
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
review: the end of time, parts 1 and 2

Thursday, July 16, 2009
classic who: the hand of fear

Monday, April 13, 2009
nu who: planet of the dead
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
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!