commented that the regulator was “assessing the complaints before deciding whether to investigate”.

So is the idea of the dead feeling pain too much for a Saturday night? Is it justified by the conventions of the genre? Were you perturbed by the idea?

(Via DrWhoNews.)

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