"When the captain's son gets vaporized, you just know that you're not getting the whole story... The audience knows that no kid is ever going to die on Doctor Who."
-Me, reviewing Curse of the Black Spot
When I wrote those words, I had no idea that the very next piece of science-fiction I watched would not only kill a child, but would also feature a character committing infanticide.
Battlestar Galactica was originated back in 1978 as the very first Star Wars ripoff, and the very first television show to cost a million dollars an episode. Guess which one got it cancelled. After 25 years and at least one aborted attempt, it was brought back by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick. Unlike Doctor Who, the revived BSG was a complete reimagining, re-casting every role and re-telling the entire story, with significant changes. An extremely long miniseries - basically a made-for-TV movie split into two parts - acted as a pilot for an actual show, which quickly followed.
The story begins with some background information that will be familiar to anyone who's seen Terminator or The Matrix, and visual effects that will be familiar to anyone who's seen Firefly. The Cylons were created by man, then they fought them, then there was a peace. An armistice station was built, but the Cylons never bother to show up. Until one day they do, in the form of two glorified toasters and one incarnation of sex. And then they blow up the station.
Cut to the eponymous Galactica, which is about to be decomissioned. In the course of one four-minute-long shot, we rove a bunch of corridors and are introduced to ace-pilot-with-an-additude-problem Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, Commander Adama, Colonel Tigh, and a bunch of bridge officers. Sorry, "CIC Officers." Galactica doesn't have a Star Trek- style bridge, but rather an aircraft-carrier-style Combat Information Center that functions as the ship's nerve center. There's no Captain's Chair, no viewscreen, and no ship's computer voiced by the creator's wife.
Down in the hangar bay, we meet two more really important characters, Tyrol and Boomer. Tyrol's Galactica's crew chief, and Boomer is a pilot. They're fraternizing. We also meet two slightly-less-major characters, Helo and Cally. Helo is Boomer's ECO, and Cally is another mechanic. Neither gets much to do now, but they'll both be important later on. The Miniseries has to introduce an imperial ton of characters, and for the most part it suceeds at getting their roles and personalities across in just a few lines of dialogue. Somewhere in the background we also meet a character named Prosna, but damn if I actually remembered who he was.
Cut to Planet Caprica. Sex incarnate wanders around a market and kills an infant by snapping its neck. Okay, that description doesn't quite do the scene justice. The last time we saw this woman, she was getting herself blown up on a space station, and now she's wandering around, apparently looking a bit confused. She mentions, somewhat amazed, that the infant's neck is capable of supporting its head. After the deed is done, she looks distressed. What was she doing? Examining human frailties? Experiencing death firsthand? She doesn't act like a serial baby-killer, and that's probably why I didn't have too much of a problem with that scene. Or maybe I'm just a sociopath.
Starbuck, Boomer, Helo, Tigh, and the Galactica's CAG play a card game. When Starbuck wins, Tigh knocks the table over and Starbuck punches him. This was one of two scenes in the miniseries that I didn't really get the first time; in retrospect, the scene's trying to tell us that Tigh's a drunk who is estranged from his wife, and Starbuck likes riling him up, even though she's on a hair trigger herself.
Back on Caprica, we meet Dr. Gaius Baltar, the Smartest Man Alive, played by an actor who looks uncannily like DS9's Dr. Julian Bashir (who just happened to be the Smartest Man Alive in that show). Sex incarnate walks in; they get it on and her spine starts to glow. As if we didn't know this woman was in no way normal. It eventually transpires that she is both a robot and a woman, a Cylon called Number Six (yes, they picked the number as a reference to that Number Six, and yes, I'll be calling her Number Sex from time to time). She's been using Baltar to gain access to Caprica's defense mainframe. She eventually tells him this, along with the fact that a Cylon attack is about to go down. But for some reason she seems rather interested in ensuring his survival. In the commentary, the producers mention that Tricia Helfer had virtually no acting experience prior to this, and it later transpires that they were writing the Cylon plan by the seat of their pants. I wonder which contributed more to Six's strange behavior. No, I'm not knocking her acting ability here; in fact I'm impressed that an inexperienced actress delivered such a good performance for a character whose motivation was apparently unknown even to her at the time.
Starbuck gets thrown in the brig for striking a superior officer. Adama's son, Lee, turns up for the Galactica's decomissioning ceremony. Unlike virtually everyone else, Lee (call sign: Apollo), doesn't have a lot of respect for the old man. At first I figured that this was just because he didn't like always being compared to Commander Adama, which brings us directly to the second scene in the miniseries that I'm ashamed to say I completely missed the point of. Lee visits Starbuck in the brig; it's been two years since "the funeral," and Starbuck and Adama still talk about it two or three times a year. We've already seen that Starbuck and Adama have a special relationship going on, and it's in this scene that we actually learn it, as well as why Lee has such a big stick up his ass when it comes to his father. Lee's brother Zak died two years ago; he and Starbuck were an item. After the accident, Adama treated Starbuck like a daughter. This isn't made explicit in this scene, but it's pretty obviously inferred. I was just being oblivious or something when I saw it the first time. Shame on me.
Lee visits the Commander and has an argument about how his brother wasn't cut out to be a pilot; he's upset because Adama pushed Zak too hard to do something he couldn't do, and that's what led to Zak's death. Lee is additionally saddled with having to fly his father's Viper during the decommissioning ceremony - as if he needs more baggage.
We meet Secretary of Education Laura Roslin, who has just been diagnosed with cancer. It's not the Venusian Flu, it's cancer. This is just one example of the realism in this series compared to other sci-fi shows. (As an aside, you can see a Firefly-class ship at the very beginning of her first scene.) She travels to Galactica to try to get it set up to be a museum, but Adama won't abide networked computers. (Not going to be an issue, really, unless Adama's going to continue to command Galactica after it becomes a museum.)
The decomissioning ceremony goes smoothy, although Adama ad-libs his speech and winds up confessing his sadness about the loss of his son. Roslin's ship leaves to head back to Caprica.
And now that every single character has finally been introduced, everything goes to hell. The Cylons attack; Galactica's CAG is killed, along with most of the Viper pilots. Boomer and Helo make an emergency landing on Caprica, where they're accosted by refugees. Their ship is fixed, but Helo gives up his seat to Dr. Baltar.
Baltar will spend the rest of the miniseries hallucinating about Six and trying desperately to save his own ass; he's the one who (unwittingly) gave the Cylons everything they needed to wipe out humanity. He gets trapped in a web of his own lies and winds up getting an apparently innocent man marooned just to save his own hide. It's all very interesting to watch, and there are moments during his epic speed lying that he actually seems to channel the Doctor - but that could just be me, since this was just before Doctor Who came back, and none of the Original Seven were quite that manic.
Here's the thing; up to this point, we have two protagonists that it's hard to like; Apollo has a massive stick up his ass and Baltar's a cowardly liar. The main protagonist, Adama, hasn't really done that much to deserve all the praise the other characters heap on him. Yes, he's a father to his men and all that, but at this point he's also an emotionally scarred man who's apparently partly responsible for his son's death. Tigh's a drunk, and Starbuck has a serious attitude problem. Six is evil (and relegated to being a hallucination of the aforementioned cowardly liar for the rest of the miniseries and most of the first batch of episodes). Of the main characters, only Roslin would appear to be completely likeable on paper, and even she comes across as a meddling bureaucrat in her conversation with Adama (whereas he comes off as a Luddite). And yet it's hard not to keep watching. That's because, with the possible exception of Baltar, none of these characters are actually unlikeable; they're all flawed people. They're not perfect Starfleet folk. And despite their flaws, we care about them.
