Showing posts with label last appearance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label last appearance. Show all posts

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

review: the end of time, parts 1 and 2


I really hate to see MyFutureHusbandDavidTennant in pain. And he acts it so well. I wince every time and want to give him a cookie and a glass of juice and a hug.

Anyway.

The official review is over on Examiner, so here I'll just mention some personal things to add to it.

I'm annoyed that there wasn't more come-uppance. I mean, that was a huge emotional and mental break there at the end of Waters of Mars, and he said some pretty upsetting things, and then it was all 'crap-that-was-wrong-all-better-now-never-mind', all the emotional and plot-ly fall out in, like, three seconds and it's never mentioned again. I hope that the Moff mentions it. It's the exact point where he went too far, where he took things the wrong way and stopped being himself and started being a lunatic, started being the Master-- and then that just didn't matter at all when this ep started and the Master was back? Yeah, that's not good writing, not good continuity, and we expect better. I expect better. And I expect someone, some time before too long into the new series to come back to it and point out that, yeah, that was wrong, and he's still dealing with it, still trying to figure out how to make up for that-- another thing to haunt him and drive him toward good.

And I'm just annoyed that as soon as the Master comes back, he's all 'let's be best friends, okay?', and doesn't have to deal with the fact that he's now that much closer to what the Master is, and it's never once a temptation to go to the Dark Side there. I mean, the Master has Force Lightning. He's already a Sith Lord. And the Doctor never even had to be tempted by that?

Geek rage rising...

And there's been this niggling feeling in the back of my brain since these specials started-- since the last three eps of the last season, really-- that it's a super-extended huff from RTD. I mean, he seems upbeat in the interviews, and then he gives us episodes where everyone is off-character, and plot lines don't make sense, and the Doctor keeps being a jerk*, and then he takes it all away, packs up his toys and moves on. It feels... bitter. It feels done. And it feels final in a way that doesn't sit right in my head based on how amazing it's been up to this point. ::sigh:: But now it's over, and we can all let this stuff settle and forget the annoyances. We never need to watch these weird overblown last episodes again. And that's almost a relief (though still a bittersweet one, because I really will miss Ten and Tennant. Four was my Doctor; now Ten is, and always will be.)

I'm divided on the unfairness of it. On the one hand, this is a kid's show, and things should turn out fair and clean and happy-- or, at least seem to be so. On the other hand, it really IS unfair, and I don't want it to be. The fact that the Doctor himself keeps saying it's unfair just makes it seem that much more unfair.

And I'm still not happy with how Rose or Donna turned out, though I like the last glimpse of Rose that we had.

I think that woman who kept appearing to Wilf is more interesting if it's Future Old Donna, turned into a Time Lord the way Ace never got to be, or if it's Romana. It'd be awesome if it's Romana. There's the idea also that it's the Doctor's mom, which would be sweet, but I don't think we need that.


Things I'd like to see in the new series:
- More than just one episode where the Tardis is grounded-- that looked like some severe damage, and it'd be interesting to see the Doctor stuck on Earth, a little like how the Third Doctor was. Not permanently, just not immediately able to up and leave. Because he's so keen on avoiding connections, I'd like to see him trapped with the same people. And I want to see the new Tardis design happening in stages as he repairs things-- or, at least see a few options before he settles on one. Something new, please.

- They promised a broken Sonic Screwdriver. Which is pretty cool. It's a crutch; I like a Doctor who can fix things like Macguyver all up in this piece.

- New monsters! And if there are returns of old ones, please please please let them be something other than a flipping Cyberman or a Dalek-- and if they are a Cyberman or a Dalek, let there be something new to say about them that doesn't involve them trying to be hybridized with humans. I mean, come on.

- I'd love for this not to be the end of the Modern Companions. Last regeneration, we had Rose to carry us into the next series, but this is a new Doctor with a new companion and a new head writer, so who's carrying us over? I bet Moff could make Marfa more interesting. Especially now that she's married to Mickey, even though she was engaged to that cute doctor that she met in the Year That Never Was. And since I still have issues with Donna's story, I want her to come back and get some better handling. And there's always the chance that Rose and Other Doctor could come back, but I think that should wait a while. Let everyone breathe and move on a bit-- and then be a special episode in, say, two years, when it'll feel fresh again. And Sarah Jane still has a lot to do. The Doctor said so in her show.

