Menu Close

Month: November 2013

Nu-View #15: Reliving “Everybody Lives!”

The Empty Child and The Doctor Dances (Series One, Eps. 9-10; 2005)
Viewed 19 Nov 2013

Doctor/Companion: Nine, Rose Tyler
Stars: Christopher Eccleston, Billie Piper
Preceding Story: Father’s Day (Nine, Rose)
Succeeding Story: Boom Town (Nine, Rose)

After seven months’ hiatus (yes, I know—dirty word), the Ladies are finally back together to watch the Ninth Doctor again. They began the evening in high spirits. “I love coming back to this season; it’s what I fell in love with,” jA declared, and jO and I gave knowing nods.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2005 BBC

Speaking of things we love, jA needed her memory jogged. “Is this where Jack comes in?”

“Oh, yeah,” came jO’s appreciative affirmation.

After that, there are surprisingly few comments; mostly we’re all more interested in watching the action unfold. Now and again, though, something will trigger a comment.

For instance, when the Doctor explains his consternation to Nancy (“It’s not a real phone; it’s not connected.”), jE quickly adds, “Neither am I.” Or when Nancy and her little band of kids settles down to someone else’s dinner, jA observes, “That’s a lot of place settings for a family of, like, four…”

Mostly, I keep my thoughts to myself, not wanting to interrupt the others’ enjoyment of the show. I can’t help thinking, though, what a minx Rose is, or how Moffat won a writers’ bet by working “Chula” into one of his scripts, or how full of British patriotism this episode it (“a mouse in front of a lion”). And even though the CG is already pretty dated, eight years down the road, Dr. Constantine’s transformation is still utterly horrifying. That’s body horror at its best.

Read more →

Retcon of the Doctor

10 Comments

Review of The Day of the Doctor
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I said recently that I could forgive Moffat almost anything about this anniversary special; I knew not everything on my personal wishlist would make the cut. And as it turned out, plenty I’d have liked to see happen didn’t. Overall, though, there wasn’t much to forgive.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

From the get-go, there were plenty of nods to the past. Starting with the original opening credits—down to the policeman strolling by Totter’s Lane—certainly set the right tone. I could go on for pages listing all those little moments, but I’m sure someone else will write up a definitive list you can find, if that’s your cup of tea. I’ll just say that I personally loved the reference to the UNIT dating controversy and one of the Brigadier’s reactions to the events of The Three Doctors (“Codename: Cromer”—and I really do recommend watching that tenth anniversary special if you’ve not seen it.)

So much happened in these seventy-five minutes that it could be a little difficult to wrap one’s brain around it all on a single viewing; I agree with others who have commented that it’s all clearer the second time around. The things I liked the first time, I still liked, and the things I didn’t… well, they didn’t irritate me quite so much when I knew they were coming.

The entire Zygon gambit felt secondary—and honestly, I quite think it was there simply as a way for the meeting of these three Doctors not to be boring as all get-out—but made surprising sense by the end. It was at least self-consistent, which is more than I can say for some episodes. The entire idea of the Zygons is great, too; they’re a well-loved adversary that was long overdue a return. As executed, they were proper scary, even if the change from human back to Zygon form was too CGI to be believable. At least it was gross.

Read more →

Best “Night” of My Life

6 Comments

It may be an exaggeration, but saying that “Night of the Doctor” is the best thing Doctor Who has produced in years isn’t far off the truth. This seven-minute minisode has the online world of Who fandom in a tizzy, and rightly so. Before I go on, just watch it yourself:

 

There was only one thing I really wanted out of the 50th anniversary episode, and while I now know I won’t get it in the actual special, I’ve received it here. I couldn’t be happier. Well, I could, but not bloody much! They even managed to work in an explanation for the awful new glow-y regeneration mechanism. Now that’s good ret-con.

Thank you, Mr. Moffat!

Read more →

More Relatable Than Ever?

Review of The Doctors Revisited – Tenth Doctor

It still feels really weird to me to think of David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor as an “old” or “past” Doctor. Since it was his episodes that cemented my fandom, and I don’t think of myself as having been a fan for very long, even though it’s been five years now, at a gut level I can’t help but think of them as quite recent. Yet it’s been nearly four years since Tennant’s last appearance. So it was with a strange combination of “walk down memory lane” and “didn’t we just get these episodes?” that I watched as BBC America Revisited my Doctor.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2013 BBC

Whether it’s because this Doctor isn’t yet very far removed, or some other reason, the list of interviewees in this episode is longer than any other: Doctor actors David Tennant and Peter Davison; Companion actors Freema Agyeman, Noel Clarke, and John Barrowman; Companion family member actors Camille Coduri, Bernard Cribbins, and Jacqueline King; supporting character actors David Morrissey, Dan Starkey, and Adam Garcia; writers Neil Gaiman and Tom McRae; and producers Marcus Wilson and Steven Moffat. All had glowing things (as always) to say about this particular Regeneration, and how he differed from all who came before.

The Tenth Doctor was a starkly different man from the Ninth. Less someone suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, he had an easier manner—like someone you’d know, it’s pointed out—and was someone the audience could relate to, in terms of both fashion sense and mode of speech. Yet the darkness was still just under the surface. He doesn’t cut his enemies much slack (“no second chances”), nor the friends who have disappointed him. As Tennant himself put it, “He can destroy a government by whispering in someone’s ear. That’s the essence of the Doctor. That sums him up.”

Read more →

Retro-View #14: Taken in Stride

Earthshock (Story #122, 1982)
Viewed 22 Oct 2013

Doctor/Companion: Five, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan Jovanka
Stars: Peter Davison, Matthew Waterhouse, Sarah Sutton, Janet Fielding
Preceding Story: Black Orchid (Four, Adric, Nyssa, Tegan)
Succeeding Story: Time-Flight (Five, Nyssa, Tegan)

It’s been four months since G and I last sat down together to watch Doctor Who. A lot has happened both in our daily lives and in the life of the show. In our flurry of catching up, the latter got lost; I never did tell her about the amazing episode recovery announced earlier this month. I did, however, manage to explain a little bit about the Cybermen.

One of the many reasons I chose this particular serial to screen for G next is that our methodology—viewing introductory and final stories for every Doctor, with one or two “representative” stories in between—has meant that she’s missed out on the Doctor’s epic struggles with some of his most iconic foes. She only met the Daleks a few sessions ago in Genesis, and until now, she’d never come across the Cybermen. So it was predictable that the “big reveal” at the end of Part One—when it turns out the Cybermen are behind it all—didn’t get much of a reaction: “Okay, now we’re to the silver guys.”

You see, since the Cybermen are all over the DVD menu, she’d seen them ahead of time. I’d had to explain who they were, and that the Doctor had come across them often before (though it was quick). So her reaction was completely unlike any fan who watched it at the time (“Cybermen! They haven’t been seen for years!”) or even a post-Hiatus fan otherwise unfamiliar with pre-Hiatus stories watching this one without spoilers (“Hey, Cybermen! I guess the Doctor did say that one was an ‘old friend’…”). In fact, I had to remind her that these were, in fact, the Big Bad; she’d been hoping for some sort of pyramid scheme in which we’d keep finding another kind of mechanical creature behind the last, as the Cybermen had been behind the androids in Part One.

Read more →