(Sidebar: I listed Tigh as a main character and didn't mention Boomer, even though Grace Park appears in the main credits and Michael Hogan is listed as a guest star once we get to the series proper. Boomer's role in this story is pretty much simply to get Baltar onto the Galactica. That's about it. She's having a relationship with the crew chief, but her character doesn't seem to be nearly as fleshed out as Tigh's. Again, that's nothing against the actress; there's just not that much to her character yet. The only reason I can think of why she gets star billing is the fact that she's revealed to be a Cylon at the end.)
Roslin gets word of the Cylon attack and commandeers the passenger ship she's on. She starts rescuing stranded civilians, but her "I'm in charge" attitude annoys a reporter, who tries to get Apollo (who was along to escort them) to put her in her place. The first scene between Apollo and Roslin is awesome; you think Apollo's going to shut this upstart bureaucrat down, but he very quickly realizes that "the lady's in charge." This is the scene where I started warming up to Apollo, and I think that this was a deliberate choice on the part of the writers. They're setting up the Roslin-Adama conflict. Roslin brings out the good in Apollo; she's a leader he can look up to and respect, whereas all he can see when he looks at his father is the accident that cost him a brother.
A Cylon attack on Galactica gets Starbuck out of the brig and forces Tigh to vent part of the ship, killing 85 people on Tyrol's crew in order to save the ship. This is where Prosna dies, and Tyrol and Cally duly mourn him, but because he had so little screen time before this, I kind of forgot who he was. This is the first of two tough decisions in the miniseries, and, like the second one, it's nice to get to see some of the consequences of that decision. It also explains why Adama keeps Tigh around; from a purely storytelling standpoint, Adama can't be the father-to-his-men-type figure if he personally makes these kinds of decisions. Instead, he lets Tigh make the call and then stands by him on it.
With all 42 (!) people ahead of her in the line of sucession dead, Roslin becomes President of
what little is left. Meanwhile, everyone ahead of Adama in the military chain of command is also dead, so he takes command of the military. He orders everyone to rendezvous with him. Roslin then orders him to rendezvous with her. "Ask him how many hospital beds he has available and how soon he can join us." Again, we never saw this sort of military-civilian conflict even on Deep Space Nine.
Adama and Apollo bitch at each other over the radio (sorry, "wireless"). Adama refuses to accept Roslin's authority, insisting that she's just the Secretary of Education. Apollo refuses to rendezvous with Galactica. The whole thing is rendered moot when two Cylon raiders appear. Adama desperately yells for his son to get out of there, but the civilian ships are apparently destroyed.
What surprised me the most about Part 1 of the miniseries was how little of the Cylon attack we actually saw. We saw a couple of nukes go off on Caprica, and we saw one fighter squadron get wiped out. Most of the rest of it was relayed to Galactica's CIC, in much the same way that the first half of the Borg battle in Star Trek: First Contact is heard but not seen. I applaud this decision; not only did it save considerably on the budget, but it gave us more time for character... well, it's too early to say "development," so let's say "exploration" instead.
It's interesting to watch this unfold from Adama's perspective, even though what we get is more Roslin/Apollo (not that that's a bad thing). All Adama wants to do is get into the fight, but his ship is ill-equipped and there's a petty bureaucrat trying to undermine his authority, and who has his only surviving son on her side. Later on, in "You Can't Go Home Again," the producers will claim that this is the first time Adama's really been emotionally compromised. To which I ask: what is he here? Throughout part 2, Roslin's going to be telling him the war is already lost. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the show is that it's a conflict between a military leader who feels and a political leader who thinks, as opposed to the other way around.
I can't cover four hours in one post. Part 2 will be up later today.
Thursday, June 2, 2011
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
BtVS: Gingerbread
First off, a bit of a foreword, because this marks the beginning of an extended foray into sci-fi/fantasy works that aren't Doctor Who. Whereas Doctor Who is largely episodic, with every serial being largely a self-contained story that you can watch without needing any background information, most of the other shows I'll be looking at aren't. Buffy can at least pretend to be, even though it does have overarching season-long arcs. Angel can't, or at least it has increasing difficulty doing so; it can in Season One, but it certainly can't by Season Four. Firefly can, but only because there are only a handful of threads that got established in its first and only thirteen episodes. The good Dollhouse episodes are arc-centric. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is largely on the fence, especially as the majority of episodes I want to look at come from the last three seasons. Battlestar Galactica is arc-driven. For this reason, a lot of these reviews, simply as a matter of necessity, won't restrict themselves simply to the content covered in neat 45-minute chunks. In general, these reviews are going to be a lot more tangential than the Doctor Who reviews have been. Likewise, the scoring system is going to be largely scrapped; neither Firefly nor Dollhouse generated enough episodes to really establish a baseline, Angel gets too arc-driven, and I'll be reviewing BSG episodes before I even finish the first season (and it's heavily arc-driven anyway). Therefore, Buffy and DS9 will get numerical scores, Firefly, Dollhouse and BSG won't, and I haven't decided what to do about Angel yet. I'll probably score Seasons 1-3 and 5, and do something different for Season 4. I'll cop the SFDebris line and mention that all scores are relative to that series and that series alone; a Buffy episode that gets an 8 is not automatically better than a Doctor Who episode that got a 7, and vice-versa.
For my first foray into Joss Whedon's most famous and influential show, I've picked an obscure episode from the middle of Season Three. I've chosen this episode because I think it's actually the darkest episode of the show, ever. That may be a high claim considering there was an episode in Season 1 with overtures of child abuse, a few episode of Season 2 that were all about sex, and the entirety of Season 6, which was largely about drugs, but also had gunplay, torture, grisly murder and the infamous attempted rape.
But for me, "Gingerbread" is the darkest Buffy episode for two main reasons. One, the plot is kicked off by the discovery of two dead children. When I reviewed Doctor Who's "Curse of the Black Spot" and complained about how obvious it was that the kid wasn't dead, this episode was one of the first things I thought of. Now, you might be wondering, since I've brought up the issue of dead children, what about the Anoited One? To which I respond, 1) the Anointed One was turned offscreen. 2) It was a very legitimate plot twist - the horrible ubervamp was not the religious nutball but instead the innocent little kid. 3) the Anointed One's death - his permanent one, near the beginning of Season 2 - is there both to establish Spike as the real threat and to dispose of a child actor who was aging when his vampiric character couldn't (strange that this was never a problem for David Boreanaz, who looks remarkably different even in Season Three than he did in Season One, never mind the weight he gained by the time Angel wrapped).
Now, yes, the notion of a demon walking around in a kid's body is creepy as all hell, but really, that explanation of vampirism pretty much left town in the middle of Season Two and never came back. Besides, the Anointed One was still mobile, and his body simply vanished when he was killed a second time. The whole "dead child" angle was not a plot point, not like it is here.
The second reason I think "Gingerbread" is Buffy's darkest episode is because by the end, Buffy's mother is pretty much perfectly willing to burn her own daughter at the stake. Top that.
Anyway, here's the plot in a nutshell: Buffy's mother (who, remember, only found out that her daughter was the Slayer at the end of the last season) watched Buffy fight some evil. They have an awkward conversation - because at this point, the show is still trying to make a point of balancing Buffy's normal life with her Slayer activities, something that either goes out the window or is just done wrong after a certain event midway through Season 5 - and then they discover two dead children with a mysterious mark on them.
It transpires that the mark is related to witchcraft, and so The Adults band together and form an anti-occult group. Problem is, Buffy's best friend Willow is a budding witch. '
I don't know how much of this was planned from the beginning, but here goes: Angel, the vampire with a soul and Buffy's love interest for the first three seasons, was originally created to be the main villain for Season Two. As the second half of Season Two - the "Angelus" arc - got underway, it became obvious to Joss Whedon that David Boreanaz deserved his own show. This much is known; I can only speculate as to whether Angel would have been killed for good at the end of Season Two if they weren't planning on spinning him off. It does seem to me like Willow's magical abilities come out of nowhere, and I'll go into more detail when I actually get to the "Becoming" episodes, but I'd be willing to guess that this episode is at least partially a means of payment for how that arc ended. "Okay, Willow restored Angel's soul and we're seeing the consequences of that for Buffy and Angel... what are the consequences for Willow?"
