janeway216 v13.0 / hermione granger

[Doctor Who] 6.13 "The Wedding of River Song"

janeway216 — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 08:19:03 GMT

So out of all the guesses I made and the speculation I did, the thing I am proudest of having gotten right is this:

And [River] and the Doctor are basically married and that basically makes Amy and Rory the Doctor's mother- and father-in-law and oh I bet Moffat just did all this because there's a joke about traveling through all of time and space with your mother-in-law in the backseat at the bottom of this.

I think my final Things I Got Right tally is at five: there were two timelines (albeit not really how I was predicting), the baby was half-human/half-Time Lord, Ashley the Tiny Time Lady was River, the mother-in-law joke, and that the question is "Doctor Who". Well, it's an improvement on how I did last year.

As far as the episode itself, I am very . . . I am very . . . I'll have to get back to you on that one. Was it the worst season finale for New Who? No, "Last of the Time Lords" and "Journey's End" are in a battle to the death for that honor. Nor was it the best: my heart belongs to "The Big Bang" there, although nothing about that episode makes a damn bit of sense.

Mostly, the issues I had with it are the same issues sache and I have been discussing all season: large bits of it felt like they were trying to be clever for the sake of being clever, and the ickiness around River's character. I thought the device of having the first twenty minutes of the episode be a story the Doctor was telling Winston Churchill was a bit too precious. It could have been straight action as easily as it was a flashback, and having it be straight action might have ameliorated some of the problem of the episode seeming like it was two-thirds exposition one-third action. Why was it a flashback? So Moffat could be clever and play with narrative structure, I guess.

And then of course there's River. I don't even . . . I can't even summon up the energy to be indignant about it. Charlie Jane over at io9 is nicely outraged by it [it's the section titled "The Downfall of River Song"], so go read her review if you haven't already, because pretty much that's where I am with this. River had so much potential to be this awesome recurring character whose story plays out over years (what can I say, I'm an optimist and I keep hoping for a Doctor who will stay as long as Tom Baker did) and instead, in one season she goes from badass independent archaeologist with a dark secret and a mysterious history with the Doctor to crazy brainwashed psychopathic kidnapping victim to lovesick weepy schoolgirl who basically emotionally blackmails the Doctor into marrying her to shut her up. On the flip side of that, she comes up with her own plan to save the Doctor, which would be pretty cool and awesome and independent, except that the episode goes out of its way to make her look stupid for doing it. Silly girl! Your plan is getting in the way of the Doctor's plan! Stop interfering! Geez.

Plus, at this point in River's life, she doesn't even know the Doctor except through her research and what Madam Kovarian has told her. She's in love with a fantasy but proclaims that no one loves the Doctor like she does and she will suffer more than everyone else in the universe if he dies. It's creepy.

I'm also kind of icked by the whole wedding thing. Not to descend into total neckbearded "the Doctor is asexual! He doesn't have romantic feelings!" territory, because clearly the Doctor does have romantic feelings and I've even written some quasi-shippy fic in the past, but to me that was always one of the defining things about the Doctor: he may feel, but he doesn't get involved. Marriage? That's kind of the definition of "involvement". We've never seen him initiate any sort of affectionate gestures towards River (it's all come from her previously) and considering the aforementioned creepiness with River . . . I feel like I need to wash my brain off.

Quicker thoughts:
- I appreciated seeing the scene where Amy unloads on Madam Kovarian. In the end, it's not the scene I would have preferred, but in a season that has kind of forgotten to give Amy any character development, it was good to see her react to something and show that really, no matter how she pretends, she is really not okay with the fact that her daughter was kidnapped.
- Theory: I wanted a big dramatic moment where Amy argues with the Doctor as a proxy for the real villains, because it would hurt more. sache pointed to Madam Kovarian as the real villain, and indeed Moffat has Amy go for Kovarian. So does that make sache the Moff and me Rusty?
- I guess the one point of relief was that it doesn't appear River is going to be the main companion next season. I can't say it's guaranteed, but Alex Kingston has been cast in another show and the Doctor was not like "YES PLEASE COME WITH ME RIVER" so I'm tentatively hopeful. I do hope the Doctor picks up a companion next season though. One-off no-companion episodes are all right ("Midnight"!) but I get bored watching the Look How Kooky And Alien The Doctor Is Show. The show works better with more people to bounce lines off of.
- Man was the greenscreen unutterably shit during this episode. The scenes with the Doctor and River on the shores of Lake Silencio were probably the worst offenders, but the scene on top of the pyramid was none too hot either.

And for the final counts:

Hat count: 2! If you count Rory's beret, and I say you do because I counted a Peg Doll's hat earlier in the season. None as cool as the fez though. The Stetson lived, why not bring back the fez?
Rory deaths: Called out by the Silence! Does that count as another thing I got right?
Amy: The Doctor's mother-in-law!

~~Next week~~ Christmas: Something about an old house and a widow with kids and the Doctor and well, we'll see.

[Doctor Who] 6.12 "Closing Time"

janeway216 — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 06:57:30 GMT

I am going to try very hard not to crack any Semisonic-related jokes.

Once again I find myself without much to say about the episode. I thought it was a solid meh, to be honest. It wasn't as funny as Roberts wanted it to be. Maybe I'm just a grump, but it's always weird to me when the Doctor makes pop-culture references -- "I've got an app for that"? Really? Though I did mostly like the Doctor's emotional arc and how nicely quiet this farewell tour was. No fucking Ood, no stumbling in the snow, no creepy trips to perv on your favoritest human, just a . . . oh wait. Okay, so he still made a creepy trip to perv on his favoritest human but there weren't any Ood so I'm calling it a win.

I'm a wee bit disappointed Amy's post-Doctor career is as . . . a model. I mean, I get that it's a gag on the fact that Karen Gillan was a model before going into acting, but brave, strong, smart Amy, Amy who built her own sonic screwdriver and reprogrammed robots and survived on her own for thirty-six years, has no further worth to society beyond being decorative? Boy isn't that a fun message to send. Yes, girls, if you're plucky enough you can travel through all of space and time with a nine-hundred-year-old alien but it's your looks that count when you come back to Earth! I guess it's a step above getting dumped somewhere so you can get married (which was the fate of a depressing number of previous female companions) but the previous few companions wound up in Torchwood, in alt-Torchwood, in UNIT, as an alien bounty hunter and as the best damn temp that ever temped her way across London, and Amy's a model?

I wonder if they're actually going to keep the 200 year gap going, or if the 200 years the Doctor spent bumming around the universe are going to be wiped out in whatever magical reset button Moffat comes up with to explain away the fact that River shot the Doctor and then she and Amy and Rory burned his body. On the one hand, it leaves a beautiful gap for ficcers, but on the other hand this is a show that wasn't able to remember it was running a year ahead of real time for the first couple seasons. One supposes the Doctor spent a fair bit of time with River in the gap and if he did, ow, the pretzel loops it makes of River's personal timeline give me a headache. Also, the Doctor is way more forgiving than I am to go hang out with a woman he knows is in jail for killing him. Oh man. I think I just popped a blood vessel in my brain thinking about that.

Specs count: BRING BACK THE SPECS
Hat count: 1, but it's a repeat, or rather the one we saw in "The Impossible Astronaut" was a repeat
Rory deaths: The Doctor has decided to have mercy
Amy: A model!

Next week: That episode is going to have to run like a hamster on meth to plow through everything it needs to in 45 minutes.

[Doctor Who] 6.10 "The Girl Who Waited" / 6.11 "The God Complex"

janeway216 — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 02:20:52 GMT

6.10 "The Girl Who Waited"

I loved 99% of this episode. The visuals, the directing, the cinematography, Karen Gillan, adored it. The one thing I didn't like, though, is that ultimately Older Amy chose to help herself because of a boy. It grinds my gears that in the end, it was Rory -- not, mind you, love or devotion, but specifically Rory -- that motivated her to sacrifice her timeline to save Younger Amy. I understand that the point of the episode was to explore Amy and Rory's relationship, which is why Amy's motivation couldn't have been "because this life sucks and I want a do-over" or "because the Doctor fucked up and it needs to be fixed." What bothers me is that it wasn't "because I love Rory", it was "because Rory loves me." I'm sure if you're not me, it was beautiful and sweet but frankly, on this show, I'm tired of seeing the women sacrifice everything for the menfolk. Well, at least Rory's been remarkably good about sacrificing in return for Amy.

Also, the counts:

Specs count: SPECS! SPECCCCCCCCCS!!! FORGET HATS EVERYTHING IS BETTER WITH SPECS!
Rory deaths: He's on a roll!
Amy: Old!

Next week: ↓

6.11 "The God Complex"

Wow. I liked that one. Didn't really love it, mostly because of yet another IT'S A SPACESHIP!!! reveal in the third act, but the emotional arc really worked for me. I liked how many layers there were to the Doctor's decision to leave Amy and Rory on Earth -- he wants to protect Amy like he promised Rory he would do; he recognizes that both he and she need to grow up and live real life instead of the fantasy of the Raggedy Man and the Girl Who Waited; he's being his usual autocratic self and fixing the universe the way he wants it; he's being immature and running away from the consequences of breaking both Amy and Rory's faith in him; he's setting up for the series finale cause that's only two episodes away and next week is the companion-lite episode to balance last week's Doctor-lite episode.

It may not have been the first trip over this ground -- the "breaking the companion's faith in the Doctor" angle first came up all the way back with "The Curse of Fenric", and of course "the Doctor takes companions because he's selfish and lonely"/"the Doctor always destroys his companions" has been a recurring theme throughout the new show -- but combined it was a nicely satisfying emotional journey.

I'm actually torn on whether I want Amy and Rory back. (I'm writing with the faith, of course, that this is part of the Doctor's plan to set up for facing his death and through Circumstances(tm) Amy and Rory will be back for the next series.) I am fond of this Team TARDIS and I'm tired of the endless Doctor/companion roulette that characterized the Rusty years. Is it too much to ask that people stick around for a while? I mean I know it involves living in Wales for a while but clearly they've gotten electricity and running water out that way in the last few years and it's not all sheep everywhere. But it does make a lot of narrative sense for the Doctor to leave Amy and Rory alone for a while so they can have a life as Amy-and-Rory, not Amy-and-Rory-and-the-Doctor. The Doctor points out, correctly, that Amy hasn't had to live a real, grown-up life and have a real, grown-up marriage, she's just been gallivanting around the universe with her boys. In addition, to save her, the Doctor had to break her, had to point out that he's not this magic man who saves everything, he's just a crazy old man with a time machine. Realistically, there'd be consequences from that. (This is, though, the show that has STILL not really addressed the emotional loss Amy and Rory have suffered about Melody/River, so who am I kidding, they'll never bring that moment up again.)

Side note: Really liked the direction on this episode. In a total shocker, it's directed by the same guy who did the last episode. Apparently I dig that guy's visual style.

Specs count: Only some horrible 80s glasses on the nerdy blogger in case we hadn't gathered from the way he was talking about CIA conspiracy theories that he was supposed to be a MASSIVE NERD YOU GUYS. At least he wasn't as much of a horrible swipe at the viewing audience as Whizz Kid.
Rory deaths: I guess maybe the writers have decided they've kicked him around enough?
Amy: Mrs. Williams!

Next week: You don't have to go home but you can't stay here.

Given that the preview features the Doctor working in a toy store I'm fairly sure this isn't the kind of closing time they're talking about but c'mon, it was way too easy.

[Doctor Who] 6.09 "Night Terrors"

janeway216 — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 22:23:08 GMT

Abnormally quick download this week.

Not really the creepshow I was expecting, which is fine with me because as I said I'm not a huge fan of horror episodes.

Basically it was a vastly more competent "Fear Her." It's more technically successful on every level, but the plot is still "small child traps adults due to fear of thing in cupboard."

I was tickled by Rory's immediately assuming that he was dead again. He's got to be aware of at least two, I think. I wonder if the poor guy is keeping a tally on a chalkboard in the TARDIS? (I have him at three real deaths, but one of those deaths was the extinction of a timeline, hard to say whether he'd remember it.)

I don't have much else to say about it.

Hat count: 1, but it was on a Peg Doll
Rory deaths: He thought he had died, does that count? 3 real/3 imaginary
Amy: A peg doll!

Next week: It's a Rory episode apparently. It looks interesting from the trailers but we'll have to see. Darvill's never had to carry an episode before, has he?

[Torchwood] 4.07-4.09 roundup

janeway216 — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 18:43:09 GMT

The problem with these episodes is they're so damn boring I can barely bring myself to recap them one at a time.

4.07 "Immortal Sins"

Oh goody. A Jack episode. Hurrah. *waves tiny flag*

So, credit where credit's due, the writing was pretty good, more like what Jane Espenson usually turns out, and Eve Myles continues to be the best actor on this show. And stuff did happen. The problem is that, barring a few sequences, the episode felt like it was just mechanically ticking off points on a plot checklist. Time to introduce the Families. Check. The Families need Jack's blood. Check. We need a link between the 1928 scenes and the present. Angelo. Check. We need an insider on the Families' plot. Olivia. Check. Okay, done!

I mean, I suppose it was a commendable enough hour of TV, but I was bored shitless. It's not like I ever watch Torchwood and think, "Hey, you know what this show needs? More Jack Harkness. It has a lack of Jack. I want to see an entire episode following Jack around 1928 New York."

Well, okay, aside from last week when I really did think "so where the hell is Jack?" That's a separate problem and one I'd like to address later.

4.08 "End of the Road" & 4.09 "The Gathering"

Or now. That works too. I'm discussing 4.08 and 4.09 together because together they're the best example of my problem with Torchwood: the pacing. These episodes were, for the most part, pretty good. A fair bit of stuff happens, there are explosions, people get shot, Q! But this shit should have happened two episodes ago. Instead this show has drunkenly staggered through seven meandering and frequently boring episodes so there'd be time for the writers to show off how much thinking they've done about the effects the Miracle would have on society, until finally they realize there's only three episodes left and it's time to set up the finale.

Also, the way this show has juggled its plots has been terrible. Things just vanish off the radar for weeks at a time before popping up again. Like, here's Oswald and Jilly again! You'd forgotten they existed, hadn't you, because they weren't in any of the last three episodes. Oh hey, finally the payoff to that foreshadowing about Shanghai four episodes ago that sunk without a mention in the interim.

Ultimately I think the problem is that the writers only had enough ideas for a six, maybe eight-part miniseries. But they got ten. So they've flailed around like a cow with the staggers trying to pad things out to ten episodes and the end result is that so far we've suffered through a bunch of filler before all the action happens in the last three episodes. This show would have been so much tighter without "Renditions," "Dead of Night" and "The Middle Men."

Also, Rex is stupid and how did Esther suddenly become so super-competent?

Bullet points:
- So how did Olivia have the technology to override the I-5s? Are we supposed to assume Angelo scavenged that from the smoking remains of Torchwood Three as well?
- Oh man John de Lancie. ♥♥♥ Why couldn't this whole series have had John de Lancie instead of Mekhi Phifer?
- The costuming for Lauren Ambrose has been so uniformly excellent. It makes me wish I could pull off a dress and coat like she does. Sadly I am four inches shorter and probably forty pounds heavier than she is. And I have short legs.
- Pairing Oswald with Team Torchwood is actually a pretty good idea. I mean, sure he's a creepy asshole, but the team has needed someone with a different voice to be a source of conflict for a while now. And not just Rex, who just stomps around being a jerkwad.
- Does it bother anyone else that the Blessing is basically a giant vagina? Also, I know I've said this like eighteen thousand times, but Angel covered the idea of a hole straight through the earth first and did it better.

Mercifully, there's only one episode left, and that's really all I have to say about that.

[Doctor Who] 6.08 "Let's Kill Hitler"

janeway216 — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 06:50:36 GMT

Mary sweet mother of mercy I have missed this show.

And so we have the consequences of Demon's Run, and how Melody Pond becomes River Song, or at least is set on River's path.

As an episode, I thought it was pretty good. Very Moffaty. But entertaining -- River's line about the "gay gypsy bar mitzvah for the disabled" is solid gold, and the justice-bots are a whole show just on their own. Plus, in a nice sleight of hand, the episode seems like it manages to answer a lot of questions without actually answering anything. Hmm. There's a crack about Lost somewhere in there, but I'm too lazy to pry it out.

Well, that's unfair. It does answer questions. The problem is, it mostly answers the gimmes that everyone had figured out, and in some cases the answers are more confusing than the questions. Namely, River. Okay, so the man she killed was the Doctor. I think almost everyone had figured that one out, and I was mostly guessing Rory for that one so I wouldn't be going for the obvious. But how the crap does all this fit with what we know about her? Like, here, she doesn't know her name will be River Song, but in "A Good Man Goes to War" she said that she was given the name in the Gamma Forest as a child -- and we know that the Alex Kingston incarnation of River was always and will always be Alex Kingston, so when was she a child in the Gamma Forest?

Oh. Wait. Surely the implication is not meant to be that River is a child here. I mean she may be a little girl in Gallifreyan terms, cause clearly they live many times longer than a human does, but a, she's not Gallifreyan and b, ew, and c, eeeeeew the Doctor sure likes em young doesn't he. Oh cripes. I bet that's it. It would fit with the line about how River met the Doctor as a small girl and he knew everything about her. Ewwwwwwww.

