Suspension Of Disbelief: True Love
It’s been a full week since the word on prometheus came out, and thanks to Mindy’s suspension of disbelief, and other reviews I’ve managed to avoid a movie that it sounds like I would hate. But given that we were ranting last week, I thought I’d lighten the mood and give everyone the low down on a program that sounds happy, but is actually quite depressing. The good news is, we’re doing this to catch up with everyone’s favourite Scottish time lord who sold his soul to Virgin Media – David Tennant. That’s right, you can thank me later for your dose of the doctor, because there’s no time travel in this show. It is however, pretty interesting.
Unfortunately in a show like this time travel might have actually been a big improvement, not that it’s a bad concept, but it felt a little rushed (mainly due to the show’s format which I’ll talk about in a moment), something that time travel can only ever make better… as we all know… because it’s to do with time…
Anyway, the basic concept of this BBC production is that this is a series with five stories, told over five episodes, with each episode acting as a sort of stand-alone, despite the promise to intertwine them in some clever way throughout the series. For the first episode, they bring out David Tennant as a happily married man named Nick who is from Scotland instead of Gallifrey and has a saucepan instead of a sonic screwdriver. May I suggest that time travel makes a little more sense than a Scotsman in Kent, England, especially seeing as he’s going to be interacting with a girl from Nottingham later on, and coming from there myself, I can say with confidence that the only beach most people ever see from there is called Skegness and it’s nowhere near Kent.
We can only assume that he’s not going to be making an appearance in the Billie Piper episode later on in the series, but I’m sure that would please the audience enough to give the BBC’s ratings a nice, healthy boost.
This is one of those shows that really challenges you not to cringe, because, like several love dramas where the main character is already married and time travel is still against the laws of physics; David Tennant, I mean the Doctor, I mean Nick, meets another woman, bringing up the apparent theme that even nice guys cheat (according to the independent). I disagree with this message, but I’ll play along for the purposes of watching an extra half an hour of Tennant despite not understanding why this is apparently expected of men by a newspaper that I’m usually alright with.
In this case the dilemma is between the family Nick has been raising and his wife Ruth (essentially a life he has grown comfortably into) and his old passion Serena, who left him because ‘[she] couldn’t see [their] future together’. The old flame in question apparently tracked him down to his new home town and after bumping into his wife and acting friendly with her proceeded to track the flabbergasted Nick down to see if the excitement was still there. Unfortunately for Nick’s wife, he’s ‘never loved anyone like he loved [Serena]‘ and so the sinning begins.
I’ll let you watch it yourself if you want to know what choice our faux-time lord makes, but I do want to say that I usually find dramas with cheating really difficult to watch; I find it hard to even look at the screen in parts usually, and perhaps that says something about me that I don’t quite understand, but I actually really enjoyed what they did with this. They made the characters relate-able, the affair and the relationship between Tennant and his old flame very believable, and thus there were scenes that were really powerful scattered throughout this first episode. Try not to want to give David Tennant a hug when he knows how badly he’s messed up, I dare you. And I think this really does highlight something it’s sometimes quite easy to forget in doctor who due to the malleability of the script; David Tennant is a really good actor. It’s not often I can be made to feel sorry for someone whose flaws are so openly on display, but I will say that David, I am open for a hug if you need one.
Cheer up soon, oh time lord.
1 Comment
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Images and gifs of Tennant’s performance in this have been cropping up all over my Tumblr dash for the past few days but I haven’t been able to figure out where they were all coming from until now because I didn’t realize #truelove was the name of the show. THE MYSTERY IS SOLVED.