Doctor Who: The End of Time (SPOILERS)
Dec. 26th, 2009 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blahflowersIt's Christmas so Russell T. Davies is going to write a Doctor Who special and it's going to be poo. The only satisfaction in this was that by now we all know that Doctor Who specials are always quite uniformly plopped from Satan's behind (all except The Runaway Bride) so at least this didn't come as a surprise. As it was we had a jumble of ideas thrown in together with little care and attention (did we really need the Ood?) and what sounds like a fairly big plot point about the Time Lords chucked in to Confidential as though it's no big thing.
What we had yesterday was quite large dollops of filler pie. No doubt whatever story it is RTD wants to tell (perhaps retconning these Time Lords as being what Dalek Caan went in to the Time Vortex meaning to save but accidentally letting out a Dalek fleet at the same time) is more than an hour long, but not much, so we get June Whitfield pinching the Doctor's bum and The Master laughing more than the annoying bald bloke from Derek Jarman's Jubilee. Russell talked about how there's got to be moments of levity before the gloom of the end of the Doctor, but he's been saying this since last Christmas. Get on with it!
That said, there were some nice moments. The scene with the Doctor and Wilf in the cafe is wonderful, for a moment David Tennant seems older than Bernard Cribbins as each of the nine hundred years of his character's life but also however many the Tenth Doctor has lived since his last regeneration. And it's a nice point of view on regeneration, even though something walks away afterwards for this Doctor it is still as final a death as the one that Wilf will some day face. And I did get a little excited when Timothy Dalton turned up (I've been fairly succesful in avoiding spoilers for this), even more so when I realised he was spitting and gobbing in front of a load of Time Lord costumes.
But The Master with his energy blasts and his bouncy legs and his eating people whole? What a sad diminuation of the character, it's like at his end RTD decides to channel the worst excesses of the John Nathan-Turner era. For all that fannying about with the Cult of Saxon and his wife and what-have-you at the start it all seems rather unnecessary and over-complicated and timewasting. And so presumably the Doctor will now have to fight the Master on a rain-soaked street of the city will all the other Master's look on until the Master can absorb Neo and so balance out the free-will equation and... ugh.
And if seeing alien/weird shenanigans is enough to make Donna start remembering her adventures with the Doctor isn't that another black mark for the Doctor in dumping her on a planet which gets invaded by aliens every other week?
I'd like to believe that the reason Wilf finds the Doctor so easily is because he's another Time Lord in a human body, the stuff with the mysterious woman on telly did seem to infer quite heavily towards him being someone who avoided fighting or at least killing in the Time War. I'd like to hope that the woman is either Susan or Romana but it seems unlikely, maybe she's the spirit of the TARDIS? And what exactly are these Time Lords going to do (presumably it'll be their fault) that might cause the end of time?
What we had yesterday was quite large dollops of filler pie. No doubt whatever story it is RTD wants to tell (perhaps retconning these Time Lords as being what Dalek Caan went in to the Time Vortex meaning to save but accidentally letting out a Dalek fleet at the same time) is more than an hour long, but not much, so we get June Whitfield pinching the Doctor's bum and The Master laughing more than the annoying bald bloke from Derek Jarman's Jubilee. Russell talked about how there's got to be moments of levity before the gloom of the end of the Doctor, but he's been saying this since last Christmas. Get on with it!
That said, there were some nice moments. The scene with the Doctor and Wilf in the cafe is wonderful, for a moment David Tennant seems older than Bernard Cribbins as each of the nine hundred years of his character's life but also however many the Tenth Doctor has lived since his last regeneration. And it's a nice point of view on regeneration, even though something walks away afterwards for this Doctor it is still as final a death as the one that Wilf will some day face. And I did get a little excited when Timothy Dalton turned up (I've been fairly succesful in avoiding spoilers for this), even more so when I realised he was spitting and gobbing in front of a load of Time Lord costumes.
But The Master with his energy blasts and his bouncy legs and his eating people whole? What a sad diminuation of the character, it's like at his end RTD decides to channel the worst excesses of the John Nathan-Turner era. For all that fannying about with the Cult of Saxon and his wife and what-have-you at the start it all seems rather unnecessary and over-complicated and timewasting. And so presumably the Doctor will now have to fight the Master on a rain-soaked street of the city will all the other Master's look on until the Master can absorb Neo and so balance out the free-will equation and... ugh.
And if seeing alien/weird shenanigans is enough to make Donna start remembering her adventures with the Doctor isn't that another black mark for the Doctor in dumping her on a planet which gets invaded by aliens every other week?
I'd like to believe that the reason Wilf finds the Doctor so easily is because he's another Time Lord in a human body, the stuff with the mysterious woman on telly did seem to infer quite heavily towards him being someone who avoided fighting or at least killing in the Time War. I'd like to hope that the woman is either Susan or Romana but it seems unlikely, maybe she's the spirit of the TARDIS? And what exactly are these Time Lords going to do (presumably it'll be their fault) that might cause the end of time?
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Date: 2009-12-26 06:40 pm (UTC)2. I have to say - and I said this at length yesterday and bored the shit out of my friend - that I don't even think that Davies is thinking far enough ahead that anyone can predict what might be the case based on continuity or logic. The main motivations are apparently to make things MORE AWESOME AND EPICER THAN THE LAST TIME; after you've thought of a fate to be prevented that's worse than the last one ("complete extinction of time" is pretty much as far as you can go there) and tied together a load of random vague ideas that you've had for awesome things, you bash down the rough edges with a hammer and hand it over to the cast to try to make it believable by force of acting.
If Wilf turns out to be a timelord I'm firebombing something.