At any rate, this episode does look at those consequences. At this point in the show, magic is not a metaphor for lesbianism or drug abuse, and this episode would no doubt have been considerably different had it been made after Willow and Tara became an item. Here magic is a stigma all its own, and Sunnydale engages in a literal witch-hunt. And because Buffy has supernatural powers, she's dragged into it, too. That's it. On the supernatural end, there's not a lot of metaphor going on, which is rare for this show. (Well... maybe. The show occasionally reminds us that Willow is Jewish...)
On the adults' side, however... It seems to me like this is a satire of those parents' groups that want to outlaw violent video games and the like - or it could be an analogue to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which would at least make it more serious. It turns out that the "dead children" are actually ancient demons who thrive on creating these sorts of witch-hunts (and originated in Germany...). Buffy and the gang stop them, "evil" witch Amy gets stuck as a rat for the next three seasons, and everything just kind of eases back to normal. If Buffy ever calls her mother on the whole "you tried to burn me alive thing" after this, I can't remember it.
So the kids aren't really dead, because ha ha, you can't actually kill kids on TV (stay tuned...) It's interesting to note how the show treats dead children as such serious business, and then nods and winks as it reveals that actually a couple of demons are just playing on people's fears. That the adults could be driven into such a frenzy that they're willing to burn three (admittedly troublemaking) teenagers alive does make for some really compelling drama. And to get there, it does need the "a demon made me do it" oomph. The anti-violent-game lot may be a bunch of riled harpies, but they're not going around demanding human sacrifice. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this is one of the last "Buffy vs Adults" stories - she's still got her confrontation with the Mayor at the end of the season, and a nebulous government organization after that, but from then on it's either personal crises ("The Body," almost all of Season 6) or direct supernatural threats (Glory, the First).
"Gingerbread" features a threat that I wouldn't have minded seeing more of; a corruptor, a threat that can turn the people you trust against you. I don't mean outright mind-control a la "Bad Eggs" or the entire Jasmine arc on Angel, but rather psychological manipulation, a la the Joker to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight. I mentioned earlier that maybe "Gingerbread" was a payoff for Willow's sudden magical aptitude in "Becoming." Much more obviously, it's payoff for the Buffy-Joyce plot in "Becoming." Joyce felt betrayed by Buffy because Buffy kept her secret lifestyle from her; in this episode, Joyce betrays Buffy. It's an extra little bit of denoument, crammed in the middle of a season, yes, but it shows that the writers really were thinking about the consequences of every single thing that happened on the show.
"Gingerbread" gets a 6 out of 10. That doesn't mean that it's only 60% good; I like it a lot, but 1) there are many other episodes that are better, and 2) it doesn't have many special qualities. It's dark as all hell, and it's a payoff for stuff that happened earlier, but that's about it.
Thursday: BSG miniseries
Friday: DS9: "In the Pale Moonlight"
Saturday: Buffy: "Becoming"
Sunday: Doctor Who: "The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People"
For my first foray into Joss Whedon's most famous and influential show, I've picked an obscure episode from the middle of Season Three. I've chosen this episode because I think it's actually the darkest episode of the show, ever. That may be a high claim considering there was an episode in Season 1 with overtures of child abuse, a few episode of Season 2 that were all about sex, and the entirety of Season 6, which was largely about drugs, but also had gunplay, torture, grisly murder and the infamous attempted rape.
But for me, "Gingerbread" is the darkest Buffy episode for two main reasons. One, the plot is kicked off by the discovery of two dead children. When I reviewed Doctor Who's "Curse of the Black Spot" and complained about how obvious it was that the kid wasn't dead, this episode was one of the first things I thought of. Now, you might be wondering, since I've brought up the issue of dead children, what about the Anoited One? To which I respond, 1) the Anointed One was turned offscreen. 2) It was a very legitimate plot twist - the horrible ubervamp was not the religious nutball but instead the innocent little kid. 3) the Anointed One's death - his permanent one, near the beginning of Season 2 - is there both to establish Spike as the real threat and to dispose of a child actor who was aging when his vampiric character couldn't (strange that this was never a problem for David Boreanaz, who looks remarkably different even in Season Three than he did in Season One, never mind the weight he gained by the time Angel wrapped).
Now, yes, the notion of a demon walking around in a kid's body is creepy as all hell, but really, that explanation of vampirism pretty much left town in the middle of Season Two and never came back. Besides, the Anointed One was still mobile, and his body simply vanished when he was killed a second time. The whole "dead child" angle was not a plot point, not like it is here.
The second reason I think "Gingerbread" is Buffy's darkest episode is because by the end, Buffy's mother is pretty much perfectly willing to burn her own daughter at the stake. Top that.
Anyway, here's the plot in a nutshell: Buffy's mother (who, remember, only found out that her daughter was the Slayer at the end of the last season) watched Buffy fight some evil. They have an awkward conversation - because at this point, the show is still trying to make a point of balancing Buffy's normal life with her Slayer activities, something that either goes out the window or is just done wrong after a certain event midway through Season 5 - and then they discover two dead children with a mysterious mark on them.
It transpires that the mark is related to witchcraft, and so The Adults band together and form an anti-occult group. Problem is, Buffy's best friend Willow is a budding witch. '
I don't know how much of this was planned from the beginning, but here goes: Angel, the vampire with a soul and Buffy's love interest for the first three seasons, was originally created to be the main villain for Season Two. As the second half of Season Two - the "Angelus" arc - got underway, it became obvious to Joss Whedon that David Boreanaz deserved his own show. This much is known; I can only speculate as to whether Angel would have been killed for good at the end of Season Two if they weren't planning on spinning him off. It does seem to me like Willow's magical abilities come out of nowhere, and I'll go into more detail when I actually get to the "Becoming" episodes, but I'd be willing to guess that this episode is at least partially a means of payment for how that arc ended. "Okay, Willow restored Angel's soul and we're seeing the consequences of that for Buffy and Angel... what are the consequences for Willow?"
At any rate, this episode does look at those consequences. At this point in the show, magic is not a metaphor for lesbianism or drug abuse, and this episode would no doubt have been considerably different had it been made after Willow and Tara became an item. Here magic is a stigma all its own, and Sunnydale engages in a literal witch-hunt. And because Buffy has supernatural powers, she's dragged into it, too. That's it. On the supernatural end, there's not a lot of metaphor going on, which is rare for this show. (Well... maybe. The show occasionally reminds us that Willow is Jewish...)
On the adults' side, however... It seems to me like this is a satire of those parents' groups that want to outlaw violent video games and the like - or it could be an analogue to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which would at least make it more serious. It turns out that the "dead children" are actually ancient demons who thrive on creating these sorts of witch-hunts (and originated in Germany...). Buffy and the gang stop them, "evil" witch Amy gets stuck as a rat for the next three seasons, and everything just kind of eases back to normal. If Buffy ever calls her mother on the whole "you tried to burn me alive thing" after this, I can't remember it.
So the kids aren't really dead, because ha ha, you can't actually kill kids on TV (stay tuned...) It's interesting to note how the show treats dead children as such serious business, and then nods and winks as it reveals that actually a couple of demons are just playing on people's fears. That the adults could be driven into such a frenzy that they're willing to burn three (admittedly troublemaking) teenagers alive does make for some really compelling drama. And to get there, it does need the "a demon made me do it" oomph. The anti-violent-game lot may be a bunch of riled harpies, but they're not going around demanding human sacrifice. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this is one of the last "Buffy vs Adults" stories - she's still got her confrontation with the Mayor at the end of the season, and a nebulous government organization after that, but from then on it's either personal crises ("The Body," almost all of Season 6) or direct supernatural threats (Glory, the First).