And finally, some progress on the plot thread that's really had me intrigued the entire time: the death of the Doctor. So it turns out the Silence are not the specific aliens from "The Impossible Astronaut"/'Day of the Moon", they're a religious order. Okay, that's a bit of a cheat, but I'll roll with it. They're working with the Academy of the Question and they believe "silence will fall when the question is asked."

Sounds like we got us some arc words! I'm really hoping the question isn't the obvious suspect, "Doctor who?", because I'll be honest, title drops like that just annoy the piss out of me no matter where they happen. Yes, that includes Zefram Cochrane's line "So you're all just astronauts on some kind of star trek?" from First Contact. But it does fit as the first question, the oldest question in the universe, and hidden in plain sight, provided you're willing to get slightly meta about your definitions of a few of these.

Plus we've got another date to count towards: April 22, 2011. Interestingly I double-checked and "The Impossible Astronaut" actually aired on April 23, but I admit I wasn't paying attention to the information off the invitation in that episode. Still no working theory on how the Doctor gets out of that one, given how conclusively my two timelines theory has been shot down. Whatever he does, he's got 200 years to set it up. The clock is ticking.

(Okay, unless he was lying about his age to make it clear to Team TARDIS what was going on. It's certainly possible. Not only is Rule Number One that "the Doctor lies" but it's practically canon that the guy lies about his age.)

Bullet points:
- My favorite thing about this episode . . . well, second favorite thing. My favorite thing was the "gay gypsy bar mitzvah" line. My second favorite thing is that Hitler is built up as this thing -- you know, it's the classic time travel scenario, killing Hitler -- and then Rory shoves him in a closet after about 30 seconds and he has nothing to do with anything.
- I had Mels pegged as River from the moment she got out of the car, but that was pretty obvious.
- Nice vfx work/sound design on the justice-bot's transformation into Zimmerman.
- Also, some nice character work (if a bit emo) for the Doctor with the bit about finding a voice interface. Sure, it was really on the nose having him moan about how he can't stand himself and groan "oh! guilt!" when confronted with the images of his past companions, but at least he admitted he feels guilt about what he did to them. I've ranted and ranted about this, particularly in regards to Martha, when the Tenth Doctor's response to any accusations about how he damaged his companions was basically "Nuh uh! They're fine! Tee hee!" The devastation he wreaked on these women's lives was real and terrible and the Tenth Doctor (and Rusty) liked to pretend it didn't exist. No, Rusty, offering some bullshit "happy endings" in "Journey's End"/"The End of Time" doesn't make up for the loss and the tragedy . . . but that's a rant for another day.
- Honestly, mad props to Matt Smith for this episode. He just kept bringing it, and bringing it, and bringing it. Sure, he looked dumb as hell flopping around on the ground, but he was completely committed to looking dumb as hell flopping around on the ground.
- Hey look it's Platform One! Or, as the Googles call it, the Temple of Peace in Cathays Park. I figured they'd run out of locations to shoot stuff eventually.
- Rory continues to be stupid awesome. It's about damn time. Also, is it just me or is his hair a different color?
- I was all excited that they were gonna bring back the cat nuns but alas, it was just the costume, the lady has a human face.

Anyway, I liked it. Here's to finally addressing the plot thread that's been more interesting to me, the death of the Doctor. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to catch a flight to Wales. I have a brick to chuck through Steven Moffat's window. I promised way back when that I was going to chunk a brick through his window if River turned out to be a Time Lord, and what do you know, she did.

Hat count: 1 (although it was on River)
Eye Patch Lady sightings: Do the previouslies count?
Rory deaths: He lives! Not even a fakeout.
Amy: A robot!

Next week: Well . . . we'll see. I'm not a fan of creepy horror stuff.

Torchwood post coming tomorrow, provided I'm not too busy. We're having a fridge delivered.

[Torchwood] 4.06 "The Middle Men"

janeway216 — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 04:35:09 GMT

Ugh. I've been having to psych myself up to talk about this one. It was so painfully awful, and my only consolation is that at least there weren't any cannibals or robots in bikinis around. My biggest problem is that it was SO. DAMN. TALKY, and 90% of the talk was either about boring stuff we don't care about, or it was boring and repetitive conversations about ground we've already covered. I guess this was meant to be another one of those philosophical breather episodes, and again I'll say: this show is not suffering for philosophy. We have been wallowing in philosophy since the second episode. What it needs is some goddamn action, and these philosophical episodes just kill the momentum.

Ugh. Ugh. Okay. Here we go, a liveblog of "The Middle Men." By which I mean mostly that I'm going to watch it and bitch about things in chronological order instead of my usual "have some random bullet points" approach.

I haven't griped about this before, but I really can't stand this "one day, no one dies" intro that they've tacked onto all the episodes. (And now I can completely sympathize with everyone who's annoyed by the Amy intros on the US airings of Doctor Who; since I'm torrenting the UK airings I don't see them.) You'd think, especially six episodes into the season, they'd trust that people understand what's going on, but instead we get this ridiculous "hey guys here's the plot!" recap EVERY TIME. Are they just really proud of the little stinger Murray Gold composed for this?

All righty, five minutes in and this episode is sucking wind like a dying man. A random Phi-Corp executive stares at some printouts from Google Maps China and then has a stilted and cliche-ridden conversation with a random guy in Shanghai. Then we have a very tense, or so the music wants it to be, sequence where the random Chinese guy walks down an alley in Chinatown before shooting his way into a fenced-off area. Seven hours later, he reappears ~~in front of a greenscreen~~ on top of a skyscraper roof, and conveniently has time to tell the other guy that he didn't find anything before ~~a stuntman does a fall off a building~~ jumping to his death. Oh, and according to a news segment the latest way people are trying to commit suicide is by jumping off tall buildings.

Look, there are good ways to foreshadow and bad ways to foreshadow. This would be an example of a bad way to foreshadow. Do we know who these people are? No. Is this stuff going to come up again? Not in this episode, it doesn't. We'll run into Stewart and the secretary one more time, but Shanghai, the 45 Club, the dead Shanghai investigator? None of this is going to matter to the plot of the episode. It's like a five minute blob from another episode that accidentally got spliced onto the front of this one, completely disconnected from the episode around it, and so it comes off as clumsy and ham-fisted. Look, guys! Stewart is trying to figure out what's going on with Phi-Corp! Maybe not all Phi-Corp executives are bad! Maybe this'll mean something in two episodes! Keep watching, kids, and find out!

What was wrong with the old Torchwood credits? Riddle me this.

Notice the single guest star credit here? It's for the actor playing Gwen's dad. Who is in one scene and is merely called upon to lay on a cot and look pasty. Ernie Hudson? Marc Vann? The people who actually have lines and are in more than one scene? Credited at the end of the episode with the rest of the plebes. I don't get TV credits.

And here, again, we dive down into the suck. Rex gets a monologue summing up the purpose of the Module and what's happening to the Category Ones. But a) we went over this last week, quite graphically, and b) this was covered in the previouslies! Do they think somehow in the seven minutes since the previouslies that we've forgotten what the plot of the last episode was? It's meant to be Rex's come-to-Jesus moment, I think, with him declaring allegiance to Torchwood for the first time (?) and swearing vengeance for Dr. Vera. Except to get there, we're subjected to a speech recapping the events of TEN MINUTES AGO. These kinds of mini-recaps make sense when a significant amount of time has passed since the last installment of the narrative (I'm thinking of the periodic sum-ups of previous events that kept getting dropped into the Harry Potter novels, where a refresher on what happened in the previous book was useful since it had been three years since the last book.) YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED IN THE LAST FIVE MINUTE OF LAST WEEK'S EPISODE WE DO NOT NEED A FIVE-MINUTE RECAP OF THE PLOT THAT IS WHAT PREVIOUSLIES ARE FOR. Argh.

I like the UI surgery done to try to make that Android phone look a little less like an Android phone.

Forgot to point it out last week: Marc Vann will be filling the role of Hey, It's That Guy! for this episode as Colin Maloney; he was Ecklie on CSI.

Why didn't someone ever say "Hey, Alexa. Great take, but can you try shutting your mouth when you're not talking?" Esther's a total mouth-breather. ESTHER. SWEETIE. CLOSE YOUR MOUTH. FLIES WILL GET IN.

Okay, Racist Guy Rules Lawyer Coworker is a nice touch. He felt real. He's an office drone at a concentration camp and all he wants to do is complain about Those Damn Mexicans and nanny his co-workers for not following regulations.

And again, it's a HIGHLY TENSE AND DRAMATIC conversation about what they're going to do with Dr. Vera's car to cover up her death. Oh my god what does it matter. And from the way the music is thumping and racing, you'd think this was the single most conversation in the series, but THEY ARE TALKING ABOUT MOVING A CAR, Y'ALL. (Okay, I get what it's supposed to do, it's supposed to illustrate how Maloney is good at details, bad at big picture, and show the banality of evil in that Maloney just burned a woman to death and he's planning out the best way to cover it up but this conversation is not near as weighty as the director wants it to be.)

Aaaand it's another ten or twelve pages of philosophical yap, this time examining the Nuremberg defense, because, you know, the Holocaust parallels just weren't strong enough from the last episode. I'll give Eve Myles credit, she delivers this tripe very well, but sweet fancy Moses there is nothing you can say about the Nuremburg defense that hasn't been said about eleventy jillion times already. And just having a character say "Don't you dare look at me and tell me you were just following orders!" doesn't make the scene any less hoary or cliched. I'm going to be merciful and not link directly to TV Tropes, but I agree 100% with what they have to say on their Nuremburg Defense page: "It's one of the tropes that cycles between Dead Horse Trope and Undead Horse Trope [...] Everyone should know by now that playing this straight (even when fully sincere, which is not always the case) is likely to meet with skepticism and ridicule."

Even if they do try to subvert it a bit by having Rhys freak out in the next scene about taking people to the Module and Gwen calming him by saying he was just doing his job. As TV Tropes points out, at this point, even trying to subvert the Nuremburg defense is a cliche.

Jack blackmailing the admin assistant works pretty well, but the girl playing Janet can't act (she uses the same tone of voice for telling Jack her drink order and calling her boss a bastard when she finds out he wants to transfer her to Cincinnati) and also, this scene is like something out of Angel except Angel would have done it better.

Aaaaaaaaaaand yet more talky philosophical bullshit. This scene is trying so damn hard to be clever, with Owens's observation that he is a middle man -- both middle as in neither good nor evil, and as in his place between PhiCorp's evil overlords and its victims. Okay, that's tolerably clever, I'll give them half a point. But then he monologues again about how the system did it and everyone was just following orders and we're all puppets of a global conspiracy, which I guess is meant to be some sort of revelation. Except that number one, this is our THIRD trip to the "just following orders" well and it's not any better played than the rest of them. Number two, it's not a huge revelation to have someone come out and actually say there is a global conspiracy behind this and they've been working on it for years. They've been foreshadowing that since poor Ellis Hartley Monroe. So it winds up being a bunch of yap about things WE ALREADY KNOW, THANKS. It doesn't even work well as dramatic irony because, well, what's the point? There's nothing at stake here. Sure, Jack's making a mistake based on an incomplete understanding of the situation, and the audience is much better informed than the characters, but there's no risk here. One suspects it was written mostly because this is Ernie Hudson and they want to make sure they give him something nice to do.

Ah, jesus, Rex. Okay, I was bitching about how the previous scene doesn't work as dramatic irony. This one does -- there's a lot at stake, the audience knows things Rex doesn't, and Rex's lack of knowledge leads him to make a tragic mistake. So, points. But Rex wouldn't be here if he hadn't been so damn dumb -- seriously, the place is on lockdown, no one in, no one out. And you go through a checkpoint? Who do you think those checkpoints are for? Soldiers, that's who. So who do you think you're going to find on the other side? Soldiers, that's who. Then he tries to engineer a come-to-Jesus moment on Maloney to escape. To be fair, he has no way of knowing that Maloney killed Dr. Vera, so he can't know that he's going to the completely wrong man for this. But "let me go so I can show the world proof that the US government is systematically murdering people/come with me so you can make it right" is a really, really bad pitch. His pitch is, "let's be whistleblowers." There are people on which that might work. The director of the entire facility, who will lose his cushy position of power in return for a life on the outside, is probably not one of them.

Why do all these people leave their computers unlocked when they're away from their desks? This is a government facility! Practice information security!

And then Esther, bless her heart, is a total dumbass. Again, dramatic irony; she can't have known that Maloney killed Dr. Vera. But she knows Dr. Vera is suspiciously missing and Maloney was the last one seen with her, so maybe it might be worth using someone a little more innocuous to get him out of there. And to give Esther credit, she does put up a good fight. I think I'd like Esther more if she weren't so damn bland most of the time.

Jack types so slow. Except for the bit where he starts typing his reply to Gwen's question before she asks it.

As impressive as it is that Gwen blows up the Module, why are they keeping explosives on the premises? I know the point of the Module is to burn people, but explosives do just a tiny bit more than that! And it isn't as if Gwen brought them in with her. Is she just that badass now, that she can produce explosives from hammerspace?

I thought something was off about Esther's makeup the first time I watched that last scene with her and Rex. Then I watched it again and realized it's that her raccoon-eye cried-off mascara keeps appearing and disappearing between shots. Also the contact lens case that Gwen is keeping her contacts in has changed between when she put them in in Wales and when she puts them in in the airport. Funny the things you notice watching an episode a second time.

And the International Conspiracy wants Jack. Of course they do. Everyone wants Jack.

In summary -- I know, 2000 words of griping and I'm coming back for a summary -- this episode was pretty much a total failure. Mostly everyone just sits around and talks, but they don't manage to SAY anything. Nothing happens until the last ten minutes. It's boring, lamely paced, doesn't move the arc forward, and was pretty much the equivalent of an 80s Doctor Who episode where all they do is run around the corridors for 25 minutes to pad out some screen time.

Next week: Please can some stuff happen. I'm rolling without trailers here so I'm going to imagine an episode where crazy things happen and the goddamn plot finally moves.

[Torchwood] Torchwood roundup: 4.02 - 4.05

janeway216 — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 20:29:31 GMT

So far overall I've been distinctly unimpressed. It's not been bad but it hasn't really been good; better than Series 2 but not even coming close to Children of Earth. Mostly it's just felt like there's been a lot more setup and a lot less action, even allowing for the fact that every two episodes of Miracle Day equals one episode of Children of Earth. I mean, hell, just watching the previouslies on "Day Two" drops more bombs (literally, in one case) than the entire aired run of Miracle Day.

But no, really, though. I watched the previouslies of "Day Two" and was astonished at how much stuff happened compared to "The New World"/"Renditions". Gwen's pregnant, Torchwood's being hunted, Jack is captured, there's a bomb in Jack, we are coming ... back . . . and then the first thing that happens in "Day Two" is Torchwood blows up. What's happened by "Dead of Night"? Well, no one is dying, except for Jack, who is mortal, and they're in America now. And Torchwood is being hunted by a mysterious organization.

Yup.

4.02 "Renditions"

Oh man this one was a snoozer. The entire damn episode, aside from about eight minutes with Esther, took place on a damn plane. Plus it didn't make a damn bit of sense. Why try to bribe Esther and Rex to drop the Torchwood thing if you don't give them time to accept the bribe and get out of town? It's like "here, have some money NOW DIE." Chemistry does not work the way Gwen wanted it to. I mean, I get from a story perspective that they actually had to put Jack in peril to show that it isn't just that he's not healing, because no one's healing, it's that he really can die, but damn that sequence was dumb. Rex is still an asshole and Esther is a doormat. And Eve Myles, of all people, left that plane set covered in tooth marks.

Also I really didn't dig the swishy stereotyped male flight attendant. Torchwood's crap about a lot of stuff but they're usually good about not breaking out the gay stereotypes for a joke.

Nice to see Dichen Lachman again though.

4.03 "Dead of Night"

Slightly more action here, with the introduction of PhiCorp, but I was still thinking "so, is something going to happen at any point?" I can understand having a slower episode to give the story room to breathe but NOTHING HAS HAPPENED YET WE NEED MOMENTUM NOT HEY LET'S STOP AND EXAMINE HOW EVERYONE FEELS ABOUT THE MIRACLE.

4.04 "Escape to LA"

I hate that title. I guess it's meant to be a play on Escape from LA? It just sticks out among all the other evocative titles because all it does is describe what happens in the episode. The team escape. To LA. Thanks for the spoiler, guys. I mean, hell, all I can think of are silly pun titles like "Dead is Dead" or "Here Comes the Sun" and they are STILL better than "Escape to LA".

Anyway, I thought this one was better because FINALLY things start happening. It definitely had its weak moments -- Rex's dad is a homeless junkie? I would never have guessed! That never happens! -- but I thought Esther's plotline worked surprisingly well, even if every bit of it was caused by her being dumb as hell. It's a retread of Gwen's plotline from S1 (rookie makes rookie mistakes) but far more palatable. I'll take "rookie tries to intervene on her nieces' behalf, gets her sister committed to a psych ward and the kids in foster care, leads assassin to Torchwood's location" over "rookie unleashes alien sex monster on first day, cheats on boyfriend with asshole date-rapist doctor, doses boyfriend with retcon so she can confess to him without him knowing what she actually did, cries on pizza" any day.

