Menu Close

Month: September 2015

Something Familiar

2 Comments

Review of The Witch’s Familiar
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

Well, it wasn’t godawful.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2015 BBC

In fact, it may well be the best second half of a Moffat two-parter I’ve yet seen (though the bar isn’t set very high, in my opinion). That’s not to say it was anywhere near flawless, but I did find plenty to enjoy.

The episode begins by resolving the we-didn’t-believe-it-anyway deaths of Missy and Clara and giving an actual explanation for the method of their escape (and Missy’s in Death in Heaven). It struck me as odd that Missy would need Clara to suss out why the Doctor always survives. Does Missy already know the answer or not? If she does, why walk Clara through it just to ask the follow-up question (“What happens if the Doctor assumes he’s going to die?”)? The only reason to do so is to bring the audience along (which is not good storytelling).

If Missy doesn’t know why the Doctor survives, then she was dead wrong when she told Clara “you’re the dog” in the relationship. Despite knowing him for millennia, Missy still needs a human who’s only traveled with him recently, on and off for a couple of years, to figure out the Doctor for her? Neither of those interpretations makes much sense, and the scene thus left me vaguely dissatisfied.

Read more →

Same Old Tricks

6 Comments

Review of The Magician’s Apprentice
Warning: This review contains episode-specific spoilers and wild speculation about future episodes.

I think most fans can agree by now that, like him or not, Moffat has a pretty distinctive style. When you go into a Moffat episode, you have certain expectations. No one should be surprised, then, to discover that in the Series Nine opener, he’s up to his same old tricks.


Source – bbc.co.uk – © 2015 BBC

The first, and perhaps most notable, of these tricks is giving us an (at least mostly) enjoyable Part One in a two-part story. Moffat excels at set-up, giving rich scenes and hints at things to come that get our fannish hearts pumping with that lifeblood of our breed, speculation. Time will tell how it all pans out, but experience suggests that the conclusion of the tale is unlikely to live up to the promise of its beginnings.

One thing we know Moffat can do well, though, is creating creepy “monsters” (at least the first time he uses them). The opening scene on the unknown battlefield provides that in spades with the “hand mines,” even though I’m still trying to decide whether I think they’re more or less frightening after finally seeing one tripped. The mix of this advanced weaponry with more archaic kinds (biplanes, bow and arrow) gives us—in retrospect—visual clues to go with the spoken ones about which war it is (especially for those viewers familiar with Tom Baker’s run). Yet, it’s still a bombshell when the boy’s identity is revealed and the opening credits roll.

Read more →

Confession #96: I’m Not Listening

With a brand new series nearly upon us, teaser trailers, images, and episode titles for Series Nine are everywhere. If one spends any time at all online, they’re easy to find, and difficult-to-impossible to avoid. I’m not a complete spoiler-phobe (which is good, because I wouldn’t be able to use the Internet if I were), but I do like to maintain a certain level of surprise going into a new season. It makes me feel like a stick in the mud, but with all the publicity on social media (which is where most of my Internet experience happens), I’ve gotten to the stage where I pretty much stick my fingers in my ears and shout, “LA LA LA!” to keep from learning things ahead of time.

I do watch trailers put out by the production team—that’s part of the show, in my opinion—and there is some news that I could only miss if I were oblivious to other fans online (e.g., return or casting of certain characters/actors). For the most part, though, I ignore the hype: I don’t go look at the behind-the-scenes, on-set photos that the BBC spams out; I’ve only watched two trailers once each (I don’t even know if that’s all of them or if there are more); and I have not read the titles of any of the episodes beyond the first two (which were plastered all over the prologue video), though I mistakenly glanced at a couple that I didn’t scroll past fast enough in my Twitter feed. (By the way, I’d like to offer hearty thanks to the others in the FB groups of which I am a member for only linking to the list, rather than posting it outright.)

Although I recognize that there are those out there who like to skip to the last page first to find out whodunnit when they’re reading a mystery, or who need to read the ending of their book after the first chapter or two to learn whether or not their favorite character survived the slaughter, I do not actually understand such people—not at a gut level. I’ll to do the whole “live and let live” schtick with someone who wants to know everything possible ahead of time, but the idea that it’s fun to learn every twist before even knowing the story just baffles me.

Read more →

Confession #95: I Like Odd Correlations

A couple of years ago, when the fiftieth anniversary rolled around, we were marveling at the fact that Remembrance of the Daleks was as far behind us as An Unearthly Child was behind Remembrance. Now Survival, which marked the end of the original run of the series, is as separated from the present as it was from the show’s beginnings (give or take a couple months). Wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey indeed.

This kind of temporal comparison fascinates me (something I realized when a different pop cultural correlation occurred to me the other day: Star Wars (the third top-grossing film of all time) came out thirty-eight years ago; Gone With the Wind (all-time top-grossing film) came out thirty-eight years before Star Wars). One can come up with all sorts of interesting pairings—whatever time frame you can think of can yield a new perspective.

For example, nearly fifty-two years down the line from An Unearthly Child, the effects and staging of the episode look positively archaic. At the time, though, it was stretching the medium in new ways. And, after all, it was technological leaps and bounds beyond the cinema of fifty-two years before. In that year (1911), feature films were still a brand new phenomenon. The Italian silent film L’Inferno (The Inferno, from Dante), released in 1911, was perhaps the third or fourth feature film worldwide, and became (Wikipedia tells me) what some consider the first blockbuster.

Read more →

Confession #94: I Won’t Evangelize

1 Comment

I’m going a bit off the beaten path from my usual approach with my confession this week. What I have to say probably counts as an Unpopular Opinion, and it may shock some of you, so ready your burning brands and pitchforks. Despite what I’ve implied plenty of times before, Doctor Who isn’t for everyone.

You heard me. Some people simply shouldn’t be brought into the fold—shouldn’t even try. “What?” I hear you say. “That’s ridiculous! Our Show has something for everyone!” Well, yes; there’s an awful lot of variety in the ~250 televised stories, never mind the vast additional oeuvre of books, audios, comics, and so on. But I argue that there are still some people for whom even this extensive selection is not enough in which to find a truly enjoyable story.

Heresy, I know.

Yet Doctor Who works best for those of us willing to overlook—or better yet, embrace—the silly or way-out-there-unbelievable to find something deeper inside. It may be a personal lesson we embrace, teaching us about tolerance or personal responsibility or the value of vulnerability. Perhaps it’s a vision of how life on Earth could be, good or bad (usually, but not always, based on how some alien culture works). Or maybe it’s just a thrilling adventure that lights a spark of joy and wonder.

Read more →