"Gingerbread" features a threat that I wouldn't have minded seeing more of; a corruptor, a threat that can turn the people you trust against you. I don't mean outright mind-control a la "Bad Eggs" or the entire Jasmine arc on Angel, but rather psychological manipulation, a la the Joker to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight. I mentioned earlier that maybe "Gingerbread" was a payoff for Willow's sudden magical aptitude in "Becoming." Much more obviously, it's payoff for the Buffy-Joyce plot in "Becoming." Joyce felt betrayed by Buffy because Buffy kept her secret lifestyle from her; in this episode, Joyce betrays Buffy. It's an extra little bit of denoument, crammed in the middle of a season, yes, but it shows that the writers really were thinking about the consequences of every single thing that happened on the show.
"Gingerbread" gets a 6 out of 10. That doesn't mean that it's only 60% good; I like it a lot, but 1) there are many other episodes that are better, and 2) it doesn't have many special qualities. It's dark as all hell, and it's a payoff for stuff that happened earlier, but that's about it.
Thursday: BSG miniseries
Friday: DS9: "In the Pale Moonlight"
Saturday: Buffy: "Becoming"
Sunday: Doctor Who: "The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People"
Tuesday, May 31, 2011
Who Review: the Dalek Invasion of Earth
Television shows need to find themselves pretty quickly. They need to nail down a style and they need to attract an audience in mere weeks, or network executives will pull the plug. That's probably as true today as it was in 1964, when Doctor Who's second-ever serial, The Daleks, introduced us to fascist saltshakers that would quickly becomes as iconic as the TARDIS itself. The audience reaction was incredibly positive; over the course of the serial, the viewing figures increased from 6.9 million (a figure any network would kill for today) to 10.4. (This despite the fact that the serial itself rapidly declined in quality from about episode four on.)
Despite the fact that the Daleks were destroyed at the end, the higher-ups quickly demanded a rematch, and once it was clear that the show would be renewed for a second season, a rematch was duly arranged. The apparent destruction of the Daleks at the end of their eponymous serial was brilliantly handwaved away; this is a show about time-travel after all, and if the invasion of Earth took place in 2164, the adventure on Skaro could very well have taken place in, say 3000. Problem solved.
So it was decided to have the Daleks invade Earth. Which meant, coincidentally, that this was the first time the Doctor actually got to save Earth, as opposed to saving some other planet, or having an adventure on Earth while trying desperately not to interfere in the timeline. (A note on that; it's always okay for the Doctor to stop alien invasions, and everyone assumes he's in it for the greater morality of it all. Yet he'll insist that you can't re-write history, not one line; what does he think he's doing all throughout the UNIT era? Especially whenever the Silurians get involved?)
It was also the first time they really got to go outside. The production team did a considerable amount of location work (of course, it blends a bit better if you can't tell the difference between film and videotape), and the Daleks were outfitted with what were basically tricycles under their "skirts" to enable them to zip around tossing each other Nazi salutes.
The setup is fantastic; Earth is largely deserted when the Doctor and company arrive, but they quickly run into the Daleks and the last, desperate resistance, led by a Churchillian figure (because this was less than 20 years after WWII, remember, and yeah, this is so very much about the Blitz). Things look remarkably bleak; the title is misleading. The invasion has already happened, and the bad guys have won. With the exception of Churchill's stand-in, nobody really thinks they'll actually throw off the shackles and free the world. And to be fair, they really don't have a chance except that the Daleks manage to have an even worse time trying to occupy enemy territory than the US has had in the last decade.
See, the Doctor and company eventually make their way out of occupied London and into occupied Bedfordshire, where there's now a massive mining complex. As I've alluded to elsewhere, when I've complained about "The Almost People" being delayed because of Memorial Day, I'm not from Britain, but I am given to understand that Bedfordshire is not the sort of place from which a sane man would try to dig a hole to the center of the Earth.
But that's okay because the Dalek plan is in no way sane; see, they want to rip out Earth's magnetic core, dump an engine in there, and steer it around the Universe like a gigantic warship. A... well, there's no point being coy about it, they want a ready-made Death Star. No, you read that correctly, and yes, that is the plot. The serial holds together pretty well until then, but after that it's a bit hard to take seriously.
Well, that plot is defeated, not by the dead hand of Isaac Newton, but rather by Ian jumping into the bomb cart himself while Barbara mimics a Dalek voice. And in case you're wondering why the Doctor doesn't do anything overly clever, well, this really isn't his show yet, and it won't be until Ian and Barbara leave. At this point, he's a glorified cabbie. People who compare Doctor Who to Star Trek often miss out on this point; Doctor Who would be a lot more like Star Trek if Uhura and Scotty were Trek's main characters for its first two seasons.
And in case you're wondering about Susan, well, she's getting hitched. Susan was the Doctor's granddaughter, created because Sydney Newman wanted a kid for the kids in the audience to identify with, and made the doctor's granddaughter because he thought that otherwise there would be some unfortunate implications about a 650-year-old* man tooling around the Universe with a teenager. Apparently nobody voiced those concerns when the show was revived in 2005.
*A note on the Doctor's age; in Tomb of the Cybermen, the (Second) Doctor claims to be 450, and unless I'm wrong, this is the first time his age is stated onscreen. I've given you the 650 figure for this, a serial that aired three years earlier, because 650 was the number on the original character sheet when the series was being concieved, and there's no evidence to suggest that anyone at the time thought his age was anything else.
Anyway, Susan's role on the show quickly devolved into "scream and get into trouble," and so Carole Ann Ford was only too happy not to renew her contract, and thus became the first regular to leave the show. She was duly written out, and while her exit (she's locked out of the TARDIS by the Doctor, who apparently wants her to settle down and have kids with a guy she's just met) isn't the most graceful, it's still a lot better than what a number of later companions got. Ian and Barbara finally got home after two years, and that felt like an event, but by and large, companion departures have been rather crap. Vicki, Jo and Leela (and maybe Peri) got "romantic" exits in the mold of Susan; Steven and Dodo got dumped; Ben and Polly got left behind because the plot (and budget) demanded it; Victoria got stranded in a completely different era; Zoe and Jamie got mind-wiped; Liz was unceremoniously dropped between seasons, as was Romana 1; Romana 2, K-9, Nyssa and Mel randomly decided to stick behind to help the natives du jour; Sarah and Tegan quit; Turlough actually got a whole serial that was all about him; and Katarina, Sara Kingdom, Adric (and maybe Peri) got killed. So, really, aside from Susan, Ian and Barbara, the only companion who actually got a dignified exit was... Turlough??? Woof.
In the past I've given "good setup, terrible resolution" stories a 7 out of 10. I can't do that here, and I'm trying not to do that anymore. You shouldn't make things so bleak if you can't actually come up with a good way of fixing it. So The Dalek Invasion of Earth gets a 4. The Daleks are back, in their big crowd-pleasing stunt, but they, well, wobble; they're frankly not nearly as threatening here as they were in their impressionist city on Skaro. Juggling the plot between four separate characters all off doing their own things might work on an hour-long show, but in 25-minute installments it really doesn't advance the plot enough for each character each week. I do like the "conquered Earth" setting, and I do wish that there had been more of that in the show - Day of the Daleks, while not stellar, was at least entertaining. But as it is, it's not enough.
Nevertheless, consider this: a science-fiction story set in the aftermath of a war that mankind lost, with a soundtrack composed almost entirely of drumming. One wonders if Ron Moore was taking notes...