Also, Eve Myles's American accent: still better than Miranda Raison's. (Is it just something that all British actors have to learn? Like if you want to become an actor, first you have to pass your American Accent test and get your American Accent license? Unless you are Sean Connery.)

"The Rising"? Hmm. I'm so bad at titles.

4.05 "The Categories of Life"

Finally! Stuff happens! Although this plotline has all the subtlety of a brick to the head. Let's see if I have this right. ~~The Nazis~~ Phi-Corp are rounding all the ~~Jews and other undesirables~~ dying and injured into ~~concentration camps~~ overflow camps, where they are ~~segregated~~ categorized into ~~those who are getting gassed now and those who are getting gassed later~~ Category Ones, the clinically dead, and Category Twos, injured but conscious, and then warehoused in deplorable conditions under the supervision of armed guards/soldiers. Families are promised they can visit but that will never happen. ~~Everyone~~ Category Ones will be ~~gassed~~ burned alive and disposed of. Terrible, right? But it's okay, because ~~the Germans~~ Americans don't have to care; they're ~~the Aryan Master Race~~ angels and totally better than all those nasty ~~Jews~~ dying people.

Fair summary?

I'm not sure I'm a fan. I guess maybe because it's a little too on the nose for me? Or because so far, all Miracle Day is doing is co-opting the Holocaust narrative without having anything new to say about it. I suppose the wrinkle is supposed to be that this time it's not a madman dictator who came up with the scheme, it's a pharmaceutical company and this is supposed to be some sort of commentary on the broken-ness of the US healthcare system (certainly, the bit with the "these are the people who don't have insurance" was an anvil lobbed from that direction.) But even then, it looks like there's going to turn out to be a madman or a cabal of madmen behind it all, so the takeaway lesson is . . . the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare system are the puppets of an oligarchy who would cheerfully stage a holocaust for personal gain? I think Michael Moore beat you to that there, Rusty. And you STILL wind up mining "madman commits industrial genocide" for drama.

Incidentally this is pretty much a recurring gripe of mine, when shows decide they are going to do a Holocaust/Depression/Terrorism story and never offer anything to say about it beyond "gosh, that sure was a bad thing, right?" Yup. And? If you're going to go there, have something to say and don't just mine it for some cheap drama.

Quick bullet points:
- I knew Dr. Vera was doomed as soon as I heard she was only doing a limited number of episodes but wow, I wasn't expecting that to be how they got rid of her.
- Bill Pullman's delivery is still annoying me. He's good in the role, I just don't like his delivery.
- Lauren Ambrose is really good though.
- Nice to see some character growth for Esther, even if the "I'm not useless, am I?" "No, uh. *shifty eyes* No, of course you're not about as useless as a screen door on a spaceship!" was a bit too on the nose. Last week she was indeed kind of useless, even if Rex was way over the top in yelling at her. This week, she kept her cool, had some good ideas and pitched in to get Rex where he needed to be.
- On the other hand, Rex is still a giant ME FIRST ME FIRST ME FIRST IT'S ALL ABOUT ME ME ME asshole. Better, in that at least this time his big It Should Be Me thing made sense, but then he ruined it by being all NO I'M THE SPECIAL-EST NO ONE ELSE CAN GO BUT ME.
- It does make Team Torchwood's lack of character development stand out a bit though? Rhys still hates Torchwood, Gwen's still a seasoned alien fighter. After thousands of years of immortality, Jack's finally killable again, but has that caused him any anxiety or trepidation? Nope.

Next week: Actually I don't know what's happening next week because my source for torrents has started stripping the trailers off the episodes.

Doctor Who returns August 27! I thought I was excited for Torchwood and then the trailers started coming out and I realized no, I was meh about Torchwood. I am EXCITED for Doctor Who.

Here, have the BBC trailer. The BBC America trailer is longer, yes, but I think this one's better cut. (And also covers the stuff I want to see more.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szw0dyFtJqk&feature=player_embedded

[Torchwood] 4.01 "The New World"

janeway216 — Sat, 09 Jul 2011 23:59:50 GMT

I never really posted much about Torchwood while it was running in the UK. So for the record, here's what I thought about Torchwood up until now:

S1: Flaming heap of shit except for "They Keep Killing Suzie" which was actually not just a decent episode of Torchwood but a decent episode of television
S2: Vast improvement over the first series, still mediocre TV
"Children of Earth": The best work Torchwood had ever done and a genuinely good piece of TV

I was pretty meh on Miracle Day when it was announced; call me an Anglophile wannabe-Pom but part of what I like about Doctor Who and Torchwood is that they're not American TV, they may use American production techniques but they're very thoroughly British/Welsh and if I want to watch Americans running around America, I can just go flip on the TV anytime. Torchwood and Doctor Who are something special that only come round once a year. (Even if Torchwood is like your drunken uncle that you only see at Christmas.)

But then they bagged Jane Espenson to write for Torchwood, and Jane Espenson is my favorite writer to come out of Buffy and probably one of my favorite writers working in TV these days. So then I knew that despite whatever reservations I had, I'd be back.

This time I'll try to remember to post about it.

So what did I think of "The New World"? Well, it wasn't as good as "Children of Earth" but it definitely beats S2. As pilots go (because it was, essentially, a third pilot) it handled its exposition fairly well and sets up the plot competently enough. I wasn't real thrilled about the structure, I thought jumping between the various plots (particularly the trips back to Wales to check on Gwen) didn't always sustain the narrative momentum, but on the other hand I can't figure out how I would have done it any differently (or better) so I guess I'll give Rusty that one.

Bullet points, because I apparently think better with these:

- I miss Ianto. Well, not necessarily Ianto, but Ianto's Spock to Jack's Kirk and Gwen's McCoy. Particularly in S2, Ianto had a sharp, dark sense of humor that worked to undercut Jack's bombast and Gwen's drama-bombiness, and with as many LARGE HAMS as there are in this cast they could really use someone grounded and low-key to balance them out. Esther might be getting there, but she's not yet.

- Bill Pullman's accent is going to annoy me. But at least it sounds like he's basing it on a real person. Peterson's accent (well, according to IMDb it's spelled Peterssen, and I protest that that's how they spell it in Minnesota, not Kentucky) mostly just sounds like he's doing the Southern accent he learned in acting class.

- I really, really doubt that threatening to sue the governor would result in Danes's release. At least here, the governor doesn't have the power to compel the release of an inmate; she'd only be able to refer a name to the parole board.

- Did like some of the nods to previous continuity -- Jack dosing Esther with retcon like he did Gwen, using the name "Owen Harper."

- Actually despite my wise-cracking on Twitter, Barrowman mostly left the scenery alone. The problem with Barrowman is he's only got two modes of acting: massive, scenery-chewing ham, and terrible leaden hunk of wood. Phifer, however, was exactly as DID SOMEONE ORDER A LARGE HAM??? as sache said. I'm hoping that this is mostly because he is really bad at playing Man in Pain because I don't know if I can take that much overacting in one cast.

- I think probably my favorite moment was Gwen sticking the earmuffs on Anwen before she started shooting the guy in the helicopter. Also, however they are getting that baby to do it, she had some pretty hilariously appropriate facial expressions in that scene -- smiling as Gwen shot at the helicopter and then this sad expression once Gwen stopped shooting.

- Clearly the fun with this series is going to be playing "Wow, [actor] is on Torchwood? Crappy-ass Torchwood?" isn't it, since the preview for next week featured Lauren Ambrose, Wayne Knight and Dichen Lachman.

I'm probably going to be late posting next week because I'm going to be on vacation starting next Saturday. Hmm. Come to think of it, maybe watching Torchwood won't be the best start to a vacation.

[Doctor Who] 6.07 "A Good Man Goes To War"

janeway216 — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 03:07:45 GMT

If you are watching on the American schedule and want to see what I had to say about "The Almost People", that's here.

Last week's warning still applies:

HERE THERE BE SPOILERS

*spoiler space*

Holy shit. Someone better have already put this episode on the Wham Episodes page at TV Tropes, because it kept dropping the bombs and never let up. So now that this half-season's over, let's see if I can figure out what I got right and what I didn't.

My previous theory: Amy was abducted by the Silence and had a genetically engineered half-human half-Time Lord baby created by the Silence implanted into her. She kept showing up as Schrodenpregnant because of some time muckery involving the Future Doctor from the premiere. The baby would grow up to be Ashley the Tiny Time Lady.

What we know so far: Amy was abducted by Madam Kozarian's forces and replaced with a Flesh doppleganger sometime during the two-month gap without the Doctor. The baby was not created by the Silence -- she is Amy and Rory's biological daughter -- but has been genetically manipulated to force Time Lord DNA into her DNA. Amy kept showing up as Schroedenpregnant because while Amy was pregnant, the ganger wasn't. The baby grows up to be River friggin Song aka Ashley the Tiny Time Lady. Well, at least that's what we're supposed to believe.

Yeah. I pretty much didn't see any of that coming. I guess I get like maybe half a point for figuring the baby was half-Time Lord half-human? And another half-point if Ashley the Tiny Time Lady turns out to be River after all? Whatever, sache is way ahead of me on points anyway.

So. River. Wow. No, I really didn't think Moffat was going to go there. I admit when I first heard the baby would be named Melody I was like, "huh, Melody Pond, River Song, that's kind of themey, and would Amy really name her daughter Melody?" but that's about as far as I made it. Does raise a whole bunch of interesting questions though.

What we know (or I'm conjecturing) about River so far: She's Amy and Rory's daughter (or at least believes herself to be.) The Forces of DOOOOOOM attempted to (succeeded in?) engineering her to be the perfect anti-Doctor weapon. She spent some time in the Gamma Forest as a child, long enough for her name to be changed to the Gamma Forest version of Melody Pond. If she's Ashley the Tiny Time Lady, then at some point she was moved to Earth (recaptured?) and stuffed in the spacesuit, from which she then escaped and ended up in New York, doing what looks an awful lot like a regeneration. At some point as a small child she met the Doctor (when he went to rescue her?) and he knew all about her. She then grows up, becomes an archaeologist (or a tomb raider) and at some point kills the best man she's ever known (Future Doctor? in the spacesuit? but I've been thinking it's going to be Rory for a long time) and is sent to the Stormcage. She's known who Amy and Rory are the entire time, which would explain why she and Amy get on so well in "The Time of Angels". And she and the Doctor are basically married and that basically makes Amy and Rory the Doctor's mother- and father-in-law and oh I bet Moffat just did all this because there's a joke about traveling through all of time and space with your mother-in-law in the backseat at the bottom of this.

So is River still a weapon that can be used against the Doctor? Or has the weapon already been used and that's why she's in jail? And is River the way she is because all this has already happened -- rescued from the Forces of DOOOOOOOOM, etc etc -- or are they changing her history and at one point she's just going to go fzzt! and there won't be a River anymore? And exactly what sorts of powers do her strand of Time Lord DNA give her anyway? It appears she can regenerate and she may age slower than humans (cause clearly the Doctor does not age like a human, that's for sure.) She can fly the TARDIS better than the Doctor (of course so could Romana, so maybe *all* Time Lords fly the TARDIS better than the Doctor) and she's pretty damn smart. Also I suppose this explains how they were planning to make Ace a Time Lord since clearly not all Time Lords are Gallifreyan (and not all Gallifreyans are Time Lords?) -- the DNA strand was identified specifically as Time Lord and not as Gallifreyan, possibly because there's only one Gallifreyan left and that would have been creepy and weird.

Plus, for as much as we just got dropped on us, there's still a lot of unanswered questions out there. Where is the Doctor going at the end of the episode? What's with Future Doctor? When does he start playing into this? Why stuff Ashley the Tiny Time Lady/Baby River into the spacesuit? If the spacesuit was meant to be a sort of automated babysitter then why give her the ability to call for help? Who was in the spacesuit when it shot Future Doctor? Why was Ashley/Baby River dying? Was it just malnutrition? How the hell did she get from Florida to New York? Who did River kill? When did the Doctor tell her his name?

Bullet point time:

- Rory knows here that Melody is his child -- he tells River as much. But in "Day of the Moon," it was a big Thing that Rory *didn't* know Amy was pregnant, that Amy had told the Doctor before telling him (and then of course Amy was like "ha ha not pregnant after all" which now we know was both true and not true.) And "The Almost People" confirmed only that Amy was having a baby. So how . . . I mean I guess he's just putting the dots together and going "oh, well, my wife and all, must be mine" but man I think I'd wait for some DNA testing before I went around assuming the parentage cause to me alien abduction + baby = ALIEN BABY (clearly.)
- Also I think I'm coming around to sache's point of view on Moffat and his obvious fucking with us. Amy's opening speech to Melody is pretty clearly constructed to make everyone think she's talking about the Doctor until that last line: "He's called the Last Centurion." Why didn't he just have Gillan do a take to the camera: "That was genius, there, wasn't it? Pretty clever."
- Also also the "people of our world" don't know Rory as ANYTHING because the timeline where he guarded the Pandorica for 2000 years NEVER FUCKING HAPPENED.
- I'd complain about the Cybermans being so wasted in this episode, but meh, I'm not hugely attached to them and it gave Rory an opportunity to be really fucking awesome.
- Guessing this probably takes place after "The Time of Angels" because I really can't see the Clerics being all "Oh hey it's the Doctor, osm" after gearing up to kill him here.
- The Sontaran nurse is goddamn awesome. Although I do wish they'd just let the parallel with Rory be instead of actually calling it out towards the end of the episode.
- "Why would you need me? I'm old! I'm fat! I'm blue! You can't need me!" made me laugh so hard.
- Nice bit of costuming on Karen Gillan to give her some baby weight.
- How do the Headless Monks' hoods stay up if they have no heads?
- "DOOR LOCKING OVERIDE" Oh come on, they couldn't have got that one fixed before the episode went out? It's override with two Rs.
- Still trying to decide which Doctor is scarier in this sort of situation, Tennant's Doctor or Smith's Doctor. The Tenth Doctor was quite impressively menacing in "The Family of Blood," silently and impassively condemning the Family to their various punishments, but also a good bit of the holy shit factor comes from watching the Doctor take such nasty and personal revenge on such lame friggin' enemies. In the "Colonel Run-Away" bit, the Eleventh Doctor is far more physically menacing but doesn't really have the "holy shit he just dropped someone into the event horizon of a black hole" factor.
- What happened to the cleric in Amy's room?
- Once again the Doctor sidesteps the issue of whether he's had children. Well, he did give Rose the straight answer "yes" but wouldn't elaborate.
- Commander Strax really can't tell humans apart. Heh.
- Also I have to give Rory a special shoutout. Finally, a personality! And it is badass. I admit I didn't like you much at the start, Rory, but like Mickey before you you have grown a personality and you are awesome.
- "The Doctor will be back in Let's Kill Hitler." Oh Moffat ILU never change. Ah ha ha ha. I live in a world where there's going to be an episode of a "children's show" called "Let's Kill Hitler." Take that, all you assholes who are like "QUIT OBSESSING IT'S FOR KIDS."

Eye Patch Lady sightings: It's Madam Kozarian thank you very much.
Rory deaths: He lives!
Things that are cool: Crying Romans with babies, bow ties
Amy: No longer pregnant, now a mum!

Next week: Let's Kill Hitler! Okay, so it's more like September, but Let's Kill Hitler!

Don't answer this question until you've seen the episode: Anyone else planning to watch Torchwood over summer? I figure it'll pass the time until Doctor Who returns nicely. (But no, seriously, don't answer that until you've seen the episode unless you don't mind spoilers. There are too many spoilers on here otherwise and What Has Been Seen, etc.)

[Doctor Who] 6.06 "The Almost People"

janeway216 — Sat, 28 May 2011 23:23:29 GMT

So, just to get the spoily bits out of the way first: sache, and everyone else who speculated that Amy was Not What She Seemed, were right. This:

NEW CRAZY THEORY: What if AMY was a clone the ENTIRE TIME and didn't know it and the reason she keeps having visions of Eye-Patch Lady is because REAL Amy is being held captive by her and Clone Amy and Real Amy are, like, slightly psychically linked. So, Real Amy is pregnant, but Clone Amy isn't and the TARDIS is scanning both of them, so schroedenpregnant.

is it exactly. The Amy they rescued in "Day of the Moon" was a Flesh decoy for Team TARDIS to retrieve. Amy has been held captive, with Eye Patch Lady as her keeper, to gestate something, most likely but not necessarily Ashley the Tiny Time Lady, and is in labor as the episode ends. The Doctor has suspected this for a while and went to the factory to confirm his facts. He then vows to come get Amy and destroys the clone.

Also, Amy accidentally told the Doctor that she'd seen him die. And there are some fairly strong hints dropped that Ganger!Doctor, who is destroyed at the end of the episode, may be returning, so points to everyone who started shrieking that Future Doctor from "The Impossible Astronaut" is a clone.

