DW 6x07 revisited.
Jun. 7th, 2011 11:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caz963My last post about the last ep of DW was more about all the unanswered questions that have been left hanging for three months rather than the episode itself, so now I've had a chance to rewatch it, I've got More Thoughts.
I know this will come off as just a tad (!) sarcastic, but I've become quite disillusioned with DW over the last couple of weeks. I keep holding out hope that SM will finally pull the rabbit out of the hat and blow me away, but I'm starting to resign myself to the fact that it's not gonna happen. Sure, there have been a few episodes that have impressed me a lot over the past series and a half (I loved TIA for example, although I was disappointed by DotM), but after this, the downer that was ACC and the Damp Squib that was last year's finale, my hopes are starting to fade :(
I thought A Good Man... was one of the most straighforward Moffat episodes ever - a fact for which I was profoundly thankful. You could see that it had had money thrown at it (insofar as the BBC is ever able to throw money at anything, but for all that, it still left me feeling pretty flat overall - just like last year's finale.
We were promised a "gamechanger". Well, yes, we've got a companion-with-a-baby, which hasn't been seen before on DW. That baby has Time Lord DNA and has been kidnapped with the intention of making it into a weapon against the Doctor. Yes, it's all new and is an interesting direction for the story to be taking. But there was no real "OMG!!" factor. Perhaps that comes from spending too much time online, I don't know, but as one reviewer said, it was so busy being, well, busy, they forgot to give it a plot. And I was distinctly underwhelmed.
I've been enjoying the show even though I don't love it the way I used to. But lately, I've started to find it really frustrating, so where I was initially very pissed off about the mid-season break, now, I'm sorta, "oh, well, three months to go. Wonder what'll be on next week instead?" And I think that part of that is because I'm almost certain that NONE of the questions that are still hanging out there (many of which I detailed in the post I linked to above, and many of which I'm sure I've forgotten!) won't be answered until episode 13. Don't get me wrong - I don't object to complexity or mystery, but the more complex the mystery, the more awesome the payoff needs to be - and after the Big Bang That Fell Flat, I'm not convinced S6 is going to deliver. Also, when you're playing a Long Game, I think you need to reward your audience occasionally. One could argue that we got a little reward on Saturday with River's true identity revealed - but that wasn't even a case of "one step forward, two steps back" - it was more like "one step forward, five-hundred-and-seven steps back"! It seems that at the moment, for every question that gets an answer, or partial answer, we get another fifty questions thrown at us.
And that's not at all gratifying. In fact, it's becoming somewhat painful!
So back to the episode itself. These are a really random bunch of thoughts and are in no particular order.
What was all the pre-publicity about the Doctor and Rory dashing across the universe raising an army? It was more like the A-Team (with the Judoon as Mr T). Or even Four Things... and a Lizard. And not only that, but a Lizard we hadn't even met before. The only one of the Doctor's little band of merry men we'd met before was Stark (he was also in the SJA, I think), oh, and the blue guy, an intergalactic Del Boy! So we get a random assortment of people we don't really know all that much about, and a few seconds on-screen for Hugh B and his beard of awesome.
I can't help feeling that the gay-married-marines and the alien-lesbian-victorian-detective were Moffat's arse-covering exercise; things he can point to when he's accused of making DW "too straight".
And... Headless Monks? I rather like the idea of the Church Militant in the future - but what was the point of them? A nod to a throwaway line in S5, and I'm sure they were meant to be all mysterious and scary - and perhaps they would have been were it not for the fact that the two that were "exposed" to the waiting masses looked like tied-up sacks of potatoes. Match them up with Mr Potato-Head Sontaran and you've got a set!
This week's cheesy set-piece comes to us courtesy of the Last Centurion - being all BAMF with a bunch of Cybermen while delivering the Doctor's "message". I like the cheesy :-)
But I didn't like the daft - "I'm angry - that's new." Er, hello?! Starwhales? Weeping Angels? And that's just him as Eleven.
And "the Doctor will rise higher than ever before". Er... I'm not trying to be thick here, but was that it? I thought "rising higher" meant something incredible, something more than the usual beating-of-unbeatable-odds that is the staple of Doctor Who, then and now.
And ... he falls further than ever before. Because he made a mistake? Another staple - the Doctor's been doing that since 1963; meets an unbeatable foe, fails to foil the plot and then has to come up with something daring and brilliant on the run using a kettle and a piece of string.
I kinda assumed that the Time Lord Victorious was a pretty low point for the Doctor - any lower than that, and he'd have turned into a REAL baddie. Maybe that's where we're heading.
River. Okay, so we know who she is now, but not, to paraphrase Ten, who she is to the Doctor. Assuming that what she told Rory is true, about having met the Doctor when she was a child (*sigh*. Another one? That's *ticks off fingers* - Nancy, Reinette, Amy, River and the awesomely named Lorna Bucket... has anyone started speculating on the fact that a bucket is a recepticle in which water can be held?) - it would seem that the Doctor doesn't manage to find baby!Pond.