Despite the fact that the Daleks were destroyed at the end, the higher-ups quickly demanded a rematch, and once it was clear that the show would be renewed for a second season, a rematch was duly arranged. The apparent destruction of the Daleks at the end of their eponymous serial was brilliantly handwaved away; this is a show about time-travel after all, and if the invasion of Earth took place in 2164, the adventure on Skaro could very well have taken place in, say 3000. Problem solved.
So it was decided to have the Daleks invade Earth. Which meant, coincidentally, that this was the first time the Doctor actually got to save Earth, as opposed to saving some other planet, or having an adventure on Earth while trying desperately not to interfere in the timeline. (A note on that; it's always okay for the Doctor to stop alien invasions, and everyone assumes he's in it for the greater morality of it all. Yet he'll insist that you can't re-write history, not one line; what does he think he's doing all throughout the UNIT era? Especially whenever the Silurians get involved?)
It was also the first time they really got to go outside. The production team did a considerable amount of location work (of course, it blends a bit better if you can't tell the difference between film and videotape), and the Daleks were outfitted with what were basically tricycles under their "skirts" to enable them to zip around tossing each other Nazi salutes.
The setup is fantastic; Earth is largely deserted when the Doctor and company arrive, but they quickly run into the Daleks and the last, desperate resistance, led by a Churchillian figure (because this was less than 20 years after WWII, remember, and yeah, this is so very much about the Blitz). Things look remarkably bleak; the title is misleading. The invasion has already happened, and the bad guys have won. With the exception of Churchill's stand-in, nobody really thinks they'll actually throw off the shackles and free the world. And to be fair, they really don't have a chance except that the Daleks manage to have an even worse time trying to occupy enemy territory than the US has had in the last decade.
See, the Doctor and company eventually make their way out of occupied London and into occupied Bedfordshire, where there's now a massive mining complex. As I've alluded to elsewhere, when I've complained about "The Almost People" being delayed because of Memorial Day, I'm not from Britain, but I am given to understand that Bedfordshire is not the sort of place from which a sane man would try to dig a hole to the center of the Earth.
But that's okay because the Dalek plan is in no way sane; see, they want to rip out Earth's magnetic core, dump an engine in there, and steer it around the Universe like a gigantic warship. A... well, there's no point being coy about it, they want a ready-made Death Star. No, you read that correctly, and yes, that is the plot. The serial holds together pretty well until then, but after that it's a bit hard to take seriously.
Well, that plot is defeated, not by the dead hand of Isaac Newton, but rather by Ian jumping into the bomb cart himself while Barbara mimics a Dalek voice. And in case you're wondering why the Doctor doesn't do anything overly clever, well, this really isn't his show yet, and it won't be until Ian and Barbara leave. At this point, he's a glorified cabbie. People who compare Doctor Who to Star Trek often miss out on this point; Doctor Who would be a lot more like Star Trek if Uhura and Scotty were Trek's main characters for its first two seasons.
And in case you're wondering about Susan, well, she's getting hitched. Susan was the Doctor's granddaughter, created because Sydney Newman wanted a kid for the kids in the audience to identify with, and made the doctor's granddaughter because he thought that otherwise there would be some unfortunate implications about a 650-year-old* man tooling around the Universe with a teenager. Apparently nobody voiced those concerns when the show was revived in 2005.
*A note on the Doctor's age; in Tomb of the Cybermen, the (Second) Doctor claims to be 450, and unless I'm wrong, this is the first time his age is stated onscreen. I've given you the 650 figure for this, a serial that aired three years earlier, because 650 was the number on the original character sheet when the series was being concieved, and there's no evidence to suggest that anyone at the time thought his age was anything else.
Anyway, Susan's role on the show quickly devolved into "scream and get into trouble," and so Carole Ann Ford was only too happy not to renew her contract, and thus became the first regular to leave the show. She was duly written out, and while her exit (she's locked out of the TARDIS by the Doctor, who apparently wants her to settle down and have kids with a guy she's just met) isn't the most graceful, it's still a lot better than what a number of later companions got. Ian and Barbara finally got home after two years, and that felt like an event, but by and large, companion departures have been rather crap. Vicki, Jo and Leela (and maybe Peri) got "romantic" exits in the mold of Susan; Steven and Dodo got dumped; Ben and Polly got left behind because the plot (and budget) demanded it; Victoria got stranded in a completely different era; Zoe and Jamie got mind-wiped; Liz was unceremoniously dropped between seasons, as was Romana 1; Romana 2, K-9, Nyssa and Mel randomly decided to stick behind to help the natives du jour; Sarah and Tegan quit; Turlough actually got a whole serial that was all about him; and Katarina, Sara Kingdom, Adric (and maybe Peri) got killed. So, really, aside from Susan, Ian and Barbara, the only companion who actually got a dignified exit was... Turlough??? Woof.
In the past I've given "good setup, terrible resolution" stories a 7 out of 10. I can't do that here, and I'm trying not to do that anymore. You shouldn't make things so bleak if you can't actually come up with a good way of fixing it. So The Dalek Invasion of Earth gets a 4. The Daleks are back, in their big crowd-pleasing stunt, but they, well, wobble; they're frankly not nearly as threatening here as they were in their impressionist city on Skaro. Juggling the plot between four separate characters all off doing their own things might work on an hour-long show, but in 25-minute installments it really doesn't advance the plot enough for each character each week. I do like the "conquered Earth" setting, and I do wish that there had been more of that in the show - Day of the Daleks, while not stellar, was at least entertaining. But as it is, it's not enough.
Nevertheless, consider this: a science-fiction story set in the aftermath of a war that mankind lost, with a soundtrack composed almost entirely of drumming. One wonders if Ron Moore was taking notes...
An explanation
Yes, this blog is called the Daily Dose of Dirty Deeds, and yes, the word "Daily" is most definitely a lie. Usually this is due to either laziness or writers' block, but since I've gotten back from college my internet has been mostly nonexistent.
And with Doctor Who on break this week (for the American audience, at any rate), and with its big summer hiatus coming up, I'm going to broaden my horizons in terms of episode reviews. I started working on Dollhouse reviews a long time ago, but frankly, despite its strong second season, it still seems like the ugly duckling of the Whedon shows for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. Bottom line on that is, they'll come, one day, but not anytime soon.
Before I saw a little something called City of Death, my favorite sci-fi show was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It's certainly the only one of the post-TNG shows that has any serious merit. As a point of massive irony, back when I saw television shows as these episodic, self-contained adventures a la TNG, I was hesitant to approach Voyager because I thought it would be too continuity-heavy. As if. Of course, if Voyager had actually stayed true to its remit... well, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Anyway, City of Death turned me on to Doctor Who, both the old and new series. I found out New Who was heavily influenced by Buffy, which encouraged me to check out all of Joss Whedon's shows. After burning through Buffy and Angel, I moved on to Firefly, eager to see how my newest hero would do science fiction.
And of course I was completely blown away. By now continuity had become second nature to me, and instead of thinking of a season as 22 45-minute films, I thought of a season as one super-extra-long film (DS9's arcs in its last few seasons probably helped). But with all the clever writing, I felt on some level - not that I could put my finger on it - that something was missing. Perhaps because I'm so obsessed with Doctor Who, I never thought about what could be done in a show with the tone of DS9 and the style of Firefly...
...yeah, I finally got around to starting in on Battlestar Galactica.
So what's coming up in the near future is: a few classic Who Reviews, maybe a Buffy episode or two, and then I'll start in on the first season of BSG. Stay tuned; if my internet holds up, I really will be on every day this week.