- There was a lot of awesomeness mentioned in passing about how the Time War went down, and it'd be fun if some of that came through. Not too much, just a little at a time, say, the Abyss Child or whatever it was, just one every other season or so. Because I really like the idea that the TimeLords are entirely batshit crazy, and that they aren't really gone, just locked away and sectioned off where they can't hurt anyone anymore-- and that now they know there are ways to get through and come back.

- Jenny. She's not done by a long shot-- and she's not supposed to have happened. She's a loose end, and that makes for an interesting story.

- River Song. Especially if it turns out the way it looks like it would-- her being the Doctor's wife or something. Especially especially if it turns out that she's something else entirely unexpected, like his daughter or his sister or himself as a woman. Especially if she's not as human as she looks, and it doesn't matter what he looks like to us, because he looks the same to her because she's looking at what he actually is, not the body he's in. Or if the timeline has been changed by his regeneration, and now he has to relate to her on a different level. I just want her to be awesome and unexpected.

- Amy's from 1991. That's a long time ago. It'll be fin for her home time to be out of synch with ours, and it'll be fun for our time to be far in the future of her's, and I hope they deal with that.



* Jerkiness: I love you, Rose, but even though the plot point that made this make sense was cut, and you risked destroying the universe to come back to me, I'm still leaving you here back where you started. Here, it's a slightly-less-cool copy of me. I'm sure he'll be fine living in a house and getting a job.
Jerkiness: I am the Timelord victorious. I do what I want. Even when it makes my companions kill themselves.
Jerkiness: Don't let Donna remember anything, or it will melt her brain. Also, that's probably not true.
Jerkiness: You don't have to be all Master-ish anymore. We're the only two left, so you can travel with me for all times, like bros, and when I lock you up, I'll make sure to give you lots of space and to pull you out from under the floor boards and dust you off once in a while, like I do with the Crilitanes.
Jerkiness: You're great, Wilf, but you're not anything and I'm awesome, and I don't think I should have to die for you. Oops, I totally did anyway. Damn.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

classic who: the hand of fear



And then we move on to The Hand of Fear. This one is Sarah Jane's last episode, and she gets to go out being herself-- or, at least, the mcguffin she frequently is.

They land back on Earth in a quarry (which is actually being a quarry, so that's two shots if you're playing the drinking game we made up and I haven't written about yet), just in time to be very nearly squashed in a rockslide created by blasting they don't pay enough attention to get out of the way of. The Doctor lands on top of the rubble, and they find him first, and they go looking for Sarah Jane and find her trapped under some massive bits of styrofoam, passed out and concussed, and holding onto a big stone hand. Which, of course, takes over her mind. ::sigh::

When they leave her alone in the hospital, she wakes up and steals the hand from the lab, sealing it up in Tupperware to keep it fresh, and uses the ring she found on it to blast her way into a nuclear power plant that may or may not be the same one in Inferno (in my head, it totally is, and it's just not a very nice place to work). She locks herself in the reactor, and the stone hand starts to come back to life. The radiation is critical, and the hand is controlling people all over the place, trying to get more of it. The Doctor manages to get Sarah Jane out, but she doesn't remember being taken over, and the hand has absorbed so much of the radiation that she isn't contaminated at all. Which is convenient.

Eventually, when the core implodes instead of explodes and the hand isn't stopped, the RAF tries to nuke the place, which I would think is pretty obviously not going to work, but maybe they're way dumber without UNIT to explain things to them. I miss the Brig. Anyway, the nukes only make the transformation complete, and Eldrad walks out of the reactor-- and is a chick, since the regeneration imprinted on Sarah Jane, the first person to touch the hand and the ring. The Doctor decides to try diplomacy (finally), and they talk Eldrad down from a massive attack on everything with the promise of taking her home, which they do, but it has to be now, millions of years after she / he was exiled and executed, so they can't mess with history. Eldrad leads them to the frozen-over capital and starts turning machines back on with the intention of rebuilding the world that was destroyed... and walks right into a trap, where a spear full of acid slams into her chest and starts cracking her crystaline structure.