This plotline strikes me as pretty cruel for what is still, in the UK, regarded and scheduled as a family show. Everything is pointing to the fact that the Doctor doesn't catch up with baby!Pond, and so Amy and Rory are going to be devastated; they've lost a baby - but have also met the adult version of their child who is older than they are, so THEY have been robbed of her childhood. (Speaking as a mum, that's a huge thing for me).
And then of course there's young!River herself, taken away from her parents at a very young age and raised by those who want to turn her into a weapon. I can't imagine it being an especially pleasant childhood. And those themes seem to be too dark for a show that has a very large proportion of children watching it.
Thing is though, that Moff seems to like happy endings. I'm not sure there is one in this case, but if there is, it'll have to be another massive cop-out, won't it?
I'm also rather occupied with the question of how River managed to know exactly when to turn up in that puff of sound-effect towards the end of the episode. I've posted this in a couple of comments, so apologies for the reptition, but I'm sure we're meant to assume that the River we see on her birthday is an older version of her than the one who arrives to give the Doctor his dressing down (and what's with that, btw? She spent most of SitL/FotD dissing Ten because he wasn't enough of a BAMF for her, but here..?) So, how did the "current" version of River know exactly when to arrive? If, as I also assume, the events we experience with River are the first and only time she experiences them, too, then how does she know? Moffat told us in SitL that the "no spoilers" rule is the Doctor's, so either she's broken it, or he has... or it's going to be completely handwaved because she needed to appear at that exact time because the plot decreed it.
Oh, I know, I could just stop watching and wait until whoever's next - but DW's a habit. I've (practically) always watched it, and it's a habit I'm not willing to kick just yet. That's the glass-half-full side of me talking; I keep expecting it to get better and make me care about it more. So far, Richard Curtis and Neil Gaiman are the only two who've managed to do that.
I thought the first ten minutes or so of set up were, in an odd way, both too slow and too fast. And that's odd, because a similar format worked really well in TPO last year - but perhaps that's partly the problem. And perhaps I'm talking through rose-tinted spectacles here (ouch!) but the whole premise of "let's round us up a posse!" would have been better handled by RTD who, whatever his faults, has an uncanny knack for being able to imbue even the most random, one-off character with just that, a character and, albeit in very broad strokes, gives us an idea of who they are in a very short space of time. YMMV on that one, of course.
I suppose that ultimately, it's the flashes of brilliance and sheer audacity of things like “Let’s Kill Hitler” that keep me hoping and coming back for more, though.
I'll be glad to see DW back in the autumn, but I won't be counting down the days.
I know this will come off as just a tad (!) sarcastic, but I've become quite disillusioned with DW over the last couple of weeks. I keep holding out hope that SM will finally pull the rabbit out of the hat and blow me away, but I'm starting to resign myself to the fact that it's not gonna happen. Sure, there have been a few episodes that have impressed me a lot over the past series and a half (I loved TIA for example, although I was disappointed by DotM), but after this, the downer that was ACC and the Damp Squib that was last year's finale, my hopes are starting to fade :(
I thought A Good Man... was one of the most straighforward Moffat episodes ever - a fact for which I was profoundly thankful. You could see that it had had money thrown at it (insofar as the BBC is ever able to throw money at anything, but for all that, it still left me feeling pretty flat overall - just like last year's finale.
We were promised a "gamechanger". Well, yes, we've got a companion-with-a-baby, which hasn't been seen before on DW. That baby has Time Lord DNA and has been kidnapped with the intention of making it into a weapon against the Doctor. Yes, it's all new and is an interesting direction for the story to be taking. But there was no real "OMG!!" factor. Perhaps that comes from spending too much time online, I don't know, but as one reviewer said, it was so busy being, well, busy, they forgot to give it a plot. And I was distinctly underwhelmed.
I've been enjoying the show even though I don't love it the way I used to. But lately, I've started to find it really frustrating, so where I was initially very pissed off about the mid-season break, now, I'm sorta, "oh, well, three months to go. Wonder what'll be on next week instead?" And I think that part of that is because I'm almost certain that NONE of the questions that are still hanging out there (many of which I detailed in the post I linked to above, and many of which I'm sure I've forgotten!) won't be answered until episode 13. Don't get me wrong - I don't object to complexity or mystery, but the more complex the mystery, the more awesome the payoff needs to be - and after the Big Bang That Fell Flat, I'm not convinced S6 is going to deliver. Also, when you're playing a Long Game, I think you need to reward your audience occasionally. One could argue that we got a little reward on Saturday with River's true identity revealed - but that wasn't even a case of "one step forward, two steps back" - it was more like "one step forward, five-hundred-and-seven steps back"! It seems that at the moment, for every question that gets an answer, or partial answer, we get another fifty questions thrown at us.
And that's not at all gratifying. In fact, it's becoming somewhat painful!
So back to the episode itself. These are a really random bunch of thoughts and are in no particular order.