I'm actually wondering now how long Amy's been a clone, which is kind of tough to figure on a show that's built on time travel. I'm guessing she was already cloned by "The Impossible Astronaut" and we're probably going to find it happened sometime during that convenient two-month gap without the Doctor. Be ballsy if it turns out she's been a clone since like halfway through S5 though. Also, I was going to grump about the timeframes not making sense unless it's been a lot longer between episodes than it appears, but this show is BUILT on timelines not making sense. Plus, unlike the Rusty days when we were always popping home to check on Rose, Martha or Donna's families, they haven't gone back to modern-day Earth since the premiere, so there hasn't ever been any firm dates referenced. So it's perfectly possible that there's been long gaps between episodes. If it does feel a bit cheaty.

So, yeah, my pet theory has been fairly conclusively shot down, which pleases me AND also proves another theory of mine: I'm always wrong. Always. Except for Saxon, because let's face it, my tiny cousin could have figured that one out and he wasn't even BORN then.

The rest of the episode? Kind of a mess with an awfully convenient ending. It just HAPPENS that enough of the humans and Gangers are killed to weed out the duplicates, and then the TARDIS just HAPPENS to drop into where the team are facing certain death and it just HAPPENS to be able to stabilize the Gangers so they can pass as human and then the other Captain Janeway blows up her ship to kill all the Kazon, but it's okay, cause she sent her Harry Kim to replace ours. Not that he needed replacing. Well, someone's got to announce that it's some kind of anomaly.

Eye Patch Lady sightings: 2, 5 total
Rory deaths: Made it through an entire two-parter without getting killed! They should have made a clone of Rory just so they could kill him. It's a real missed opportunity. 3 real/3 imaginary total
Things that are cool: Bow ties, always and forever
Amy: Confirmed pregnant! But not for long.

Next week: No trailer, but since I've already told you there are going to be spoilers, here's the synopsis:

Amy Pond has been kidnapped and the Doctor is raising an army to rescue her. But as he and Rory race across galaxies, calling in long-held debts and solemnly given promises, his enemies are laying a carefully concealed trap. In her cell in Stormcage, River Song sadly acknowledges that the time has come at last -- today will mark the Battle of Demons Run and the Doctor's darkest hour. Both sides will make their sacrifices and River Song must finally reveal her most closely guarded secret to the Doctor.

Also, there are Cybermans, Silurians and Sontarans. Also also, it's a two-parter and the second half isn't airing until September. Yup.

[Doctor Who] 6.05 "The Rebel Flesh"

janeway216 — Tue, 24 May 2011 05:14:43 GMT

Not much to say this week. Damned two-parters.

I like the way Amy and Rory have like totally taken over the TARDIS control room. Well I guess they've got to do something when they're not having adventures. No, not that.

Karen Gillan's hair. It is so beautiful. I must investigate how to make mine look like that. Probably a lot of high-end supplies. And the blood of sacrificed goats.

Liked the direction and fx work on this one. Well, except for Creepy Snake Jennifer, that wasn't very good. And okay, Cleaves turning her head around. So basically all the fx work that didn't have to do with a live person.

For all the lingering shots on Amy, this was really Rory's episode, wasn't it? It's almost the reverse problem of what I was complaining about last week -- the Doctor gets a plot, or at least stuff happens around him, and Rory gets a plot, and Amy . . . uh. Does some running around and makes some sarcastic remarks? I guess the lingering shots were the director's way of reminding us that Amy was actually there this episode.

Not really up to speculating about this one. Clearly the Doctor knows more than he's telling, which is kind of a lousy way to build suspense in the script. Ganger!Doctor was set up to be this "aw, fuck" moment, except that they'd been beating you over the head with the fact that the Flesh was making a Doctor the entire episode. It looks like they're trying to set Ganger!Doctor up as a threat, but given that mostly the Gangers are following the originals' personalities (exception being Ganger!Jennifer who is out for blood, and Ganger!Cleaves, who isn't) seems to me this is the Flesh's -- as opposed to the Gangers' -- best way of reaching out and trying to help.

Well until those pissed-off Gangers fuck everything up which will happen in about 30 seconds.

Decent episode but I was really hoping for some better body horror than what we got. Come on. A factory filled with clones, self-replicating goo that becomes clones, and an hour unaccounted for, and it's the guest cast that gets all the angst about "but I'm REAL! I'M REAL!!!" Should've established some doubt about whether the main cast were clones early on and screwed with that instead. Make Amy a clone, give her something to do. Make Amy a clone who doesn't realize she's a clone and starts to figure it out. Well, maybe I'm not giving the writer enough credit, maybe that's the reveal in the next episode and that's why she didn't do anything all episode.

Anyway, the counts.

Eye Patch Lady sightings: 1, 3 total
Rory deaths: He lives! 3 real/3 imaginary total
Amy: Still Schroedenpregnant

Next week: Blah blah scream blah blah clone blah blah can it be "A Good Man Goes To War" already, that episode sounds WAY more interesting.

Fair warning: I'm watching on the UK schedule and "The Almost People" will be airing next Saturday. I hear it's not airing on BBCA? At any rate, it's going to be spoiler city up in here next week and the week after.

[Doctor Who] 6.04 "The Doctor's Wife"

janeway216 — Sun, 15 May 2011 21:29:49 GMT

Confession time: This was actually the first major work of Neil Gaiman's I'd seen.

That said, can we get him back for some more stuff? Or maybe it won't work a second time. But man, I dug this episode.

If I have one major criticism of the episode, it's that it felt like fanfic. Maybe even crackfic, but the sort of crackfic that is so good you're like, "This is totally cracked out and insane but I can't even bring myself to care, I just want to know what happens!" Of course, that may have been because it basically was fanfic, it's just that the writer is rather a bigger name than the rest of us and actually gets to have his fanfic aired as part of the series.

A few other minor criticisms: script felt a little dense, mostly because it was packed with so much good stuff that it was like repeatedly being hit over the head with a mallet made of awesome, the "You want to be forgiven!" / "Doesn't everyone?" moment was way overplayed, the science of it made no sense even by Doctor Who standards, reference to current arc plot very awkwardly shoehorned in.

Other than that, it was super, and I really loved Gaiman's grasp of the characters and relationships, particularly Rory. Can we always have Neil write Rory? Like, can he submit all Rory's pages from Minnesota? Especially coming after his total uselessness last week, it was awesome seeing Rory be the one to figure House's game out and take care of Idris as she was dying. It felt like Gaiman did a much better job of balancing the group and giving everyone moments to shine. Some other episodes (last week, I'm lookin' at you) tend to come off as "The Doctor has this plot, Amy has this plot, Rory . . . aw fuck I forgot about Rory again" and as a result he winds up useless or dead again.

Anyway I was going to go through and make a list of everything I thought was great but it was starting to get unwieldy so I removed it. Probably this has been my favorite episode of the season so far -- "Day of the Moon" had much more of a wham factor but this one was just more enjoyable.

Hat count: Holding at 2 total
Eye Patch Lady sightings: If there was one I missed it; 2 total
Rory deaths: i, hallucination caused by evil TARDIS-stealing entity (3 + 3i total)
Amy: Mercifully they decided only to beat us over the head with one arc plot this time

Urgh. I hate imaginary numbers. Never doing the count that way again.

Next week: Appears to be a Doctor Who/Deep Space Nine crossover. The Founders are invading!

[Doctor Who] 6.03 "The Curse of the Black Spot"

janeway216 — Sat, 07 May 2011 20:51:02 GMT

Yes, I am WELL EARLY this week.

Meh. Perhaps it's because I went in not really expecting to be impressed, but . . . I wasn't impressed. Any other week this might have been a good episode, but it's sandwiched between "Day of the Moon" and something called "The Doctor's Wife" written by Neil Gaiman, it just has no hope of living up to its neighbors. Tiny little claustrophobic episode that fails to generate any dramatic tension and never really makes us care about the characters (well, except Avery, he was pretty good) with a requisite third act "but it's actually a SPACESHIP" timey-wimey technobabble twist once again ruined by the fact that they used it on Rory.

Not that I don't like Rory, it's just that they keep killing him and he keeps coming back, by this point "ONOES RORY IS DYING" has really lost its emotional impact. HIS NAME IS IN THE MAIN CREDITS, HE WILL BE BACK NEXT WEEK.

Hmph. I think I know how sache felt last week.

Anyway it's not the worst thing ever committed to film and it passed 45 minutes of my day quite nicely but bring on the Gaiman.

Specs count: okay I'm just beating a dead horse by now.
Hat count: 1, although we do not know whether the Doctor thinks it is cool or not (2 total)
Eye Patch Lady sightings: 1 (2 total)
Rory deaths: 1, drowning (4 total, 5 if you count the faked one in "Day of the Moon")
Amy: Still Schroedenpregnant.

Next week: Written by some guy named Neil Gaiman, you might have heard of him. I hear a lot of people think he's pretty cool. Although the last episode named "The Doctor's [Family Member]" was slightly meh and I never got the science to make any sense.

Still need Eleventh Doctor-era icons.

[Doctor Who] 6.02 "Day of the Moon"

janeway216 — Wed, 04 May 2011 02:34:03 GMT

I thought after two days I'd have something approaching coherency on this one, but mostly I just wind up writing down a bunch of questions, so this week's review is going to be a bit unusual.

PRESENTING: AN INTERVIEW WITH STEVEN MOFFAT (AS PLAYED BY THE 216)

The 216: Hi Steven, really great you could take the time to chat with me.

Steven Moffat As Played By The 216: It's always a pleasure.

The 216: So, "Day of the Moon" --

SMAPB216: Bit good, isn't it.

216: Left me begging for more.

SM: The best ones always do.

216: But it also left me with a few questions --

SM: Course it did.

216: -- so do you mind if I ask a few? Well, okay, several. Okay, many.

SM: Fire away.

216: Okay. So. First up, there are a couple of things that are bothering me. Like maybe -- look, I hesitate to use the word plot holes, cause they're not, really, but -- okay, first. At the end of last episode there's a big flash of light, like the Silence are toasting someone, and River yells "Rory!" and goes running, and then we never see what happens. Next episode, Rory's fine, no one goes "Wow, that was a really close call you had with the Silence," just nothing. So what the hell happened there?

SM: It'll be explained later.

216: Hang on, the whole point of this is that you ANSWER QUESTIONS --

SM: It's cause he's still part plastic and plastic doesn't conduct electricity.

216: Really?

SM: No, but you didn't like the first answer. It's not important! They missed, he survived, it was just to generate tension, move on. Next question.

216: Okay. So. Amy, Rory and River. Three months in 1969 without the Doctor. In the SAME CLOTHES?

SM: Laundromats.

216: With no money?

SM: The Doctor gave them credit cards.

216: And no transportation?

SM: Hitchiking.

216: [belligerent look]

SM: Artistic license, all right?

216: Okay. Where did the US government get that nonsenseanium they were building the Doctor's prison out of? Is it the same stuff the Pandorica was built out of? I noticed the Doctor called it the "perfect prison" and he called the Pandorica that too.

SM: Oh for god's sake. Nobody cares! The people reading this, they do not care. Quit asking nerd questions and actually ask something people want to discuss.

216: Quit being rude to me! You're a figment of my imagination. I could end you right now.

SM: But you won't, because you haven't gotten to the stuff you actually want to discuss, so I can be as rude to you as I want. Fatty fatty no-parents.

216: All right, fine. So. The little girl --

SM: Ashley.

216: Really? I had pictured her as more of a Fiona, or a Caitlin --

SM: Nope. Ashley.

216: Okay. So. Ashley. What's her deal?

SM: Half-human half-Time Lord, genetically engineered by the Silence so they can have their own pet Time Lord. They already have total control of Earth, or at least they did. Imagine what they could rule with someone able to control time and space on their side.

216: So the Time Lord bit is the Doctor, because there's just not that many left of them these days --

SM: Well, he's so damn determined to go around killing all the other ones.

216: And the human bit is Amy?

SM: Sure.

216: So that's what they meant when they said she would bring the Silence. They've nabbed a bit of her and the Doctor, made a baby and stuck it in her.

SM: They don't create anything themselves when they can use what already exists.

216: So there really is a droplet in the Pond.

SM: It's just not the droplet you thought it was.

216: And Amy thought she was pregnant because she was feeling sick --

SM: Newlywed, right, and maybe helped along by a little post-hypnotic suggestion in the ladies'.

216: But doesn't think she's pregnant anymore, because she wasn't, and she doesn't remember what happened when she was abducted.

SM: Right. The Silence are everywhere but they're not omnipotent. The plan was disrupted the first time.

216: Why is Amy showing up as Schrodenpregnant on the scanner? I mean, Ashley exists. She's real. And there's a picture of Amy with a baby. I mean, I'm not going to discount that the picture could be completely unrelated to Ashley and it was just placed there so Ashley would bond with Amy, but that still doesn't explain Schrodenfetus.

SM: Think back to the last episode. The Doctor dies -- but he also takes steps to change his past so he doesn't die. I mean, he's strange but he's not cruel; he wouldn't bring Amy, Rory and River to watch him die unless he thought they could prevent it from happening. So right now time is -- if you'll permit me -- all wibbly-wobbly around him as things change. So there's a timeline where the Silence abduct Amy, knock her up, she gives birth, and Ashley grows up to kill the Doctor. And then --

216: There's a timeline where none of that happens.

SM: Exactly. And the timelines are fighting for dominance. Hence, Schrodenpregnant.

216: Hang on, if Amy's pregnant now, how is Ashley like eight years old at the same time?

SM: Wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey --

216: Ball of stuff. I get it. What's with the spacesuit? Why does Ashley start dying when she's out of it? Why's it take six months? I mean, I'm guessing she didn't starve to death, it wouldn't take a human six months to starve to death.

SM: The Silence made the baby using sixties-era human technology and a bunch of stuff they stole from other races. How successful do you really think that would be? Ashley's body is unstable. The spacesuit keeps her in one piece. As soon as she leaves it, her body starts degenerating until she has to regenerate to repair herself.

216: One more thing. Okay. WHAT THE HELL WAS WITH THE LADY IN THE DOOR?

SM: *smiles* Spoilers.

216: Okay. Moving on . . . Amy, Rory, and the Doctor.

SM: You realize most of this is just me messing with you. I know what you shippers get up to.

216: I have become temporarily deaf and have no idea what you just said. Was Amy really talking to Rory when she made her big confession? I mean yes, she calls Rory "Stupid Face." But "fell out of the sky" is a really weirdly specific metaphor to use when you do know someone who honest to jeebus fell out of the sky and landed in your backyard, and "It's a figure of speech, moron!" is not the most convincing denial ever. Plus, Amy and the Doctor have mad chemistry, you know they do, and Amy and Rory don't even seem to like each other that much most of the time.

SM: Maybe she was telling the truth. Maybe she wasn't. It doesn't matter if she was telling the truth or not. What matters is whether Rory believes her.

216: And does he?

SM: What do you think?

216: I think I hate you.

SM: No you don't. The point is, the Doctor should have left Amy and Rory alone a long time ago. They got their happy ending, they're young, they don't need some weird old alien hanging around and messing things up. But the Doctor's old and lonely and he needs them and can't let go, and it's about time someone dealt with the consequences of how the Doctor wrecks his companions' lives. The Doctor is not a safe friend to have. Your good ending is Sarah Jane --

216: Sarah Jane is awesome!

SM: Sarah Jane *is* awesome. But she was also still damaged. Your bad ending is -- well gosh. So many to pick from. And that's not even counting the dead ones. So. Consequences. Lives wrecked.

216: You know, as much as I would like to see it directly addressed, and not just in Rusty's way of breaking the Doctor's companions and then when people are upset, going "BUT LOOK THEY GET AN AWESOME HAPPY ENDING LOOK", that could get really bleak. After Children of Earth, I'm not sure I'm ready for bleak.

SM: I know we're really hard to tell apart, us both being male head writers of Doctor Who and all, but I'm not Rusty.

216: And thank jeebus for that. Speaking of Rory and insecurity and jealousy --

SM: Oh boy.

216: Look, okay, I know I said I wanted Rory to grow a personality because he's basically freakin' wallpaper. But can we not have his plot arc be "Rory is insecure and jealous"? It gets old!

SM: What else do you suggest I do, though?

216: I, um . . . Hmm.

SM: Exactly. Consequences, remember. Think about Rory. Think about what he's dealing with. He knows his wife fancies the Doctor. He knows he can't ever measure up in terms of that larger-than-life Doctorness. He's simple, human Rory and he's going to be insecure about that and yes, he's going to be jealous at times. It wouldn't be realistic if he was always "Hey, it's okay with me that you tell him things you won't tell me and he's the first person you called out for when you were abducted by aliens and you'd jump him if he offered and you didn't think River would take you out. It's cool with me!" No. So he's an insecure mess at times. Deal with it.

216: Okay, okay, I will. I just -- one last thing.

SM: Hit me.

216: Don't you think this is all a little Rose/Mickey/Doctor?

SM: This interview is over.