The Doctor and Sarah Jane take her down to a regeneration chamber past a void and through various other traps. She's amazingly good at remaining manequin-stiff as the Doctor hauls her around, and she must not weight much (though if she's really silicon like quartz, she should way most of a ton) because he's hauling her around all over the place. They make it to the chamber just in time, and Eldrad is reborn as his true self, a big pointy man-thing with a crystal beard and a habit of extreme overacting. And he's a lunatic. He was the one who killed the planet, and his continuing punishment is to have a world where everyone chose to die instead of risking that he'd come back, even far in the future, and killed themselves. Jeeze. The Doctor and Sarah jane have to escape his crazy to get home, and they toss him down the needless chasm to do so.

And then Sarah Jane has to leave. She's complaing about always getting chased and mind-controlled and tricked and manipulated, and pretends to want to go home, and stomps off to get all her stuff together (which turns out to be a stuffed owl, two ugly jackets, a teeny tiny suitcase, a potted plant and a tennis racket)-- and while she's gone, the Doctor gets the Call home to Gallifrey. Humans aren't allowed there, and he has to leave her. So he drops her off where he thinks she lives, and she gets off with the sort of cheerfulness of someone who thinks she'll get to go back soon, and he leaves her. For thirty-five years. And I was very sad. The last few episodes, he called her his best friend, and he was so deflated-sounding when he told her she couldn't go with him, and she didn't really seem to know what it meant...

And so ends the Sarah Jane Years. She gets an abortive spinoff in the early 80s, and she gets to come back for the Five Doctors in a bit, and she's still around the expanded universe, but there's no more Sarah Jane Smith in the series until School Reunion in Nu Who, and the Sarah Jane Adventures after that. I'll miss her. Even with her really awful outfits and her sometimes hopeless ankle-twisting, she was sharp and clever and smart enough to keep up with the Doctor, and they were a good team.

Monday, April 13, 2009

nu who: planet of the dead

doctor_who_planet_of_the_dead_promo

Yay! My Who fix that I know will last all of about six and a half minutes before I start feining like woah. I mean, they throw me this delicious little bone, and then I have to wait until November, knowing that the last story is a two parter that will have a month—A MONTH—between parts.

But I digress.

Planet of the Dead starts out with a robbery and a Torchwood-ish escape-and-chase. Lady Christina-who-is-not-the-Bionic-Woman-and-is-cooler-anyway hops on a giant red bus to escape the cops, and our lovely Doctor waltzes in and introduces himself and his new hobby: following tears in reality. (I hope this hobby sticks around. Really, it’s so random and will be so useful for future stories if the right writer gets his /her/ it’s grubby hands on it) This one goes wonky and the bus falls through into Dubai where once a thriving society lived.

The Doctor is great in this one, sparkling and sparky and chattery and fun as all hell—and a little more honest then he’s been lately: he says at one point ‘the worse it is, the more I love it’, which just about sums up the entirety of the Doctor’s best traits, and in the end, he tells Christina to bugger off because he isn’t having any more companions. He’s finally gotten tired of losing them. (This is brilliant. Think how weird he’s going to be without anyone to reign him in! Think how dark and closed off he’ll be when he meets his first real companion as 11!) He’s gripy when no one’s paying attention to him, he’s genius when he needs to be, he’s absolutely batty, he talks to aliens in their own language, and he doesn’t quite tell people what he’s doing, and he has the most gloriously insane expressions through the whole thing, and it’s just wonderful. I’ve missed my Doctor so much, and I’m so glad this fresh story has the Doctor exactly how I love him. The Next Doctor was fun, but it was melancholy also; this one holds off the darkening until the end when the psychic sets up the plot for the rest of my love’s run: The darkness is returning, his song is ending like the Ood said, and when it comes, whatever it is, it’ll knock four times. Ominous!

And Christina is fun. I wasn’t all that thrilled with Bionic Woman, so I was a bit ick about her casting, but she’s fine. Strong, mysterious, cheeky, clever enough to keep up with the Doctor, confident and self-sufficient. She’s the sort of companion the Doctor needs—one who can keep up and have as much fun as he does as the world falls down around him. And he tells her no. Beautiful. Maybe he’s finally getting over his codependency issues, even if he is replacing them with a fear of intimacy. Ha! Our Doctor’s just a different sort of basketcase now.