And with Doctor Who on break this week (for the American audience, at any rate), and with its big summer hiatus coming up, I'm going to broaden my horizons in terms of episode reviews. I started working on Dollhouse reviews a long time ago, but frankly, despite its strong second season, it still seems like the ugly duckling of the Whedon shows for reasons I can't quite put my finger on. Bottom line on that is, they'll come, one day, but not anytime soon.
Before I saw a little something called City of Death, my favorite sci-fi show was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It's certainly the only one of the post-TNG shows that has any serious merit. As a point of massive irony, back when I saw television shows as these episodic, self-contained adventures a la TNG, I was hesitant to approach Voyager because I thought it would be too continuity-heavy. As if. Of course, if Voyager had actually stayed true to its remit... well, I'm getting ahead of myself.
Anyway, City of Death turned me on to Doctor Who, both the old and new series. I found out New Who was heavily influenced by Buffy, which encouraged me to check out all of Joss Whedon's shows. After burning through Buffy and Angel, I moved on to Firefly, eager to see how my newest hero would do science fiction.
And of course I was completely blown away. By now continuity had become second nature to me, and instead of thinking of a season as 22 45-minute films, I thought of a season as one super-extra-long film (DS9's arcs in its last few seasons probably helped). But with all the clever writing, I felt on some level - not that I could put my finger on it - that something was missing. Perhaps because I'm so obsessed with Doctor Who, I never thought about what could be done in a show with the tone of DS9 and the style of Firefly...
...yeah, I finally got around to starting in on Battlestar Galactica.
So what's coming up in the near future is: a few classic Who Reviews, maybe a Buffy episode or two, and then I'll start in on the first season of BSG. Stay tuned; if my internet holds up, I really will be on every day this week.
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Who Review: Curse of the Black Spot
"Ignore everything I've said up till now."
Take one part Horror of Fang Rock and add one part "The Empty Child," one half-part The Stones of Blood and one part Pirates of the Carribean and you pretty much have the recipe for this episode.
...I really don't know what else needs to be said, but anyway, here goes.
Ever since The Time Meddler, Doctor Who has had this habit of getting science fiction in my historical dramas. Or perhaps historical dramas in my science fiction, I'm not sure which. Anyways, there's a pirate ship, and anyone on it who gets sick or injured gets the black spot on their hand, and then a siren comes up and vaporizes them. The Doctor et al appear, and after a brief sword-fight, Rory gets injured. The Siren shows up to claim him, but the crew manages to hide on various different parts of the ship. The TARDIS gets stolen and one by one, the crew are killed. When the captain's son gets vaporized, you just know that you're not getting the whole story.
Here's the problem with this episode. The audience knows that no kid is ever going to die on Doctor Who (aside from Adric, and not counting what happens in Rory's dream. And also not counting the Astronaut/Time Lord, which doesn't count anyway). So when Toby gets zapped, we know the Siren's "good," but the Doctor simply asks his companions to take a leap of faith. This is the sort of antic we could expect from anyone from Indiana Jones to Captain Jack Sparrow, but the Doctor has (generally) actually had a good reason for doing what he does, and for him to take the "what the hell" approach seems a bit off.
(Okay, he and Amy did it in "Amy's Choice," but that was prompted by her. It's generally true that while the Doctor may throw himself willy-nilly into dangerous situations, he's never before - to the best of my knowledge - shaken hands with death quite like this.)
Anyway, there is another ship occupying the same space as the pirate ship (this is where Stones of Blood comes in), and it's got a sickbay with a mind of its own (this is where "The Empty Child" comes in). The Siren is actually an emergency medical hologram... but alas, it does not refer to itself as "the Doctor." The black spot is what gets left over when the Siren takes a tissue sample, which a) is a staggeringly inane explanation for the black spot, and b) leaves open the gaping plot hole of why the Siren needs to take a tissue sample in the first place. If the ship has the technology to take a tissue sample of the afflicted crewman so the Siren knows who to take, why doesn't the ship just take all the tissue samples, i.e, the entire person?
Anyway, Rory dies (again), and comes back (again), and the captain and his crew and his son go gallivanting off in the spaceship. Everybody lives.
The bottom line is, it's another "Medical Tech Run Amok Disguised As A Horror Story" episode. Parts of it were very well done, especially all the pirate ship stuff on a BBC budget. Nevertheless, it seems like the author was trying too hard to cram both the Siren and the black spot into the episode and, as I pointed out above, it suffers for that.
5 out of 10.
Take one part Horror of Fang Rock and add one part "The Empty Child," one half-part The Stones of Blood and one part Pirates of the Carribean and you pretty much have the recipe for this episode.
...I really don't know what else needs to be said, but anyway, here goes.
Ever since The Time Meddler, Doctor Who has had this habit of getting science fiction in my historical dramas. Or perhaps historical dramas in my science fiction, I'm not sure which. Anyways, there's a pirate ship, and anyone on it who gets sick or injured gets the black spot on their hand, and then a siren comes up and vaporizes them. The Doctor et al appear, and after a brief sword-fight, Rory gets injured. The Siren shows up to claim him, but the crew manages to hide on various different parts of the ship. The TARDIS gets stolen and one by one, the crew are killed. When the captain's son gets vaporized, you just know that you're not getting the whole story.
Here's the problem with this episode. The audience knows that no kid is ever going to die on Doctor Who (aside from Adric, and not counting what happens in Rory's dream. And also not counting the Astronaut/Time Lord, which doesn't count anyway). So when Toby gets zapped, we know the Siren's "good," but the Doctor simply asks his companions to take a leap of faith. This is the sort of antic we could expect from anyone from Indiana Jones to Captain Jack Sparrow, but the Doctor has (generally) actually had a good reason for doing what he does, and for him to take the "what the hell" approach seems a bit off.
(Okay, he and Amy did it in "Amy's Choice," but that was prompted by her. It's generally true that while the Doctor may throw himself willy-nilly into dangerous situations, he's never before - to the best of my knowledge - shaken hands with death quite like this.)
Anyway, there is another ship occupying the same space as the pirate ship (this is where Stones of Blood comes in), and it's got a sickbay with a mind of its own (this is where "The Empty Child" comes in). The Siren is actually an emergency medical hologram... but alas, it does not refer to itself as "the Doctor." The black spot is what gets left over when the Siren takes a tissue sample, which a) is a staggeringly inane explanation for the black spot, and b) leaves open the gaping plot hole of why the Siren needs to take a tissue sample in the first place. If the ship has the technology to take a tissue sample of the afflicted crewman so the Siren knows who to take, why doesn't the ship just take all the tissue samples, i.e, the entire person?
Anyway, Rory dies (again), and comes back (again), and the captain and his crew and his son go gallivanting off in the spaceship. Everybody lives.
The bottom line is, it's another "Medical Tech Run Amok Disguised As A Horror Story" episode. Parts of it were very well done, especially all the pirate ship stuff on a BBC budget. Nevertheless, it seems like the author was trying too hard to cram both the Siren and the black spot into the episode and, as I pointed out above, it suffers for that.
5 out of 10.
Monday, May 23, 2011
Rebel Flesh first impressions
Unless Part 2 really impresses in two weeks, consider this a snarky preview of the whole thing.
"Replicants are like any other machine. They're either a benefit or a hazard."
-Deckard, Blade Runner
The premise of this episode relies on artificial people, the age-old fallback of a bored uninspired sci-fi author looking to try to make a clever take on the old "robot rebellion" story.
It's the future, and a bunch of "Gangers" - remote-controlled carbon copies of people - are digging for acid beneath a monastery. If we ever figure out why, it was edited out of the BBC America version, which is unfortuantely all I have to go on at the moment. (Incidentally, BBCA shot itself in the foot here by airing ads for an upcoming showing of Blade Runner during this episode, hence all the references.) To relate to us that nobody thinks at all about these things, the episode opens with one of then getting "decomissioned" in a vat of acid, only for its replacement to show up afterward and snark at his co-workers about it. It's only marginally more subtle than calling them "skin-jobs," as Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica do. The Doctor arrives and explains the whole thing for the benefit of the slow, and then there's a massive solar storm and everyone gets knocked out for an hour.