So yeah, that's pretty much what I think about things. I admit I'm also kind of sold on the idea of Creepy Little Possible Time Lord being the Master's approximately sixty-fifth plan to come back, mostly because I like the idea of Creepy Little Girl Master, provided the actress is up to the part.

Also, I have NO EARTHLY IDEA about the lady in the door.

Some more bullet-pointy things:

- Depending on how early in the year "Blink" was supposed to take place, the Tenth Doctor and Martha were somewhere in London during all of this.
- The Greystark Hall sequence, particularly Amy in the room with the Silence, was one of the few things that this show has done that genuinely creeped me out, and I don't scare easily -- the Weeping Angels, for example, didn't even faze me.
- As a fellow redhead, I totally covet Karen Gillan's hair.
- Rory as a G-man? Not bad. Think I'm just a sucker for specs.
- Okay, "Welcome to America!" was funny, but *another* Americans like guns reference? We get it, okay? We solve all our problems with gun violence!
- I did sporfle at the rather winking reference to the Nixon tapes.
- Why does Dr. Sheperd look like a Maytag repairman?
- Rory says he remembers being plastic, but only intermittently, like a door in his head that he can keep shut. I didn't include this in my mock-interview, because I think he may have been speaking metaphorically, but I thought it was interesting with my theory about their being two timelines.
- "You're ugly, has anyone mentioned that?" and "Is this really important, flirting, cause I feel I should be higher on the list." God I love Amy.
- "You've got a screwdriver, go build a cabinet!" may be my favorite line of River's. I know I said I didn't really like River before but she seriously grew on me these two episodes. Well, maybe just this one episode. Well, maybe just the ten seconds when she was spinning around and shooting the Silence cause that was totally badass and I am easily impressed. I know she's supposed to be a take on Indiana Jones, but mostly she reminds me of Lara Croft.
- So Canton wants to get married to a black . . . man. Everyone gets to be right!
- The Doctor flailing as River kisses him is a nice bit of funny from Matt Smith. Also the way the TARDIS prop wobbles as he stands at the door is hilarious. They can build a TARDIS that looks like it has a control room inside, but they still can't build a TARDIS that doesn't wobble when people brush up against it.

Overall, I liked "Day of the Moon," even if it was basically just Moffat throwing a bunch of balls up in the air and now we're waiting to see how he catches them.

Next week: Doctor Who does Pirates of the Caribbean. Meh.

[Doctor Who] 6.01 "The Impossible Astronaut"

janeway216 — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 06:02:08 GMT

I mostly forgot to do these for S4 and S5, so let's see if I can get back in the habit.

I don't really have enough thoughts yet to do an actual review with paragraphs, so let's have some bullet points:

- "In memory of Elisabeth Sladen." Lovely to see and yet broke my heart.
- Bit with Louis XVI: foreshadowing or just Moffat-style wacky hijinks?
- Loved the callback to "The Pandorica Opens": "She's doing it again. Dr. Song, sir. She's packing." Nice lampshade on the fact that for an incarcerated woman River Song sure spends a lot of time out of jail.
- Adele playing in an American diner -- still trying to decide how likely that would be. I can't say I've heard Adele on the Muzak anywhere I've been lately, but maybe the Muzak in the office lobby isn't representative.
- Still not digging the new credit sequence. The last one I really liked was S3 and all of them since then have just made me grumpy.
- Rory as series regular? Well, it makes sense, but can he grow a personality this year please? I get he's supposed to be the grounded, low-key counterweight to the Doctor, who is larger than life, and Amy, who is determined and assertive, but Rory mostly just blends into the wallpaper.
- Casting father and son as old and young versions of the same character must've just made the casting department go "WE ARE SO GEEEEENIUS."
- Killing the Doctor in the first ten minutes? Definitely not in Rusty-land anymore.
- Standing directly under the Doctor and loudly discussing the situation? That strikes me as perhaps not the best way to hide something from him.
- Now it's true I wasn't around during the Nixon era and I'm most familiar with the way he sounds from the Nixon tapes, which are terrible quality, but the guy they've got playing Nixon doesn't strike me as either sounding or looking particularly like Nixon. If anything he sounds like a British actor trying to Hugh Laurie his way through an American accent, but IMDB says the guy's American-born. Of course my ear may just be thrown off by Londoner Mark Sheppard and his equally gravelly American accent. I do have to give them points, though, for apparently learning their lesson from the accent disaster that was "The Daleks Take Manhattan" and finding British actors who can actually do plausible American accents. Maybe not fantastic ones, but definitely not the ear-melting awfulness that was Miranda Raison's attempt at an American accent.
- Another swipe at us Americans and our guns? Is it more funny in the UK? Me, I'm just tired of the cheap shots at how we're all violent and even our pets have guns and stuff.
- Again, chalk this up to me not having been there, but a black man on Richard Nixon's Secret Service detail, possibly even leading the detail? Wasn't Nixon, like, spectacularly racist? I mean, it's true that the civil rights movement may not have been at its most intense in 1969, but the King assassination would have happened only a year earlier, so it's not like America was all WOO HOO INTEGRATED SOCIETY NOW YAY! Maybe I'm just totally uninformed and the Secret Service was integrated, I'm just shooting my mouth off here, it just made me go "Wait. What?"
- River was so much less irritating this episode than she has been. One of my gripes about the character has been that River usually knows more about what's going on than she's willing to tell, and she's always seemed rather smug about having that knowledge -- "Spoilers!" Here, she's just as confused and off-base as everyone else is and is so much more likeable when she can't lord it over everyone that she knows what's going to happen.
- "Is that a Star Trek mask?" Heh.
- In a total surprise, for once we have a creepy creature who's not a) played by Paul Kasey b) voiced by Nick Briggs.
- "Brave heart, Canton!" Heh.
- So River confirms that basically her life is running back to front compared to how we reckon time, and she says she first met the Doctor "a long, long time ago" when she was a "young girl." Interesting. Still very Time-Traveler's Wife, but interesting. It also makes me wonder precisely how long "a long time" is. Does she mean merely that she met the Doctor as a child and has known him for 40 years? Or does she mean that she first met him far, far in the future, a long ways from 1969? Or is River perhaps far, far older than she appears?
- If she turns out to be a Time Lord though I'm throwing a brick through Moffat's window.
- As has been astutely pointed out by others, that's the ship from "The Lodger", or at least it looks a hell of a lot like it.
- Wanting to get married but having it be a crime -- if this were Rusty I'd say for sure it's because he wanted to marry a man but with this being the Moff, 50/50 split with it being that he wanted to marry a black woman, which yes, would have been a crime in some places.
- Odds on Amy actually being pregnant? It's been, in the Who timeline, two months since we've seen Amy and Rory last so there's definitely time for her to have gotten knocked up and to have realized she's knocked up. And the Doctor quipped she'd gained some weight. On the other hand, River had the same "gotta hurl" reaction to the Silent and unless this is turning into Father of the Bride, she's probably not preggo. Personally, I think it's just Amy putting the feeling that she has to tell the Doctor something together with the fact that she's constantly nauseated and coming up pregnant and we'll find out next episode that there isn't actually a droplet in the Pond. Would it be ballsy actually giving her a wee time tot? Sure it would. It's also ground Torchwood covered with Gwen and for cripes' sake I hope Moffat has better things to do than rip off freakin' Torchwood. [edit: Apparently the Confidential confirmed she's actually up the duff, so, uh, that ought to be interesting. I haven't seen it yet so I'm going by the Wikipedia cite.]

Overall, it was a solid episode, even if it had to necessarily spend more time on setup than answers. Definitely a big change from the softball first episodes of the Rusty era. It's probably not my favorite of the season openers (that tends to vacillate between "Partners in Time", mostly because of the Adipose, and "Smith and Jones") but that's okay, it kept me hooked and now I don't know how I'm going to last the week until "Day of the Moon."

Next week: Well, the trailer blows a couple of the cliffhangers (Creepy Astronaut Girl lives and so does Rory) but damn, next week has a lot of questions to answer. Why'd the future Doctor let Creepy Astronaut kill him? How the hell did Creepy Astronaut get to Utah? What's with the creepy hash marks all over everyone? How long has the Doctor been in government custody? Is Amy actually pregnant? What's with the Silence? ARGH I MAY EXPLODE WITH ANTICIPATION.

Specs count: Different Doctor now :-(
Hat count: 1
Things that are cool: Bow ties, fezzes, Stetsons

Doctor Who: 4.1 "Partners in Crime"

janeway216 — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 07:41:13 GMT

I have a Torchwood post-mortem planned, but every time I sit down to discuss it I end up yelling and frothing incoherently and I have to go sit someplace dark until I calm down again.

First. I don't like the new arrangement of the title theme. I didn't like it in That Damned Voyage but I was hoping it would go away. Obviously it isn't going to. I suppose I'll just have to hope that it will grow on me.

Also. I know Rusty intended the Baby Adipose to be horrifying and macabre. I know they're just ambulatory blobs of human fat (with beady little eyes and cute little fangs!). I don't care. I WANT ONE. Oh my God those things were ridiculously adorable! The waving! The smiling! The cooing and squeaking! It would be the CUTEST PET EVER . . . until it grew up into an adult Adipose, anyway.

Overall, I did like "Partners in Crime." It wasn't perfect -- I thought the bit with the Doctor and Donna and the continual near misses started to drag by the end, and Donna's heart-to-heart with her grandfather just missed the mark with me -- but it was a welcome change from the depresso-fest that was Friday night's Torchwood. It continued the Rusty tradition of starting the new season off with a fun, light episode to ease people back into the swing of things and bring everyone up to speed on the new (or in this case, returning with a revamped personality) characters. A promising start to the season, but -- well, we'll see.

And speaking of returning with a revamped personality characters. I admit that when I heard Catherine Tate was going to be the S4 companion, I was half-excited and half-nervous. After all, this was a character that Rusty himself had described as a shrieking fishwife who got on people's nerves. I was picturing an entire season of "WOT?" and "HUH?" and "WHO'RE YOU?" and cringing. But I did come to like Donna by the end of The Runaway Bride, because she was perfectly willing to give the Doctor a good slapping when he needed it and she could tell him no when he deserved it -- after S2, this was a welcome change. Plus, the ending hinted that there might be more to Donna than just the gossip and the frivolity that Lance derided her for. Upshot is, I was somewhat unsure because I knew they were going to have to give her a personality makeover in order to fit her in as the continuing companion but I was willing to give her a try. Plus, I like Catherine Tate.

For the most part, I think they pulled the Donna revamp off. It took me a while to get to the point where I could buy it, but eventually they made it. Serious Donna being Serious Investigator made me blink a few times until I figured out what was going on. As I mentioned earlier, Donna's pouring out her troubles to her grandfather just felt hollow to me, despite all the talk in the Confidential about how Tate "has a valve to her soul she can open up." I wasn't even sure I believed the whole bit on the roof where she explained why she was going all Sarah Jane. Really, it was Donna's monologue about trying to change, but being disappointed by the fact that she was unable to escape from mundanity that sold it for me. Not completely, as it still feels a little contrived and like Rusty's borrowing from himself (because who else do we know that had a crappy mundane life living at home with her mother, ran into the Doctor, helped to save the world and realized there was more to life than just the everyday, impressed the Doctor enough that he asked her to come along with him, initially turned him down and then eventually went with him to grand adventures?) but you know, I'll go with it. And by Doctor Who standards she's off to a great start as a companion since one of the first things she does is get a woman killed.

Of course, she's not completely changed from the old Donna, because this is Catherine Tate after all and part of her schtick is being loud and obnoxious, so we get the enormous luggage and the "YOU'RE NOT MATING WITH ME, SUNSHINE!" 'comedy' bit. Oh, that Donna! She's not going to be like the last one at all, is she? When she says she's not interested in the Doctor, by golly she means it! Har har har! I suppose this is probably a nice point to segue into my second point:

Martha. Yes, I watched the episode, I know she's not in it, but her presence still hangs over it the way Rose's presence hung over The Runaway Bride and "Smith and Jones." If my feelings on Martha are not clear, I will give you a reminder: I adore Martha. I hesitate to toss around the words "favorite companion ever" when there's so many companions that I haven't even seen yet (plus Ace is a strong contender for the title) but no matter what, Martha is always going to be near the top of my list of favorites. You might also remember, however, that I felt she was rather hard done by last season. I'm not going to rehash my gripes here, if you're interested in re-reading my reactions I've handily tagged all my Doctor Who-related posts with "doctor who", but in particular I was annoyed by the fact that Martha continually sacrificed on the Doctor's behalf and received only minimal acknowledgement and gratitude in return. I don't really participate in greater Who fandom, but I know enough to know that I really wasn't the only person who was upset or outraged by the way Martha was treated. And although I can never prove it and for all I know I may just be reading too much into things, it felt to me like the mentions of Martha were the production office acknowledging the failings of last season and attempting to sort of Band-Aid them over. I didn't really discuss her episodes on Torchwood, but her appearance over there kind of felt like Step 1 in "Appease the Crazy Internet People." She was confident, she was unbelievably competent, she was happy and she'd been hired by UNIT, possibly helped by a recommendation from the Doctor. Definitely had more than a hint of "Look! Martha is EVEN MORE AWESOME now! And the Doctor helped her get a SUPER AWESOME JOB! See, he's sorry for how he treated her and he's trying to make amends!"

Then here, there was the scene with the Doctor starting the technobabble monologue, and then the UNMISSABLE GRAND SWEEPING DRAMATIC SHOT of him alone in his TARDIS, as if Rusty was saying "Look! He really does miss her! He's lonely without Martha! SEE? SEE??" Then there was the admission that "I had this friend Martha Jones. She was brilliant. And I destroyed half her life. -- It got complicated. And it was all my fault." FINALLY some acknowledgement that yes, she suffered because of him and yes, her family suffered because of him, now could he tell HER that? (Of course since we know she's coming back this season, I'll bet the odds are that he does try to say something like that to her and she immediately rebuts him, talking about how she's happy and has a SUPER AWESOME JOB and yeah, that year sucked but she learned a lot about herself and her life is so much better now since she's known him, and then he can go on his way confident in the belief that it doesn't matter how he treats the little humans as long as in the end, they come away better, because he's the Doctor, he makes people better -- as the Master perceptively observed -- and I may end up tossing a brick through Rusty's window anyway.)

And THEN Rusty goes and pisses me off again with the whole crack about "She fancied me." To be fair, it's kind of a retroactive pissed-off, because it's just stirring up my anger about the cheap shot the Doctor took at Martha in "The Sound of Drums": "It's like when you fancy someone and they don't even know you exist." Oh, boy. Last time I was hacked off about it because Rusty was like "Oh I PROMISE the whole 'Martha has a crush on the Doctor' thing is going somewhere, it's going to be significant" and then really it wasn't, it was just another hammer used to beat Martha over the head with, just a source of punchlines. And while I wasn't willing to cut Rusty any slack about the line, I was willing to cut the Doctor a bit of slack on it -- it's canon that he can be an insensitive clod where feelings are concerned, and maybe he was just being thoughtless. But the fact that here, again, her falling in love with him is treated as the punchline to a joke, I think slides the earlier crack over the line from 'thoughtlessly cruel' to 'deliberately cruel'. Insensitive clod or not, making a joke about unrequited crushes to someone you know has an unrequited crush on you is just a really dickish thing to do. And, maybe I'm just overreacting, but I think treating someone's feelings as the punchline to a joke as he does here with the "She fancied me" line is pretty dickish too. Oh that Martha! She was brilliant! She was great! She did me a lot of good even though I ruined her life! But she fell in love with me, can you believe it? Har har har! These silly alien womens! [Alternately, the line could be meant as him bragging to Donna -- Martha was all that and a bag of chips and she picked me to have a crush on -- which is still a dickwaddish thing to do. 'Look at me, I'm so awesome that awesome women fall in love with me, take that Miss Deeply-Unimpressed-Yet-Running-After-Me.' Gaak.]

Hmm. That was rather a lot of upset for an episode I said I liked. Which I really did, I just get stirred up when it comes to Martha. Perhaps I'll feel better when she actually reappears later on and is awesome.

Bullet points time!