What was all the pre-publicity about the Doctor and Rory dashing across the universe raising an army? It was more like the A-Team (with the Judoon as Mr T). Or even Four Things... and a Lizard. And not only that, but a Lizard we hadn't even met before. The only one of the Doctor's little band of merry men we'd met before was Stark (he was also in the SJA, I think), oh, and the blue guy, an intergalactic Del Boy! So we get a random assortment of people we don't really know all that much about, and a few seconds on-screen for Hugh B and his beard of awesome.
I can't help feeling that the gay-married-marines and the alien-lesbian-victorian-detective were Moffat's arse-covering exercise; things he can point to when he's accused of making DW "too straight".
And... Headless Monks? I rather like the idea of the Church Militant in the future - but what was the point of them? A nod to a throwaway line in S5, and I'm sure they were meant to be all mysterious and scary - and perhaps they would have been were it not for the fact that the two that were "exposed" to the waiting masses looked like tied-up sacks of potatoes. Match them up with Mr Potato-Head Sontaran and you've got a set!
This week's cheesy set-piece comes to us courtesy of the Last Centurion - being all BAMF with a bunch of Cybermen while delivering the Doctor's "message". I like the cheesy :-)
But I didn't like the daft - "I'm angry - that's new." Er, hello?! Starwhales? Weeping Angels? And that's just him as Eleven.
And "the Doctor will rise higher than ever before". Er... I'm not trying to be thick here, but was that it? I thought "rising higher" meant something incredible, something more than the usual beating-of-unbeatable-odds that is the staple of Doctor Who, then and now.
And ... he falls further than ever before. Because he made a mistake? Another staple - the Doctor's been doing that since 1963; meets an unbeatable foe, fails to foil the plot and then has to come up with something daring and brilliant on the run using a kettle and a piece of string.
I kinda assumed that the Time Lord Victorious was a pretty low point for the Doctor - any lower than that, and he'd have turned into a REAL baddie. Maybe that's where we're heading.
River. Okay, so we know who she is now, but not, to paraphrase Ten, who she is to the Doctor. Assuming that what she told Rory is true, about having met the Doctor when she was a child (*sigh*. Another one? That's *ticks off fingers* - Nancy, Reinette, Amy, River and the awesomely named Lorna Bucket... has anyone started speculating on the fact that a bucket is a recepticle in which water can be held?) - it would seem that the Doctor doesn't manage to find baby!Pond.
This plotline strikes me as pretty cruel for what is still, in the UK, regarded and scheduled as a family show. Everything is pointing to the fact that the Doctor doesn't catch up with baby!Pond, and so Amy and Rory are going to be devastated; they've lost a baby - but have also met the adult version of their child who is older than they are, so THEY have been robbed of her childhood. (Speaking as a mum, that's a huge thing for me).
And then of course there's young!River herself, taken away from her parents at a very young age and raised by those who want to turn her into a weapon. I can't imagine it being an especially pleasant childhood. And those themes seem to be too dark for a show that has a very large proportion of children watching it.
Thing is though, that Moff seems to like happy endings. I'm not sure there is one in this case, but if there is, it'll have to be another massive cop-out, won't it?
I'm also rather occupied with the question of how River managed to know exactly when to turn up in that puff of sound-effect towards the end of the episode. I've posted this in a couple of comments, so apologies for the reptition, but I'm sure we're meant to assume that the River we see on her birthday is an older version of her than the one who arrives to give the Doctor his dressing down (and what's with that, btw? She spent most of SitL/FotD dissing Ten because he wasn't enough of a BAMF for her, but here..?) So, how did the "current" version of River know exactly when to arrive? If, as I also assume, the events we experience with River are the first and only time she experiences them, too, then how does she know? Moffat told us in SitL that the "no spoilers" rule is the Doctor's, so either she's broken it, or he has... or it's going to be completely handwaved because she needed to appear at that exact time because the plot decreed it.
Oh, I know, I could just stop watching and wait until whoever's next - but DW's a habit. I've (practically) always watched it, and it's a habit I'm not willing to kick just yet. That's the glass-half-full side of me talking; I keep expecting it to get better and make me care about it more. So far, Richard Curtis and Neil Gaiman are the only two who've managed to do that.
I thought the first ten minutes or so of set up were, in an odd way, both too slow and too fast. And that's odd, because a similar format worked really well in TPO last year - but perhaps that's partly the problem. And perhaps I'm talking through rose-tinted spectacles here (ouch!) but the whole premise of "let's round us up a posse!" would have been better handled by RTD who, whatever his faults, has an uncanny knack for being able to imbue even the most random, one-off character with just that, a character and, albeit in very broad strokes, gives us an idea of who they are in a very short space of time. YMMV on that one, of course.
I suppose that ultimately, it's the flashes of brilliance and sheer audacity of things like “Let’s Kill Hitler” that keep me hoping and coming back for more, though.
I'll be glad to see DW back in the autumn, but I won't be counting down the days.
