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.

nu who redux: fires of pompeii and planet of the ood

You know, one of the best things about rewatching a whole season of the wonderfulness that is Nu Who, is you can see how they start the threads really early. I mean, right here in Fires, we've got 'she's returning' and we've got 'there's something on your back' and we've got warnings that the end is near, there's a missing planet, they mention the Medusa Cascade. And we've got the new companion, though at this time, she wasn't even in the running, because my-future-husband hadn't announced he was leaving yet.

This was a fun episode. This whole season is more fun than poor Marfa's previous season. The Doctor takes Donna to Rome... only his aim is off again, and it's Pompeii, about twelve hours before the word Volcano is invented. I love the translation discussion-- and I love that if they actually speak in the language, the Tardis gets glitchy, and they sound Welsh to the listeners (and I think they should play with the idea that the Tardis translates-- sometimes inconsistently-- more often. Think how much fun it would be if the Doctor suddenly isn't speaking English because even though he can, he relies on the Tardis to translate whatever the hell Gallifreyan sounds like into English when he's there...).

I digress. Poor Donna gets pushed into the captured-companion role, but she fights all the way and the Doctor saves her, of course. What I really like about this ep is how Donna fights everything-- the Doctor says it's a Fixed Point, there's nothing he can do about it, and Donna disagrees, keeps disagreeing until they find an excuse for something to be done, and then disagrees more when he's gone all hard-hearted and wants to just leave. But she knows, as we know, that the Doctor isn't like that, and she reminds him of who he is just enough to make a little bit of difference. Which is what the Doctor is all about.

I don't know what's up with the caption on this picture. The Beeb is weird sometimes.

So here we go on Donna's first off-planet adventure. She's so excited that we can hardly understand what she's saying-- and then it's a glacier world with a secret slave trade. I feel bad that she's in the Whoverse after everything has gone to darkness and sadness, but I'm glad it's her, because she fights and she finds the silver lining and she tries to change things. Good on her.

The Ood are... problematic. They're creepy in the face, but we're supposed to see them as something ordinary and not at all gross. They live to serve, but that's because we lobotomized them. They're supposed to be harmless, but both times we saw them, they were being mentally manipulated by stronger minds... But they're also really cool. They share consciousness and sing to eachother across the galaxies. They're not really individuals, I'd guess, though it isn't explicitly said so-- the Ood Brain would be the actual entity, and they are it's eyes and ears and hands in the universe. And that's cool. 

And maybe their low level telepathy translates into something of psychicness-- they are the first to bring up the Doctor's song ending, and it's not the last time we hear it. H thinks Ood Sigma will be a big part of 10's Final Story, since they keep saying everyone is coming back, and I think maybe that's true. There's alot of weight on that Ood's words in this ep.

I like that Donna is adapting quickly; her first sight of an alien is an Ood lying bleeding in the snow, and she gets over it very quickly. She refuses to treat them like slaves, and she even works to actively free them. And she reminds the Doctor that this is what he does. Because after all the sadness and screaming of the last series, he needs it. Maybe that's why he keeps getting younger? It's to counteract the natural hardening and darkening of a very old soul? But at this rate, Doctor 12 will be, like, sixteen, and Doctor 13 will be in second grade...

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.

Technorati Tags: nu who,doctor ten,special,planet of the dead,series 4.5

nu who redo: utopia, sound of drums, last of the timelords, time crash

These last three episodes nearly save the season for me. I've mellowed on it some since the first time around, and I don't think it's as bad as I once interpreted it, but it's still laced through with these emotional tones that I find uncomfortable, and it's so unhappy, so thwarted and sort of dark-verging-on-bitter... But these last episodes are great. Silly, way over done in that climax, but overall, very likable.