- Is it just me, or did Donna mention investigating all that funny stuff in Cardiff? I thought I heard a line about that the first time I watched the episode but couldn't find it when I rewatched for this review.
- Speaking of, Catherine Tate did get some nicely funny stuff in. The whole mime conversation was great, and I have to give both Tennant and Tate kudos because ordinarily I can't read lips but I was able to make out everything they said up until Donna's big paragraph of mime -- and by then reading her lips wasn't the joke anyway. It probably helped, though, that the Confidential showed the script for almost that entire bit. Also, her delivery on the rooftop speech was great, particularly the lines about the bees disappearing and the rumors about the Titanic buzzing Buckingham Palace.
- One really trivial thing that annoyed me about the episode was the amount of music reuse. C'mon, Murray, it's a new season, let's get some new tracks! Okay, so you gave "Donna's Theme" a nice new arrangement, points, but NUL POINTS for dumping "After the Chase" in as the BGM for the scene with Donna and her grandfather on the hill, and DOUBLE NUL POINTS for the bit where, when the cut was over, you just repeated it from the beginning! Particularly because the Confidential focused on the filming of that bit and dropped in another piece of music that was far more effective. Not that I can identify what it was. "The Doctor Forever" made an appearance in what I think was its "Gridlock" form when the Doctor was catching Miss Foster's sonic pen, and the music from the scene where the Doctor tells Donna "it's a funny old life aboard the TARDIS" is a reuse that is driving me crazy because I know it's a lift and I can't place where it's coming from. (Is it from the last scene of TRB? Them in the snow and "come with me" and "you need someone to stop you"?)
- This episode did manage to get a few squeals out of me, to its credit. Most particularly when Donna stops to speak to a Mysterious Blonde who very conspiciously keeps her face turned away from the camera, and then the Mysterious Blonde turns, and it's Rose bloody Tyler . . . or at least, someone that looks like Rose. I don't care that she was played by Billie Piper and credited as Rose Tyler, in this universe, just because something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck don't mean it's a duck. There are too many people who have run around in disguise for me to automatically go "ZOMG IT'S ROSE!" If it is really really Rose, though, and not, say, the Rani masquerading as Rose or Romana in another eerily familiar regeneration, I am DYING to hear Rusty's explanation for what's going on there. Because I know it's going to be a doozy, given all the time they spent on SHE'S GONE FOREVER, UNIVERSES ARE CLOSED, HOLE IN THE VOID IS SEALED, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY ONE-HUNDRED PERCENT NO WAY THROUGH.

Specs count: HURRAY THE SPECS ARE BACK
Saxon count: OLD MEME
Rose count: 1

Next week: And once again we're following the template laid out by S2 by heading back in time for a historical. Rose went to the Victorian era, Martha went to the Elizabethan era, but Donna is going to top them all by going to Volcano Day! If they don't run into Jack I'll be sad.

the 216 has finished the book

janeway216 — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 00:07:38 GMT

Start time: 1:10 pm
End time: 4:37 pm
Not bad. I'll reread it slower, though.

Non-spoilery review: Neither the worst book of the series nor the best one. It has the same problem as the last one did, that nagging feeling that you've read this before, only it was fanfic the first time and the fic author did it better. Also, I'm really not sold on the epilogue. I mean really.

Spoilery review: I'm going to be processing this for days, I can already tell. The book started slowly -- that first chapter was a hell of a hard slog -- but once the action kicked off, it became quite a page-turner. There were parts I wasn't thrilled with, mainly the massive infodumps scattered throughout the text and, oh yeah, the epilogue, but Jiminy Cricket, it was a hell of a ride. I giggled my way through, and shouted "A-ha!" rather frequently, and yelled "Jo, no! How could you!" at least a few times.

Jo really wasn't kidding when she said we'd know everything, was she? We got Dumbledore's backstory, Snape's backstory, a full explanation on the prophecy, a straight answer on Snape, more on the Potter family. Ron and Hermione finally got it together, and yes, I cackled gleefully seeing Harmony shippers take a sword to the gut. "She's like a sister to me." It doesn't get more straightforward than that.

It was interesting seeing what had been guessed and what hadn't. Of course, everyone had figured out that R.A.B. was Regulus Black; I've seen more than a few fics with the "Snape loved Lily/Lily and Snape were friends" twist; and Melinda Leo had better feel proud of herself for guessing that Harry himself was the seventh horcrux. People had also figured out the whole "Snape kills Dumbledore at Dumbledore's request/Dumbledore was dying anyway" thing. I was mostly wrong in the various guesses I made for Endlong and its associated fics, but I did guess, oddly enough, the outfit Hermione wore to Bill and Fleur's wedding. JO, DUN PLAGIARIZE.

And the deaths. Cripes, the deaths. It was as if someone had handed Jo a list of my favorite characters and she turned it into a hit list. I must be twisted and wrong because while several of the deaths had me going "OH NO" and "OSHIT", the ones that really hurt were Hedwig and Dobby. Mad-Eye . . . well, bless his magical eye, but no, that one didn't really bother me. And I'd already killed Fred, Tonks and Colin off myself. Lupin's death was a heartbreaker, but sadly, I knew it was coming. Thanks, fuckers who were posting spoilers early. Ditto Snape's death. I also saw Wormtail's death coming, but not because I'd been spoilered for it. It's not called a "life debt" for no reason. And everyone knew Voldemort was going to bite it for good in this one. But, yeah, Hedwig and Dobby. I'm not gonna lie to you, the page got a little blurry when Harry buried Dobby.

The Tonks and Lupin thing was, upon thinking about it, really dark. I mean, he spends nearly a year fending off her advances with the whole "I AM NOT WORTHY OF YOU" defense before finally surrendering in early June 1997. And yet, six weeks later, they're married -- and not terribly long after that, she's pregnant. It reads to me, especially with Lupin's whole "I shouldn't have married her, it was a mistake" freakout, like Tonks was pushing him -- "let's get married, let's have kids" -- and he just went along with it because, as Jo has pointed out, he's so very desperate to be liked. That's -- wow. Not exactly a love story for the ages, is it? It felt a bit contrived to me, like Jo wanted to push the tragedy buttons -- doomed love, war orphan -- without bothering to really provide any sort of buildup or support for it.

The battle at Hogwarts was pretty wicked, though. I kept squeaking delightedly at the awesomeness of it all. Badass!McGoogles! And SuperBadass!Neville! I was not, however, thrilled by the big denoument, mainly because, well, I'd seen it done before and much less hokily. Harry summons the ghosts of all his dead buddies? And then he takes a Killing Curse, but instead of dying he just has a nice chat with Dumbledore like in every freakin other book of the series?

And the epilogue. Jeez-o-pete, the epilogue. I'm sorry, Jo, that was well bad. I've seen too many crappy fanfics that start off JUST LIKE THAT to take it any sort of seriously. I *loathe* Second-Generation Fanfics, particularly the ones where it turns out the kids are just like their parents, lolz, and get into just the same sort of trouble as their parents did at Hogwarts, double lolz! And now that shit is freakin' canon! I mean, srsly. There's James, the brash one -- like Harry! (Or at the very least, his grandfather.) Rose, the smart one, like Hermione! Hugo, the thick one, like Ron! Lily, the feisty one who wants to go to Hogwarts before she's able, like Ginny! Only Albus doesn't fit in, being the Neville of the group. Give fandom a week, we're going to be drowning in horrible fics about the adventures of the Potter and Weasley kids. *vomits everywhere*

On the whole, I think I liked it. I'd have to reread to be sure. There were certainly lots of good bits and things that had me gasping and giggling and [insert synonym for shouting that starts with a g]. I'm just kind of in the whole "it's over?" post-book letdown, plus the incredulity I felt reading the epilogue did sour the experience slightly. The book should have ended with Harry concluding he'd had enough trouble for one lifetime.

I think once seretuscumbia finishes reading my copy, I'll reread and then post a fuller review. It's just too fresh in my mind right now.

Five Phone Calls Martha Jones Made To The Doctor (Doctor Who, PG, not-quite-shippy)

janeway216 — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 04:48:11 GMT

Title: Five Phone Calls Martha Jones Made To The Doctor (And One She Didn’t)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Tenth Doctor, Martha Jones, cameos by others
Word Count: 4368
Rating: PG
Summary: Martha Jones promised to call the Doctor.
Author’s Notes: This pretty much fell out of my head whole after watching “Last of the Time Lords”. As such, spoilery for the entire third series. Doesn’t quite gibe with what we know about the fourth series, mainly because I started writing it before the BBC made all those announcements. Mostly unbetaed, but thanks to powerof3 for putting up with me testing dialogue on her. She also suggested a few things. This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by persons and entities included but not limited to the BBC, Russell T. Davies, Phil Collinson and Julie Gardner. No money is being made from this work. No copyright infringement is intended.

I.

The phone calls start shortly after the Doctor finishes up tidying up the mess aboard the Titanic. It was all a rather bog-standard (and frankly, boring) alien plot to abduct – and consume – the inhabitants of the doomed ship. He’d had some unwanted and completely unnecessary help from his ninth incarnation and, oddly enough, his fourth, and in the end, the ship regrettably went down as scheduled. History, after all, has to be maintained.

He jumps at the mobile the first time it rings, only to disappointedly find that it is a wrong number. The second time it rings, though, it is Martha, giggling uncontrollably and gleefully into his ear when he answers. “Hello?” he says.

“I passed my exams!” she shrieks. “I’m a proper doctor now! Not just an almost doctor anymore, me. A real true proper doctor!”

“Well, that’s good, I suppose,” he says, tucking the phone under his ear while he tweaks two wires underneath the TARDIS console that don’t really need tweaking. “What are you planning to do now?”

“We’re – hush up, Shaz, I’m on the phone – we’re going –” There is a burst of high-pitched female voices in the background. “Hang on,” says Martha. The Doctor sighs and transfers the mobile to his other ear.

Martha comes back on the line. “We’re going down the pub, apparently. Tom says he’ll meet us there and Julia says she knows the bartender, so maybe we won’t end up paying a packet for a few rounds. And Shaz says we’re going dancing after that.”

“Oh,” the Doctor says vaguely, keeping his voice neutral. The wires won’t – “Who’s Tom? Bloke from school, is he?”

“Tom? No, he’s a doctor already. He’s been a doctor already. Pediatrician at St. Basil’s. He’s – I’m sort of seeing him. For a couple months now, actually.”

The Doctor pushes the wires together harder than he intended to and they spark, singeing his fingers, making him quickly drop them. “Oh. Well. That’s,” he says, and then he isn’t really sure what it is, so he lets the sentence trail away. “So you’re not – not calling because –”

“No, Doctor.” Martha’s tone is gentle. “Not yet. I will – it’s just – there’s so much . . . my family and Tom . . . and I’ve been studying for this so long –”

“No, no,” he says. “No, it’s all right. Don’t worry about it. It’s okay. Don’t rush yourself on my account.”

“I will call you when I’m ready,” she promises. “You’d better answer when you see it’s me. I’ll be angry if you don’t.”

“Yeah.”

“Look, I really have to go now, Doctor. I just wanted to let you know. Sort of – keep you up on things. You know, right?”

“Right.” He pauses. “Congratulations, by the way.”

“Thanks. I – I miss you, you know.” He hears the catch in her speech and knows she was about to say something else.

“Yeah. Bye.”

“Goodbye, Doctor.” The phone beeps as Martha rings off. He flips the mobile shut and slips it into his inside suit pocket.

“So . . .” He sighs and looks round the TARDIS, empty except for him. “Barcelona, then, old girl? We’ve never quite managed to make it there.”

II.

The second time Martha calls him, he is running for his life. The Most Holy and Revered Praetor of the Kthiolian Empire has become convinced that the Doctor stole the ancient Klyte Crystal, and – well, all right, he has stolen the Klyte Crystal, but it’s for a good cause and besides, he’s going to put it back when he’s done with it, so there’s really no need to send an entire phalanx of Praetorian Guards after him with orders to shoot on sight.

The mobile rings, and he has a brief and interesting moment trying to juggle the crystal and the phone while skidding around a corner in the Praetor’s castra with seventy-six guards in close pursuit. “Hello?” he says, very nearly dropping the phone as he puts it to his ear.

Martha giggles rather sloppily in his ear. “Doctor,” she slurs and titters some more. He sighs inwardly, cursing stupid humans and their stupid love of ethanol and their stupid slow metabolism and their stupid, stupid primitive brains.

“Yes, Martha,” he says, rounding a corner and – ah, there’s the TARDIS, if he can just reach it before the thundering horde – “Is there a reason you’re calling me, Martha?”

“No,” she says unconcernedly. “I was just – well, I thought I might order a pizza. We were supposed to have dinner, but Tom got called in, third time in a week, I don’t even know what’s going on up there, so I called Julia instead and she brought over some limoncellos and –”

“Is this going somewhere?” he interrupts. Nearly to the TARDIS – nearly there –

“– I don’t even know how much I had – was it . . . maybe it was . . . but – no, it couldn’t have been . . . well, maybe it was. Anyway –”

“Oi you! Get back here!” shouts one of the Praetorian Guards. The Doctor chances a look behind him. The closest one is reaching out, nearly able to grab his collar – he breaks into a sprint, flinging open the door of the TARDIS and barrelling inside. The guards, thwarted, begin banging on the doors and yelling for his head.

In his ear, Martha rambles away, oblivious. “Anyway, I thought I’d order us a pizza, or a curry perhaps, but then when I picked up the phone I saw your number in my phone book – well, my number really, but it’s yours now – and I thought I hadn’t called you in a while, so perhaps I should, and so I called you. Hi!”

He briefly considers simply hanging up on her. He is the sole lord of all of time and space – he’s well above being drunk-dialed by former companions, especially former companions who are drunk enough they might not even remember calling in the first place . . . but then again, this is Martha, who he’s been abominable enough to already. He can put up with her rambling for a few minutes.

“Hello, Martha,” he says, preparing the TARDIS for dematerialization – he’s safe enough inside the TARDIS, but all the thumping on the doors is giving him a headache.

“I really miss you, you know?” she says. “Like I’ll just be standing there, washing the dishes, and I’ll think, I wonder what the Doctor’s up to. Or I’ll be working on charts and I’ll think, I wonder what the Doctor’s doing up there without me.”

“Uh-huh,” the Doctor says, popping the handbrake. The pounding on the door abruptly lessens as the TARDIS slides into the vortex.

“And any time there’s anything big on the news, you know, some kind of international crisis, I’m always glued to the telly, the entire time. Tom makes fun of me for it, says it’s all lies anyway, but I’m watching for you, you know? I mean, I know you don’t like being on the telly, it’s not your thing, you just do your bit and go, you know, but I think – well, maybe someone’ll catch just the edge of him. Just a bit. Or the TARDIS. But I never see you. Are you avoiding Earth?” she demands.

“Only the television cameras.” He checks the coordinates, readjusts the TARDIS’s heading slightly. “I was there just a couple months ago, kicking aliens out of Downing Street. Again.”

“See, I knew there was something funny about that new home secretary!” Martha says triumphantly. “Just seemed off somehow. Tom didn’t believe me. He doesn’t know about . . .”

The Doctor gives her ten seconds, then prompts, “About?”

“About everything that’s out there. You, Shakespeare, end of the universe. I can’t tell him. I can’t tell him anything, really.” Martha goes quiet. The Doctor briefly takes the phone away from his ear, checking to make sure he hasn’t lost signal. Theoretically, she’s still there. “I really love him,” she says after a long pause. “I really, really love him. I mean, I really, really, really love him.”

“I’d gathered.”

She sounds reflective when she speaks again. “I love him so much. But I worry that maybe he doesn’t love me as much as I love him? Like I always tell him I love him before he goes to work. But half the time he doesn’t even say anything back. Just walks away. Is it me, Doctor? Am I the problem?”

“Martha,” he says, “you’re drunk. Put the phone down, drink some water and go lay down.”

She giggles again. “Doctor’s orders. Take two aspirin and call me in the morning. Oh –” in the background a door opens and a soft woman’s voice says something – “I should go. Julia’s asking where the pizza is.”

“Go on, then.”

“I’ll call again,” Martha says, and then she is gone.

The Doctor pockets the mobile again. “No, Martha Jones," he says reflectively, "you weren’t the problem."

III.

The third time Martha calls, he is up to his elbows in TARDIS parts, methodically applying his sonic screwdriver to various fuses, trying to find exactly which one has blown and left him stranded just outside of the Malactar Cluster. He is on his way to the Planetary Fair and Market on Traxid Prime at the request of the Duchess of Traxid, a beautiful woman who does not appreciate tardiness, so the repairs are growing a little frantic.

Martha’s phone starts beeping in his pocket and he hauls himself out of the well, groaning. “Ohh, Martha, you picked a bad time to call for a taxi,” he says to himself. Flipping open the phone, he says, “Hello?”

At first, he hears nothing but a snuffling noise that makes him wonder whether the phone is still working, but just as he is about to hang up, he realizes two things: one, Martha is there, and two, she is crying.

“Martha?” he says, alarmed. “What’s going on?”

She sniffles a few times before forcing out in a tiny voice, “He left me.”

Fantastic. The Doctor’s not sure, but the last time he checked, his job description didn’t include the words agony aunt. Apparently it does now. He rapidly recalls Martha’s personal timeline and tries to figure out who he might be. “Who? Tom, you mean?”

“Wanker, more like.” She laughs slightly, choking on a sob. “We’ve been together for so long, and then this morning he told me he ‘needed some time away from me’ so he could ‘think about things’. What’s there to think about? He either loves me or he doesn’t. Simple as that.”

The Doctor shifts uncomfortably, aware that he isn’t exactly upset by this news. As a matter of fact, he’s feeling rather – relieved? Even gleeful?

Oh dear.

“Well,” he says lamely, “he could just –”

“Bet he’s got another girl,” Martha says darkly. “Bet she’s blonde. And perfect. It’s always the blondes. What’s wrong with me? What’d I do? Oh God, look at me. I get dumped and the first thing I do is ring up a time-travelling alien. I’m pathetic.” The snuffling starts up again.