(I'm tempted to say that the TNG episode this rips off the most is "Measure of a Man," the one where Data gets put on trial to determine whether he's sentient or not, and that's a close second. The actual closest TNG analogue is "Clues," in which some very important things happen during a gap in everyone's memories that is much longer than anyone first suspects.)
(I'm also tempted to say the version of the Doctor who got shot on the beach in "The Impossible Astronaut" might have been a Ganger, but I kind of doubt that Moffat would resort to a bailout that crass. Please don't make me eat those words this October...)
"Memories. You're talking about memories."
-Dekard, Blade Runner
When they come to, they quickly discover that some members of the mining crew have been replaced by Gangers. The Doctor sympathizes with the Gangers because a) they have memories and therefore souls - somehow, and b) because this is exactly the sort of thing he's been known for doing since 1970, when the show lost its black-and-white morality along with its black-and-white video. There's an entire scene built around the Doctor and company discovering that these things have memories and, sadly, Blade Runner did it better. For those of you who don't know, Blade Runner is a cult film from 1982 - by "cult," I mean it's awkwardly paced, has one of the most uncomfortable romantic subplots I've ever seen, and was savaged by the critics when it came out, but it nonetheless has a following. Don't get me wrong, it has a lot going for it, but the only thing that makes its pacing better than that of 2001: A Space Odyssey is the fact that Blade Runner doesn't have an overture or intermission. It's about a man who may or may not be an android (the evidence changes with each re-release) hunting down a bunch of androids while at the same time falling in love with yet another android. These are not "artificial people" like Data from TNG or even Ash and Bishop from the Alien films - they're the closest things Karel Capek's robots from Rossum's Universal Robots have ever gotten to appearing on screen (at the time; we've since had the Cylons in BSG). Flesh and blood all the way through, they're completely indistinguishable from human beings, except that they're supposedly completely sociopathic - ironic, then, that the relationship between two of the antagonists seems a lot more stable than the one between Deckard and his love interest.
And, yes, it's unfair to compare a television episode to a cult sci-fi film (except that, once again, Battlestar Galactica pulled it off), but as characters, Batty and Pris seem a hell of a lot better fleshed out (sorry, no pun intended) than any of the orange-shirts this week. Blade Runner is perhaps a film with the focus on the wrong character, as Batty's desperate quest to increase his four-year lifespan (which concludes with him murdering "God") is altogether more interesting than Deckard's quest to "retire" a bunch of fugitives. "The Rebel Flesh" doesn't really offer us any compelling reason to sympathize with either side. The supporting cast don't even have the amount of character development that the crowd in "The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit" got - and, arguably, they need it here more than there. We knew the Doctor was going to get cloned because the Doctor poked at the Flesh, but for this story to have any real dramatic weight, what it needed was a clone of Amy or Rory. Especially of Rory. He hasn't died enough this season.
"Have you ever retired a human by mistake?"
-Rachel, Blade Runner
You sometimes get some help in figuring out who's what because the Gangers' faces occasionally look more... plastic, molded, artificial, what have you. Which would normally be fine, except that there's already a pretty egregious unfinished-looking face... on the leading man. (What they have to resort to when the Doctor's double shows up boggles the mind.)
And there's another, more serious problem (Matt's face is fine, honest - I couldn't resist pointing that out, though). Amy and Rory don't wake up in the same room as we last saw them, so there's really no guarantee that the Amy and Rory we follow around for the remainder of the episode are real. When Rory and one of the Gangers get separated from the group, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell whether the person we're watching at this particular moment is a Ganger or not.
(BBCA also showed ads for Battlestar Galactica during this episode. I knew fantastically little about that show when I wrote the bulk of this review, which is admittedly kind of silly since Ron Moore used to write for DS9. But I can't help but feel that commercials for yet another "rediculously human robot" premise really didn't help this episode.)
Oh, and just to round it out - faceless corporation employs an army of clones in a hostile work environment? Moon. So, yeah, most of this episode, it seems, originated somewhere else. And the most notable part that didn't - the Doctor climbing a power during the middle of a solar event - reeked uncomfortably of "Evolution of the Daleks."
Bottom line: between the tired premise and the unintentional difficulties involved in telling who's a Ganger and who's not, Part 2 had better impress, or this is going to end up getting the worst rating thus far in Matt Smith's run.
"Replicants are like any other machine. They're either a benefit or a hazard."
-Deckard, Blade Runner
The premise of this episode relies on artificial people, the age-old fallback of a bored uninspired sci-fi author looking to try to make a clever take on the old "robot rebellion" story.
It's the future, and a bunch of "Gangers" - remote-controlled carbon copies of people - are digging for acid beneath a monastery. If we ever figure out why, it was edited out of the BBC America version, which is unfortuantely all I have to go on at the moment. (Incidentally, BBCA shot itself in the foot here by airing ads for an upcoming showing of Blade Runner during this episode, hence all the references.) To relate to us that nobody thinks at all about these things, the episode opens with one of then getting "decomissioned" in a vat of acid, only for its replacement to show up afterward and snark at his co-workers about it. It's only marginally more subtle than calling them "skin-jobs," as Blade Runner and Battlestar Galactica do. The Doctor arrives and explains the whole thing for the benefit of the slow, and then there's a massive solar storm and everyone gets knocked out for an hour.
(I'm tempted to say that the TNG episode this rips off the most is "Measure of a Man," the one where Data gets put on trial to determine whether he's sentient or not, and that's a close second. The actual closest TNG analogue is "Clues," in which some very important things happen during a gap in everyone's memories that is much longer than anyone first suspects.)
(I'm also tempted to say the version of the Doctor who got shot on the beach in "The Impossible Astronaut" might have been a Ganger, but I kind of doubt that Moffat would resort to a bailout that crass. Please don't make me eat those words this October...)
"Memories. You're talking about memories."
-Dekard, Blade Runner
When they come to, they quickly discover that some members of the mining crew have been replaced by Gangers. The Doctor sympathizes with the Gangers because a) they have memories and therefore souls - somehow, and b) because this is exactly the sort of thing he's been known for doing since 1970, when the show lost its black-and-white morality along with its black-and-white video. There's an entire scene built around the Doctor and company discovering that these things have memories and, sadly, Blade Runner did it better. For those of you who don't know, Blade Runner is a cult film from 1982 - by "cult," I mean it's awkwardly paced, has one of the most uncomfortable romantic subplots I've ever seen, and was savaged by the critics when it came out, but it nonetheless has a following. Don't get me wrong, it has a lot going for it, but the only thing that makes its pacing better than that of 2001: A Space Odyssey is the fact that Blade Runner doesn't have an overture or intermission. It's about a man who may or may not be an android (the evidence changes with each re-release) hunting down a bunch of androids while at the same time falling in love with yet another android. These are not "artificial people" like Data from TNG or even Ash and Bishop from the Alien films - they're the closest things Karel Capek's robots from Rossum's Universal Robots have ever gotten to appearing on screen (at the time; we've since had the Cylons in BSG). Flesh and blood all the way through, they're completely indistinguishable from human beings, except that they're supposedly completely sociopathic - ironic, then, that the relationship between two of the antagonists seems a lot more stable than the one between Deckard and his love interest.