I’d heard that the story was silly, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d expected. Maybe my standards just aren’t as nonsilly as others, but I found it pretty tight and well-put-together, even if they didn’t really deal with the fact that an entire planet was dusted. Or that the neat creepy bug-aliens (at least one of which had definite weevil body language and is probably the same actor) we very conveniently gobbled and gone. Or that UNIT was sort of a sideline that didn’t really need to be there and could as easily have been Torchwood or the usual cops, who must be getting used to this crazy by now. But I was glad to see them, and the nuBrig (who’s a captain) was appropriately badass, and Malcom is just lovely and so Welsh I could die.

Dear Moff: here’s a spinoff about a royal jewel thief in a flying bus for you. Also, here’s a lovely mad scientist who loves the Doctor like the very best fan; keep him around.

So! Next time, we’ve got a space station, which I always do love and get so little of in nu Who. And there’s people screaming and running down corridors, good good. As to be expected. And there’s water. On Mars. That seems to take over / come out of people. And it may or may not be an anagram for War of the Master, which would just make my year.

Tuesday, November 18, 2008

classic who: planet of the spiders

And here we have Doctor Three's last story.

Yates is back! He's been trying to find himself and sort out his mind after the crisis of faith (and reality) of his last story, and he's let his hair grow out and joined a group of spiritualists following a Tibetan monk, but something's off with them, and when he witnesses the others of his group conjuring a spider in the name of power, he gets Sarah-Jane to bring in the Doctor and investigate. She does (though we aren't sure why, as he was crazy when she met him and left soon after, so there's no reason for the friendship they seem to share, but whatever). And that's the first-ish episode. Almost all of the second ep is an extended car chase-- a who2-bessie-and a cop chase, then a who2-and-helicopter chase that escalates into a boat-and-hovercraft chase. Really, it just keeps going on. And the baddie disappears.

He reappears after sixteen hours of recaps in the foyer of the retreat, where he's witnessed by the sweet but really slow Tommy, and then other stuff happens, and Tommy buggers off for a while. There's spiders on Metabilis 3, there's the crystal the Doctor gave Jo for her wedding, sent back to him because the natives in the Amazon think it's cursed, there's a plot to get the crystal to the queen of the spiders that's thwarted by Tommy stealing it and then again by the Biggest Spider Ever wanting it for herself. And yet there's more! Sarah-Jane is captured by the spiders after winding up on Metabilis just as the queen spider shows up to stop a rebellion of the natives (which look mysteriously Arizonan in a desert that is not at all blue), which of course comes in handy for the master plan. There's a developmentally challenged man who gets 'cured' by the crystal and can suddenly read and think clearly, but doesn't know what any of it means. There's the first baddie, who gets to hang around and twitch and get angry, only to get zapped by force lightning and die at the end without accomplishing anything. There's a lot of Yates listening through doors and getting tied up and getting knocked out, and he smiles up at Sarah-Jane so sweetly when he comes through. There's the Doctor being sick and getting better, only to get scared, have to face his fears, and getting killed by the Metabilis crystal energies. There's a head monk who turns out to be a timelord who happens to have been the Doctor's teacher / guru in his youth, who conveniently reappears in time to jump-start the regeneration so the Doctor doesn't die entirely.

We get to see Spiders controlling people (and keep saying 'there's something on your back'!), and we meet some fun characters and get a little sliver of backstory on the Doctor. There's this last-hurrah feeling, waht with Jo's crystal and the nifty cars that we haven't seem much and the return of Yates, all of which are very Pertwee-era plot widgets.

And then there's no more Jon Pertwee. Right at the end, we get Tom Baker, and I'm just thrilled by that, but I'll miss 3. He was grumpy and arrogant and charming and ever so slightly mysogynistic and he always wanted to reverse the polarity and always did what was right, even if he didn't want to or knew it would lead to his sure death. Which it did. Thank god we've got that nifty little plot device that allows a new actor to take over!