Utopia brings us Chantho and the return of Captain Jack Harkness, and all the bouncy fun of him intereacting with the Doctor and the Doctor knowing all his tricks. Love the running joke about Jack introducing himself, the Doctor shooting him down, and everyone not minding. And it brings us Professor Yana, who's a genius and a weirdo and a sweet absentminded professor-- and how utterly different he is as soon as he opens that watch. And that poor doomed hope of saving the human race from the end of the Universe (and how horrible would it be to be witnessing the last moments of the whole Universe?). We finally get to see the Doctor dealing with what happened to Jack and admitting that Rose isn't just hidden, she's gone and he can't see her again. Big news. Marfa doesn't get to do much, but the sweetest scene in the episode is her's-- when she gets Chantho to talk without saying 'chan' and 'tho'.

And the Sound of Drums / Last of the Timelords brings us the Sexy Master who is just as overbearing, but way more entertainingly insane than the old one. He's the dark image of the Doctor-- his companion gets messed up by traveling with him, he gets very involved with her (they're making out all over the place, her marries her, and he beats her), he enslaves Marfa's family, he kills people left and right, he humiliates the Doctor... He's like when MyFutureHusbandDavidTennant took over the role-- manic, bouncy, fast-talking, fresh, twitchy-- but all warped in the direction of badness, evilness. And yet, there's still this little bit that makes him almost likable, almost three dimensional-- he wants the drumming to stop, and wants the Doctor to make sense of it, to be as messed up as he is; he's almost sweet to Lucy when he isn't driving her insane, pulling the chair out for her before he sits down himself, comforting her when she freaks out that someone has figured out their plan...

Poor Doctor. What a way to cap a bad year-- that's actually several bad years. He traveled with Marfa, but our count, somewhere around a minimum of three years experienced time, and we just saw the highlights, all of which were rough. And then here comes the end of that phase of his life, and he has to ask Marfa to Walk The Earth while her family is beaten and enslaved, he has to take the Master's mistreatment for a year while he works on his plan, he has to watch the world being taken down, the Toclaphane proving to be the people he tried to save, his Tardis being cannibalized and used to warp reality... It's awful. And then the whole world believes in him and he's a god for a moment, all be it one that's made so by tapping into a technological feedback loop, and then he's so entirely the Doctor. There's no vengance there. For once-- and maybe he finally worked through that angry and destructive phase. He forgives him. He takes responsibility for keeping the Universe safe from him, and seems to think maybe he can help the Master-- which is a nice nod to their history: he was never one to kill or damage the Master, only to stop him when he needs stopping and maybe to find a way to contain him, to help him. 

But the Master won't be contained, and he's entirely himself, too-- better to die once and for all then be contained by the Doctor, who he knows is better than him, and who he hates because they're opposites. One last wound for the Doctor.

So he gets a Vader death, though I don't know if he deserves it, and then there's that last shot where a lady's hand with red nails claims his ring. So there's an out if they want him back, though hopefully they won't overuse him like they did in the past and the daleks have been used in this series.

Other points:

- The Doctor eats. I find this weird because he never is shown eating in the new series, though he always was in the old one, and I'd kinda decided that he doesn't eat and doesn't sleep because he's an alien who's only pretending to be like a person and who gets sustenance some other way. I suppose it could still be that, and eating and sleeping are just human affectations he's taken on as part of his obsession with Earth... which could be why broken-hearted season 3 Doctor doesn't do either until this episode: he's not trying to seem human these days...

- Jack is the Face of Boe? It would make everything make sense, but it's a silly way to do that. 

- Torchwood in the Himalyas? Really? You couldn't think of something better than that? ::sigh::

And then there was Timecrash! With the return of Peter Davidson, who is lovely. My second favorite Doctor before 10, now about tied with 4, who was my previous fav. It's a nice little antidote to the sadness of the season right before it, and it's fun. Joky. Written by the Moff, who so far has written all the best episodes. Well, most of them. And it plays with the Doctor Who mythos without being mean and while still being a good little episode-- the Doctor gets to be self-aware on both sides of the rift, there's sciencing the fiction, there's averted disaster, and it's lovely. I know the sadness will continue into Voyage of the Damned, but I also know that Series 4 is lighter and brighter and more fun, and this little moment of relaxed joyfulness in being the Doctor is enough to get me through.