He sighs inwardly. Comforting women, particularly human women, has never been a skill of his. Usually he just ignores their distress until it goes away, but something tells him – perhaps it’s his overdeveloped sense of self-preservation – that Martha will not accept being ignored.

“Martha Jones,” he says, “Martha, listen to me. You’re a star, I told you that. I meant it then and I mean it now. And if he can’t see that then it’s just his fault.”

There. That sounds good, like what the humans say to each other. He genuinely cares for all his companions – he wouldn’t invite them along with him if he didn’t – but he’s not always very good at communicating that to them, particularly not in their silly little language.

“You’re just saying that.”

“I’m not just saying it. I mean it.”

“Right.” Martha seems, slowly, to be calming down.

“So,” the Doctor says after a pause, “not that I’m not flattered, you know, by the thought. But – what made you decide to call me? Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

“I don’t know!” Martha sounds irritated and defensive. “Because – I don’t know. Because D comes before J in my address book?”

“Ah.” They are both silent. Finally, he says, “You know . . . you could always come with me. I’ve got a vacancy in the TARDIS, and –”

“Doctor –”

“– you know I can always use a helping hand around here, and –”

“Doctor, no.”

“– well, all right, if that’s what you want, I suppose.” He waits. “We could go see Agatha Christie, I never did get around to visiting her . . .”

“No,” Martha repeats, and then softens. “Not right now. I need – I think I need to talk to Tom, see what’s going on with him. And if we really are – well, if that’s the case, then I’ll give you a ring.”

“Can’t say fairer than that, I guess.”

Sounding wistful, Martha says, “When is it where you are?”

“Well . . . I don’t so much have a when right now, I’m sort of – stuck – but the last time I was somewhere with a time, it was the year 8472. Not exactly a good time for Earth. You lot had taken to bombing each other again. What is it with you and all the bombs anyway? Why don’t you all learn that it’s never a good idea?” He stops. “When is it where you are?”

“February,” Martha says. “2011. It’s my birthday in a week. Great timing, Tom.”

Always funny, the Doctor thinks, how their little mayfly lives flit by so fast. For him it’s been no more than a couple of months, six at the most, but two years of her life have already gone since the last time they saw each other.

“Oops –” says Martha. “Call waiting, hang on.” The line goes dead. Resignedly, the Doctor resumes testing fuses. After about six fuses, Martha returns, saying, “That was Tish. I don’t even know how she knows, but she knows. I think I might have a moan at her for a bit instead of you. No offense, Doctor, but you’re not very good at this whole listening while someone moans at you bit.”

“You’re not the first person to notice,” he mutters.

“Call waiting,” Martha says. “I should –”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll ring you again sometime, okay? Goodbye, Doctor,” says Martha, and the phone goes dead.

Frowning, the Doctor carefully slips back the phone into his pocket. “That was odd,” he says to himself, and then shrugs and sniffs. “Huh. Nothing I can do about it. Now . . .” He claps his hands and looks up at the TARDIS. “Let’s get you fixed, old girl, so I can be on my way to Traxid. The Duchess is waiting.”

Around him, the TARDIS hums back into life, the time rotor placidly beginning to pump. He gapes admiringly up at the control console. “Cheeky girl! You stopped just so I’d talk to Martha, didn’t you? You like her, I know. So do I.”

The TARDIS’s thrum sounds rather smug.

IV.

He is in the bath, washing off the grime of an intervention on Laimus II, when he hears Martha’s phone start bleating obnoxiously. He sighs. Let it ring, or – well, it might be important. Fortunately, his suit jacket is hanging on the back of the TARDIS bathroom door, so he jumps out of the shower, hastily wrapping a towel around his waist, and dives for the phone, catching it just before it goes to voicemail. “Hello?” he says.

“Doctor!” Martha says, sounding a little frantic. “Oh, thank God you’re there. How can you kill a Skelix?”

“What do you need to kill a Skelix for?” he asks, confused.

“Just tell me!” she snaps.

“No, really. What do you need to kill a Skelix for? Normally they’re fairly docile.”

In the background he hears screaming, a man’s voice yelling, an animal howling, people running.

“You wouldn’t happen to have disturbed a nesting mother, by any chance? There’s a small colony of them living in the Lake District – it’s really not wise to bother them during nesting season.”

“Oh, for God’s sake – no, I didn’t disturb a nesting mother. Look, will you just tell me how to get rid of this thing?” Martha demands.

“Aw, you don’t want to kill it. That’s not right; it’s only protecting its babies, after all. Plenty of ways to knock it out, though – good old H₂0'll work just fine. Water. Always thought it was funny that they live in the Lake District. All that water, and they can’t touch a drop.”

“Hang on,” says Martha. After a pause, the Doctor hears her yelling, “Jack! Tosh! The hosepipe! Spray it with water!”

“Jack?” he says, even though he knows Martha can’t hear him. “Jack Harkness? Oh, Martha Jones, what are you doing mixed up with Torchwood?” He stands there, water dripping down his legs, and listens to the sound of Jack’s team – plus Martha – battling the Skelix.

Finally, Martha comes back on the line. “It’s down,” she says. “Thanks.”

“There wouldn’t happen to be a horde of Skelix running wild through Cardiff, would there?” he asks suspiciously.

“Not in Cardiff, no.”

“Ah.”

“Maybe in Swansea, more like . . .”

“Ah.”

“And – oh, I think Jack wants to talk to you.” A brief silence, and then Jack is there, all his usual bonhomie firmly in place. “Doctor! Excellent idea Martha had, sticking you with a mobile phone. I should have thought of that myself.”

“Martha says there’s a horde of Skelix running wild through the streets of Swansea,” the Doctor says, keeping it from sounding entirely like an accusation.

“Not a horde! More like one. One very angry Skelix. Someone saw one of them up in the Lake District and thought it might make a good housepet. Can’t imagine why.”

“You’re one to talk!” Martha’s voice says in the background. “That bloody pteranadon scared me senseless the first time I saw it.”

“Anyway, it – that’d be the Skelix, not Myfanwy – got free, and it was just a little bit annoyed about the whole situation. But we took care of it. Like we usually do. Most of the time.”

The Doctor considers, hitching his towel up. “Get where she can’t hear you.”

“Just a moment . . . Okay. We’re clear.”

“What,” the Doctor demands, “is Martha doing in Swansea with Torchwood? It’s bad enough you’ve – infiltrated them – but her too? Did something happen in London? She was safe there.”

“Relax, Doctor,” Jack says, tone level. “I didn’t brainwash her or anything. I needed a new medic after the one I had deliberately walked into a den of Weevils and got himself mauled beyond recognition, and Martha was looking for a change after Tom dumped her. So I offered her a job and she accepted. She’s tough, Martha. She’s done really well so far.”

“If she gets hurt –”

“I know, Doctor. She does a better job of keeping herself safe than any of us could do for her.”

“I mean it.” He pauses, thinks. “Don’t tell her I said anything.”

Jack chuckles. “I won’t. You too, huh?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” the Doctor says, as dignified as he can get, considering that he’s currently sopping wet and wearing nothing but a towel clutched around his waist.

“Sure, Doctor.”

“Put Martha back on, will you?”

A rustling sound, and then Martha says, “Hello?”

“While I’ve got you on the line,” the Doctor says, “what is that awful Crazy Frog ringtone doing on your phone?”

“I didn’t put it on there! Leo did, absolutely ages ago, when that ringtone was everywhere. He told me he thought it was funny.”

“I was trying to change the contrast on the screen and now it’s stuck as your ringtone.”

“Oh dear,” Martha says, giggling. “A catastrophe. Look, we have to take this Skelix back to the Hub before it wakes up. Thanks for the advice, Doctor.”

“Oh, right. Anytime. You know that.”

“Bye,” she says, and hangs up. The Doctor lowers the phone, keenly aware that for the first time, Martha has not promised to call again. And to top it all off, his bath has gone cold.

“Bother,” he says.

V.

Martha’s next call is a long time in coming, long enough that he feels the need for a new companion – or companions, actually. There are two of them: William and Mary Dunbar – “we’ve heard all the jokes, thank you kindly,” Mary says – a pair of siblings in their mid-twenties from turn-of-the-20th-century Manchester. William is an engineer and a tinkerer, fond of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne; Mary is practical, vivacious and slightly bemused by the reality of time travel.

Finally, though, the mobile in his pocket rings. “Hello,” he answers.

“Hello, Doctor,” says Martha.

“Martha! Good to hear from you. Finally decided you’re ready to come back aboard the TARDIS? Great. I have to warn you though, it might be a bit crowded with you here. I have some other friends traveling with me at the moment –”

“That’s not actually why I called you,” Martha says, and the Doctor can hear suppressed glee trembling in her voice. “Doctor, I wanted to tell you . . . Tom and I are getting married!”

The news hits him like a punch in the gut, which is strange, because up until thirty seconds ago he was sure his reaction to news like this would be total happiness. He blinks a few times, runs a hand through his hair and finally says, “I thought you and Tom broke up. You moved to Cardiff and started working for Torchwood.”

“I still work for Torchwood. But six months ago Tom and I got back together, so I moved back to London. His Majesty’s Government thought it was a good idea to finally rebuild Torchwood One.”

“I don’t,” he mutters.

“It’s different now, though. It’s not bad. Not with me around. We’ve gone public, we have.” Martha switches gears. “Anyway, you should come round for dinner sometime, maybe meet Tom. You’re definitely invited to the wedding.”

“I don’t know,” says the Doctor, “weddings and I really don’t mix. I tend to bring – catastrophe – with me whenever I go to one. Human sacrifice – killer robot Santas – that sort of thing.”

“At least come for dinner? I really want Tom to meet you.”

“Sure.”

“And just because I’m getting married doesn’t mean I can’t travel with you ever again, right? I mean, the TARDIS travels in time and everything. I could spend a week with you and come back the second after I left and it would be like I wasn’t even gone. You know?”

“Right.” The Doctor idly fiddles with some of the switches on the TARDIS’s console. “I should go,” he says. “We’re about to materialize. I told William I’d take him to see the year five million. He insisted.”

“All right,” Martha says easily. “Don’t forget – wedding in June 2014. Save the date. You’d definitely better be there.”

“I definitely better will be,” says the Doctor, and he’s not sure if he’s lying or not.

“Seriously. Dinner sometime. Give me a ring.” Martha rings off.

The Doctor holds the mobile in his hand, staring at it until Mary and William burst into the console room, all good humor and casual demands to see something interesting. “Rome?” he suggests. “Pompeii? Ooh, maybe not Pompeii.” And they are off and running, eventually headed for 24th century San Francisco.

Much later, the Doctor makes a note in his thousand-year diary for June 2014.

VI.

It is night aboard the TARDIS. Molly and Will bunked down hours ago, but the Doctor is still up, sitting in the console room and reading the TARDIS’s repair manual. Something is itching his time senses, just enough to keep him from sleeping properly. He is unable to identify what it is, though, which unsettles him.

He is chortling his way through a discussion of the proper way to flush the TARDIS’s meson scrubbers – obviously written by someone who had never operated a TARDIS – when Martha’s phone goes off. He fishes it out of his pocket, flipping it open and answering. “Hello?”

“Is this the Doctor?” an unfamiliar man’s voice says.

“Usually, yes,” he says. “Who is this?”

“This is Tom Milligan. Martha’s husband.” His voice sounds raw and tired.

“I missed the wedding,” mutters the Doctor. “I was going to go. I meant to go.”

Milligan continues, “Martha left instructions that you were to be called if something – Look, do you have a name or anything? All Martha’s note says is ‘call the Doctor’ which is kind of weird, you know.”

“It’s just the Doctor. She wanted you to call me if something?”

“If something happened, right. Um . . .” Milligan hesitates and the Doctor holds his breath, knowing what Milligan is about to tell him. After a painful moment, Milligan finally says, “There was an accident yesterday evening. Martha was crossing the street on her way home from work, and some idiot going too fast – he says he didn’t see her, but how could he not see her? She was wearing white, there were lights – anyway, she, um, uh . . .”

Milligan’s voice fails him. Gently, the Doctor says, “Got hit.”

“Yeah,” Milligan says, sounding rather broken. “It was over pretty soon after that. She died on the way to the hospital, they told me. We haven’t even been married a year yet. Our anniversary’s next month.”

The Doctor feels rather broken himself. This is what was troubling his time senses, he knows. He always feels it when a companion passes – Barbara, Jo, Harry. He hadn’t expected Martha to go, not so young. Not without ever coming back to the TARDIS. He had their next trip all planned out, and it was going to be – well, all right, maybe he didn’t have their next trip totally planned out, but it was going to be fantastic. And now –

“I’m sorry,” he tells Milligan. “I’m so, so sorry. She was exceptional. Wonderful. Brilliant.”

“She was the best thing that ever happened to me,” Milligan says, his grief echoing down the line.

The Doctor pauses. “Did Martha ever tell you how she and I met?”

“She meant to, but she never had the chance . . .”

He begins the story. “Remember when there was that terrorist attack on Royal Hope Hospital? Martha was there. And so was I . . .”

-30-

Reviews are always appreciated.

the 216 wishes to clarify something

janeway216 — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 10:47:20 GMT

It may not be immediately obvious any more, what with the wide variety of public posts available, but my journal is still friends-only. I only unlock fandom-related posts; all personal content is still under lock. If you have friended me and would like me to friend you in return, please mosey over to this post and say hey (and take some time to admire the awesome, awesome banner, because it is very awesome.) I don't bite and I've never turned anyone down yet.

Disclaimer: None of my personal content is particularly interesting. I've heard people read portions of my journal to themselves to help them fall asleep.

the 216 commits Whofic again

janeway216 — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 21:50:19 GMT

I have a longer one in the pipeline, but it needs polish and love for great justice, so here is a weensy small one instead.

The Doctor waited.

The phone never rang.

The next one will make up for this one?

Doctor Who: 3.13 "Last of the Time Lords"

janeway216 — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 06:59:14 GMT

What. The fuck. WAS. that shit?

Just . . . what the fuck, Rusty. You need to talk to Aaron Sorkin about the Right Way to write when high on crack. And possibly ask him where he gets his. That fucking Welsh shit you're smoking just is not working.

Yeah, okay, so the first part wasn't that bad if a bit cliched. Phenomenal cosmic powers, and the best the Master can do is putting the Doctor in the doghouse, enslaving the Jones family and chaining Jack up? The whole "put a guy on a chain and treat him like a dog until he goes insane and thinks he's actually a dog" has been done before by people far more evil than the Master. Plus, the Master hits Lucy. Good God. How much more cliche can you get? Try harder next time, Rusty, I think you forgot a couple. On the other hand, Badass!Martha, cute doctor guy, I'm almost willing to call it a wash. But not quite.

But then it just started to get stupid. Escape attempt? Not bad, but I knew it was doomed when I looked at the time elapsed on the scrubber bar. And then the Doctor turned into fucking Dobby the House-Elf. And then it turned out the idea I hoped really, really wasn't the case ended up being the case -- the only part I was wrong about was that Utopia wasn't a trap built by the Master. Of course, I think pretty much everyone guessed that the Toclafane were the humans that went to Utopia.

So a gun that kills Time Lords dead. I'd rather have had that than what we got. But, er, if the gun was just a decoy, then where the hell did it come from? And then, to paraphrase everyone on the Internet, I hate that the plan is that Martha gets everyone to believe in the Doctor on the Doctor's say-so. For one, it takes away from all the hard work she put in for that plan. He sits up on Valiant, doing what? Being old and ignoring the Master when he taunts him. And she is down there busting her ass, criss-crossing the globe and risking death every freakin' day but in the end she's just doing what she's told, the grunt work, he's the one that gets to be the Magical Flying Jesus.

And about that. His big plan is to become fucking Magical Flying Jesus? Rusty, you are fucking SHITTING me. We spend a whole year on "thinking you're a god is bad, you need someone to stop you" and then oh no, in the end it turns out that's okay, he actually BECOMES a god so it's all justified. We even get fucking crucifixion imagery and then, oh and then of course there's the kicker: The Doctor: "You know what I'm going to say." Me: "I forgive you." The Doctor: " . . . I forgive you." AGGH AGGH AGGH you want to toss in a "He knows not what he does" while you're at it there Rusty?

*bashes head against keyboard*

And as others have astutely pointed out, the whole Magical Flying Jesus thing isn't even what saved the world. JACK is the one who saved the world by taking a machine gun to the Paradox Machine. So the Doctor got to be a god and didn't even really DO ANYTHING.

Death of the Master. Now that was well-done. Tennant and Simm were just giving it all they had. And the whole bit with the Doctor demanding that the Master live, dammit, was fab -- first, it was wonderfully slashtastic (hooray for hoyay!) and second I can totally believe that the Doctor is so desperate just to have another Gallifreyan alive, even if he is completely evil and keeps trying to kill lots of people, that he would beg the Master to stay alive. Although it's a little pathetic that he tries to convince the Master to stay by in essence saying, "Remember that time you tried to kill a bunch of people and I stopped you? Oh, and remember that time you tried to kill a bunch of people and I stopped you?"

But of course, silly Doctor. The Master never stays dead. Not even things like running out of regenerations, being dropped in a black hole and sucked into the Eye of Harmony can kill the Master. I was sort of hoping that when Lucy shot the Master it was because she'd had enough of the abuse and was taking her chance to kill him -- but I think the last shot of the woman's hand picking up the ring makes it clear it was some sort of worst-case scenario escape plan he had cooked up and had her follow. They spent an awful lot of time on Lucy's hands and her long red fingernails earlier in the episode. If you show a gun on stage in the first act, it had better be fired in the third.

Of course Jack goes back to T'wood Three, even though the Doctor is suddenly totally over his racism. This must be his way of saying "oh, by the way, thanks for technically saving the world, even though in the grand scheme of things all you really did was take a machine gun to my TARDIS and Martha was way awesomer than you but I can never acknowledge this fact because she is not Rose." Jack is probably wise to decline, though. "I kept thinking about that team of mine," he says, and politely doesn't add "They fuck up so many things with me around. They'd probably blow up the entire planet if I left them to their own devices for five minutes." "Responsibility," he adds, and again politely doesn't say, "I have to keep them from killing us all." And then of course the Doctor neuters Jack's vortex manipulator. I think this is less because he doesn't want Jack going anywhere in time and space, and more because he doesn't want T'wood Three going anywhere in time and space. Christ, they're bad enough on one planet in one time. Also so people don't watch Torchwood and go ". . . why don't they just use the vortex manipulator to fix this shit?" And Jack wonders about getting older. He must age really slowly cause you know, he lived 120 years on Earth and only looks two years older than he was the last time we saw him. Funny, that.

And so Jack is the Face of Boe. This makes no sense at all. Rusty, put DOWN the crack pipe. It certainly explains how the Face went from "some guy the Ninth Doctor met at a party" to "the Tenth Doctor's best friend" in the course of three appearances. Also, if Jack is unkillable -- if even having all the life force sucked out of him by the Devil couldn't kill him -- then how could running out of gas/giving his life energy to open up New New York kill him? He's probably still there on the floor in the New New York Senate, constantly reviving, choking to death in the oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere and then dying again.

And then the Martha thing. AGGH AGGH AGGH AGGH AGGH. I know why Rusty wrote it this way -- this way Martha's not in the Christmas special, leaving room for a big-name star to be the guest companion, and then the last five minutes of the special is the Doctor's phone ringing because she's ready to be picked up. It's just awful. Contrary to all Rusty's talk, nothing was resolved as re: the unrequited love. He doesn't love her. She's still in love with him. She leaves because no matter how wonderful she is or how awesome, she will never ever be good enough to love. I suppose the only good thing was that she had enough self-esteem to walk instead of fawning over him hopelessly and hoping that maybe today would be the day when he finally realized. Which means I just spent a year falling in love with Martha Jones and watching the writers continually shit all over her FOR ABSOLUTELY NO REASON. Because she walked away with NOTHING. Oh, I'm sorry, the Doctor thanked her and gave her a heartfelt hug. Well that TOTALLY makes up for the two months spent doing hard manual labor and enduring constant insults as a maid in 1913 while he faffed about and lived the good life. That TOTALLY makes up for the God knows how long she spent working in a shop and supporting his lazy ass while he stayed home and fiddled with electronic bits in 1969. And that COMPLETELY makes up for the LONG, HARD YEAR SHE JUST SPENT CONTINUALLY RISKING HER ASS FOR HIM. For Christ's sake. She didn't even take the opportunity to march over, lay a sizzling kiss on him and THEN walk away. No, she wimps out and picks him on the cheek.

Oh and then the fucking Titanic thing. The Doctor's reaction -- "WHAT." -- totally mirrors my own. I suppose this may be the TARDIS's way of showing him how pissed off she is that he just let Martha and all her awesomeness walk away. I'm not quite sure how getting all smashed up figures into the plan, I'm just looking at the part where she flew him into the path of a really huge ocean liner so he could get squished. Beyond that, IT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE. It was the NINTH DOCTOR who was aboard the Titanic, he SAID SO. So unless they've talked Chris Eccleston into coming back for a guest spot and they're doing a The N Doctors sort of thing, this is another case of Rusty completely contradicting established canon just because he's Rusty and he can.

I can live with no Martha in the Christmas special. But if there's no Martha in Series 4, I am flying to Cardiff and putting a brick through Rusty's window. I will do it, I swear. YOU HEAR THAT, DAVIES? MARTHA BETTER BE COMING BACK OR YOU WON'T HAVE ANY WINDOWS LEFT!

Specs count: Whatever.
Saxon count: Fucking whatever.

~~Next week~~ Christmas: Titanic. THE FUCKING TITANIC.

Doctor Who: 3.12 "The Sound of Drums"

janeway216 — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 05:18:30 GMT

AGGH ZOMG I have to wait a whole week to find out how this ends?!?!?

- So, points for whoever called that the Doctor would repair Jack's vortex manipulator to get them off Mxyzptlk or wherever the hell it was. Of course, that's like half the fandom, but go on, take your points, I'm feeling generous.
- Rusty is clearly a Ten/Martha/Jack shipper. Look at all the grabbing on and hugging they do. The Doctor, on the other hand, is clearly a Doctor/Master shipper. He's all disgusted at "the Master and his wife!" Poor Doctor, it's okay, you know the Master really loves you best.
- Speaking of, I *heart* the Simm Master. He is totally the rock star Master. He's completely batshit but at the same time completely rational and this whole Prime Minister thing is all just a game that he's amusing himself with and yeah, okay, so he's evil, but he's a lot of fun to watch. He cracks jokes! He makes funny faces! He gives Buddy Christ thumbs upses! He mugs for the audience! I have to give credit to nostalgia_lj for making the comparison first: he's totally Faith to the Doctor's Buffy. (Okay, actually nos pinged the Doctor as Angel. But the Doctor is totally in love with himself so I don't see why he can't be both. This would make Martha Xander and Jack Willow y/n?)
- Oh no! The Master has Tish! . . . That's totally the same suit she was wearing in "Smith and Jones".
- I had to snicker during the Cabinet scene as it brought the line from the Dead Ringers parody of Torchwood to mind -- "What have we got?" "A MacBook with lots of stickers on." --because that pretty much describes every computer shown in this scene. (Well, if you look at the scene with the Master tapping out the drum rhythm, there is an undisguised MacBook there, so I guess they ran out of Archangel stickers.)
- "Jack, who are you phoning?" "Just some friends of mine." Noooo Jack don't call T'wood Three in, they will fuck everything up.
- Oh yawn, time for the Obligatory Infodump. Oh and look it's time for the Obligatory Celebrity Appearances in the Series Finale. Last year's was better, and I don't even watch EastEnders. Oh and look, it's the Obligatory Flashback Sequence! Ahh. It's just not a proper Doctor Who series finale without these anymore.
- There is only one way to explain Martha's horrifically tacky flat: she must have appeared on Changing Rooms at some point before meeting the Doctor. It explains so much. Aqua. Painted waves on the wall. Tiny decorative mirrors in enormous black frames. It screams Laurence Llewelyn-Bowes (or possibly Anna Ryder Richardson, after a while all the designers start to blend together in a kaleidoscope of awful.)
- I admit it, I howled with laughter during the scene when the Master kept opening the door to check on the progress of Vivienne Rook's death.
- Why does Lucy cross her fingers when Saxon says "The government told you nothing"?
- Score one for Martha telling the Doctor to stuff it. Score another point for sniffing out that Francine's line was bugged. And score like a kajillion points for Clive for not toeing the party line and for warning Martha off, and for realizing that something is wrong with Saxon. I love the moment when Martha yells "This is your fault!" at the Doctor. And the look of dawning horror on her face as she realizes Saxon is on the line.
- agghsdjfkl the phone conversation. Hooray for hoyay! But also for the glee of watching two talented actors act their little socks off, especially considering that each of them is just reciting lines into a handset. IT SO BRILLIANT AND SLASHY AGGGH THERE NOT WORDS. . . . The Master doesn't know about Gallifrey. Aww. It okay Master, the Doctor wants to make you all better. "I ran. I ran so far --" he says. What the fuck does A Flock of Seagulls have to do with this? And then "Are you asking me out on a date?" YES, MASTER, YES HE IS, YES.
- And we have the Obligatory Roundup of World News Coverage . . . and then Rusty subverts himself by cutting to the Teletubbies! AWESOME
- "I thought you were going to say [the Master] was your secret brother or something." "You've been watching too much TV." RUSTY ILU
- Hey look it's Gallifrey! An obviously CGI Gallifrey, but there it is! And a big old Gallifrey infodump! And the Seal of Rassilon! And Gallifreyan formal wear! *rambles incoherently about how the Doctor is getting positively chatty on the subject because his Big Angsty Emo about the death of his home planet has been lessened by the presence of ~~his true love~~ another Time Lord*
- Oh hot damn, not only do we get T'wood-y music, we get a full-on T'wood logo! Interesting to see what Jack considers "in [the Doctor's] honor." I don't know about you, but I certainly think assembling a team of fuckwits and fuck-ups who inevitably destroy everything they come in contact with is a great way to honor the Doctor. Give yourself a hand, Jack. You've done a wonderful job of rebuilding T'wood. They've gone from an incompetent team of bumblers to an incompetent team of bumblers.
- "It's like when you fancy someone and they don't even know you exist." ". . . You too, huh." So is this the reason for Martha's Unrequited Love? So they can make cheap shots about it in the finale? Yeah, the line had me snickering, but this had all better be Going Somewhere. (Also, the Doctor clearly does not know what it is like to fancy someone who doesn't know he exists. The Master is obviously very aware that the Doctor exists.)
- There's some sort of meta on the way that the American president keeps trying to take charge of everything, but I can't quite figure out what . . . And Arthur Coleman Winters is not Not!Bush, but president-elect, which sets this story sometime between December 15, 2008 and January 20, 2009. Martha says it's only four days since the Doctor picked her up, which means she's not quite from the present day (and which also means that while Torchwood's forgotten the one-year gap, Doctor Who is respecting it.) Interesting, though. It means this series is set in the dead of winter, but people were running around outside without coats during "The Lazarus Experiment" and looked quite comfortable.
- And speaking of weirdness in time -- all right, so the Ninth/Tenth Doctors are around 900, more or less -- cheeky sod keeps lying about his age -- and the Fourth Doctor was 750 years old, more or less, and the Second Doctor was 450 years old, more or less, which means the First Doctor was, dunno, 300? More or less. So how come adding 100 years to the Doctor's life makes him look like he's teetering on the edge of the grave, when his first incarnation was far older and yet only looked about 60?

Specs count: HUZZAH!
Saxon count: HUZZAH!

Next week: It's Badass!Martha! HUZZAH!

eta: I meant to mention this and forgot. It's good to see that the Doctor is finally realizing the consequences of his temper tantrum in The Christmas Invasion that toppled Harriet Jones. If you'd let well enough alone, you might not be having this problem, hmm, Doctor? (Or the Master might just have had her killed. 50/50 shot. Either way, this isn't the way history happened according to the Ninth Doctor. Whoops.)

I do not even want to know how old those jelly babies the Master filched from the TARDIS are.

And [SPOILERS AHOY]so anyone want to speculate on what the Toclafane are? I'm kind of wondering if they don't tie into whatever Utopia was (if indeed Utopia was anything other than a MacGuffin.) There's this little gem from the BBC Press Office:

"Earth has been conquered and the Master rules supreme, with the Doctor a helpless prisoner, in the final episode of Russell T Davies's Doctor Who.The entire human race has been reduced to slavery, as the mighty warships of a new Time Lord Empire rise from the ashes. Only Martha Jones can save the world..."

"The mighty warships of a new Time Lord Empire"? Mighty warships. Time Lord Empire. They gotta come from somewhere. My vote? Earth 2008 wasn't the Master's first stop. He built Utopia first, which is like a Human -> Toclafane (or possibly Human -> Time Lord, although I'm less sure about this, Time Lord Empire might just mean "The Master's Empire") conversion plant, and then he went to Earth 2008 to wreak havoc. I am torn whether to hope this is truly the case or not. If I am right, score points for being right, but I'd rather I'm not, because, well, it's not very good, is it? Maybe putting a guess like this down on paper will ensure that it's NOT what happens. Let us hope so.[/SPOILERS]

Also, my brain is apparently slightly overloaded with awesome because I found myself idly tapping out the drum rhythm without even realizing I was doing so. MUST VOTE SAXON IN 2008. WRITE-IN BALLOT.

Doctor Who: 3.11 "Utopia"

janeway216 — Sun, 17 Jun 2007 00:51:21 GMT

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH.

Jack! A main title credit for Barrowman! And the Torchwood-y music when he was dead on the planet! Jack and Martha bonding over what a shit the Doctor is at times! And Awesome!Jack instead of StupidMopeyBroodyLoserAngelWannabeTorchwood!Jack! And the Doctor telling him to stop flirting all the time!

AGGGGGGGH DED FROM AWESOME

Actually, my only problem is that the anvils were laid on so thick before now that while I did a lot of squealing and gasping, nothing revealed in this episode was really a surprise, more of just a "well, good to see that guess is right". As soon as they started going on about "you are not alone" we knew there was another Time Lord around and with the ever-escalating references to "I'm the last of my kind. I'm the last of the Time Lords" then we knew it was the Master -- who else would be worth all the fussing about and denial? (Although I wouldn't mind seeing a Romana III turn up. :-( ) The bit where the Doctor explained to Jack how Rose had made him immortal -- while it's a bit satisfying to hear the Doctor admit that St. Rose fucked something up -- hell, I figured that one out during Torchwood's run. Can't you people leave us some surprises? :-(

OKAY I GO BACK TO SQUEEING NOW EEEEEEEEEEEEE

Saxon count: WHO CARES HERE HE IS
Specs count: WHO CARES

IS IT CAN BE NEXT WEEK TIEM NAO?

the 216 posts Whofic!

janeway216 — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 07:49:28 GMT

This is something new for me, I've never managed to write Whofic before and will probably never manage it again. (Also, I probably shouldn't be writing reams of Whofic as I have other, more pressing WIPs not to mention seven essays in the next eight weeks.) But! For the moment I am proud to present 470 words of exceedingly plotless and mostly useless Whofic.

Spoily if you're not up to date on watching Series 3. Also vaguely spoilery for That One Bit Of Speculation Everyone's Heard About. Can be read as shippy if you prefer.

“A shopgirl.”

“What’s that?” said the Doctor, fiddling with the television aerial.

“I’m a shopgirl. I sell shoes. For a living. I’m stuck in 1969, selling shoes.” Martha Jones kicked off her own shoes and collapsed on their sofa, which threatened to collapse itself. “This is all your fault.”

“Oh now that’s hardly . . .” He trailed off, twiddling the aerial. Martha watched as he seemed to perform some voodoo dance, twitching the ears back and forth. “Do you think that looks better?”

“Compared to what?”

“I dunno. Before?”

“Looks about the same. Why couldn’t you be the one to get a job? Why’s it got to be me? My feet are killing me.”

The Doctor looked over his shoulder. “Really? Because if there’s – I could –”

“No, Doctor.” Martha grabbed the Radio Times off the coffee table and started thumbing through it. “I still think you’re the one needs a job.”

“A job? Seriously? Can you picture me working? Honestly?”

Martha tried and found that she couldn’t.

“I mean, really. Me, working.” The Doctor sniffed. “I’m too pretty to work. Can you imagine a face like this behind the counter at the chemist’s? Telling people ‘thank you, that’ll be two pounds fifty’? Giving people their paracetemol and their analgesics and their digitalis? Mind . . .” He looked reflective. “I’ve always sort of fancied being a postman. That might not be so bad like.”

“You can’t read people’s mail, Doctor. It isn’t allowed.”

“Oh, well never mind then. Life of leisure it is. Besides, I’m around now. Can’t have myself running into me. That never ends well. Plus there’s UNIT . . . Torchwood . . . Better to stay put and out of trouble. There, I think that’s the best it gets.” He scrambled away from the television set, nearly knocking over the coffee table.

Martha tossed the Radio Times aside. “What are we watching?”

“News! Very important, Martha Jones. Have to keep up with what’s going on in the world around us.”

“In case your grand plan doesn’t work and we’re stuck here?”

“My grand plan will work! It’s already worked. Several times over for all we know. Unless it doesn’t work, in which case yes, we’re watching the news because we’re stuck here.” The Doctor plopped onto the sofa, putting his feet up on the coffee table.

“That’s reassuring.” Martha poked the Doctor in the arm. “You’d better find a way to get us out of here. I don’t want to live through the 70s. I’ve seen pictures. That’s bad enough.”

“Aww, they’re not so bad, the 1970s. Great music. If it helps any, I lived through them once already.”

“Oh, really?” said Martha. “What were they like?”

“Can’t tell you, really. Mainly I remember a lot of monsters. And . . .”

“And?”

The Doctor’s face closed like a door. “Never you mind, Martha Jones. Never you mind.”

A tip of the hat to nostalgia_lj, whose style was something of an inspiration, and to everyone who expressed a desire for post-"Blink" fic -- can't say as this is very satisfying, but the comments did at least drive me to attempt to write Whofic.