And, yes, it's unfair to compare a television episode to a cult sci-fi film (except that, once again, Battlestar Galactica pulled it off), but as characters, Batty and Pris seem a hell of a lot better fleshed out (sorry, no pun intended) than any of the orange-shirts this week. Blade Runner is perhaps a film with the focus on the wrong character, as Batty's desperate quest to increase his four-year lifespan (which concludes with him murdering "God") is altogether more interesting than Deckard's quest to "retire" a bunch of fugitives. "The Rebel Flesh" doesn't really offer us any compelling reason to sympathize with either side. The supporting cast don't even have the amount of character development that the crowd in "The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit" got - and, arguably, they need it here more than there. We knew the Doctor was going to get cloned because the Doctor poked at the Flesh, but for this story to have any real dramatic weight, what it needed was a clone of Amy or Rory. Especially of Rory. He hasn't died enough this season.
"Have you ever retired a human by mistake?"
-Rachel, Blade Runner
You sometimes get some help in figuring out who's what because the Gangers' faces occasionally look more... plastic, molded, artificial, what have you. Which would normally be fine, except that there's already a pretty egregious unfinished-looking face... on the leading man. (What they have to resort to when the Doctor's double shows up boggles the mind.)
And there's another, more serious problem (Matt's face is fine, honest - I couldn't resist pointing that out, though). Amy and Rory don't wake up in the same room as we last saw them, so there's really no guarantee that the Amy and Rory we follow around for the remainder of the episode are real. When Rory and one of the Gangers get separated from the group, it becomes increasingly difficult to tell whether the person we're watching at this particular moment is a Ganger or not.
(BBCA also showed ads for Battlestar Galactica during this episode. I knew fantastically little about that show when I wrote the bulk of this review, which is admittedly kind of silly since Ron Moore used to write for DS9. But I can't help but feel that commercials for yet another "rediculously human robot" premise really didn't help this episode.)
Oh, and just to round it out - faceless corporation employs an army of clones in a hostile work environment? Moon. So, yeah, most of this episode, it seems, originated somewhere else. And the most notable part that didn't - the Doctor climbing a power during the middle of a solar event - reeked uncomfortably of "Evolution of the Daleks."
Bottom line: between the tired premise and the unintentional difficulties involved in telling who's a Ganger and who's not, Part 2 had better impress, or this is going to end up getting the worst rating thus far in Matt Smith's run.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Who Review: The Doctor's Wife
Fan-lore: "The Doctor's Wife" was proposed as an episode title all the way back in 1984. That was never the serial's real title (the real title was The Caves of Androzani); JN-T thought there was a leak in the production office and used the fake title as a means of exposing it.
Needless to say, I assumed something similar was going on here. It's Neil Gaiman, for crying out loud, I thought, it'll just be some celebrity guest-writer with a good plot and probably some throwbacks to the old series.
I was pleasantly surprised. So it's not really his wife, in that the person we meet in this episode is in no way related to Susan Foreman, but aw, bless, what a clever plot regardless.
In a nutshell: something knocks out the TARDIS's soul and puts it in a woman. She goes absolutely ape, but for about 40 minutes we get mad, talking TARDIS. It is mad, mad, mad, mad mad!
In order to save his TARDIS, the Doctor must construct another TARDIS out of the remnants of broken TARDISes, which is a nifty thing. Less nifty is the sub-plot: Amy and Rory do a lot of running around the TARDIS's (that'd be the Doctor's one, or rather, the part of the Doctor's TARDIS that is not currently a woman) corridors while the villain plays tricks on them.
Now, Gaiman is a famous British author, so I kind of assume he's at least somewhat familiar with the old show. He should know that episodes with lots of running around inside the TARDIS are, um, not very good. (The Edge of Destruction and The Invasion of Time are blatant examples, and there's a case to be made for the first episode of Castrovalva as well.) This is the first time we've seen TARDIS corridors in the new series, and the result is... underwhelming. They look like something the proposed 90s show with McGann might have come up with.
Which brings me to my second complaint about the episode. It turns out all the old console rooms are stored somewhere in the TARDIS. This makes sense, and there's precedent for it (see The Masque of Mandragora, The Hand of Fear, The Deadly Assassin, and The Robots of Death). But I thought it was kind of... odd, really, to go out of their way to get 11, Amy and Rory into the Eccleston/Tennant console room. When they said that all the rooms were stored there, for one fleeting moment I thought we might get one of the classic rooms rendered in a 21st-century budget. And then they said that there were console rooms that hadn't even been used yet, and I thought "awesome!" But no, they trot out the "Coral" desktop, which the BBC has evidently kept in storage for some reason. Come on, guys, that's a massive set! Give it to the fan club and move on.
Third complaint: the minor characters are disposed of entirely too quickly and conveniently. Fourth complaint: the Doctor gets upset when it's clear that Idris is going to die, but he never once seems concerned for the woman Idris used to be before she got a TARDIS rammed into her brain.
Niggling complaints out of the way... I love the idea that the TARDIS stole the Doctor and not the other way around. Or rather both. It's the logical conclusion of the aforementioned disaster, The Edge of Destruction, which happens to be the very first time that the TARDIS's sentience is brought up.
"The Doctor's Wife" is the episode for all the Doctor/TARDIS shippers out there. You know who you are. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad episode, where the last thing you should do is take anything seriously. I didn't think Gaiman could be this lighthearted - the closest parallel in his written work is Good Omens, and I chalked all the lighthearted bits in that up to Terry Pratchett after I'd read more of each author's solo work.
Aside from some random Chekhov's Guns being set up at the end, you could probablyuse this to introduce a Classic Who fan to Matt Smith. It doesn't rely on the season's arc for validity - rather, it relies on the series' mythology, the Doctor/TARDIS relationship in particular.
9 out of 10. A great concept let down by some downright terrible TARDIS corridors, this is nevertheless the greatest TARDIS-centric story ever made.
Needless to say, I assumed something similar was going on here. It's Neil Gaiman, for crying out loud, I thought, it'll just be some celebrity guest-writer with a good plot and probably some throwbacks to the old series.
I was pleasantly surprised. So it's not really his wife, in that the person we meet in this episode is in no way related to Susan Foreman, but aw, bless, what a clever plot regardless.
In a nutshell: something knocks out the TARDIS's soul and puts it in a woman. She goes absolutely ape, but for about 40 minutes we get mad, talking TARDIS. It is mad, mad, mad, mad mad!
In order to save his TARDIS, the Doctor must construct another TARDIS out of the remnants of broken TARDISes, which is a nifty thing. Less nifty is the sub-plot: Amy and Rory do a lot of running around the TARDIS's (that'd be the Doctor's one, or rather, the part of the Doctor's TARDIS that is not currently a woman) corridors while the villain plays tricks on them.
Now, Gaiman is a famous British author, so I kind of assume he's at least somewhat familiar with the old show. He should know that episodes with lots of running around inside the TARDIS are, um, not very good. (The Edge of Destruction and The Invasion of Time are blatant examples, and there's a case to be made for the first episode of Castrovalva as well.) This is the first time we've seen TARDIS corridors in the new series, and the result is... underwhelming. They look like something the proposed 90s show with McGann might have come up with.
Which brings me to my second complaint about the episode. It turns out all the old console rooms are stored somewhere in the TARDIS. This makes sense, and there's precedent for it (see The Masque of Mandragora, The Hand of Fear, The Deadly Assassin, and The Robots of Death). But I thought it was kind of... odd, really, to go out of their way to get 11, Amy and Rory into the Eccleston/Tennant console room. When they said that all the rooms were stored there, for one fleeting moment I thought we might get one of the classic rooms rendered in a 21st-century budget. And then they said that there were console rooms that hadn't even been used yet, and I thought "awesome!" But no, they trot out the "Coral" desktop, which the BBC has evidently kept in storage for some reason. Come on, guys, that's a massive set! Give it to the fan club and move on.
Third complaint: the minor characters are disposed of entirely too quickly and conveniently. Fourth complaint: the Doctor gets upset when it's clear that Idris is going to die, but he never once seems concerned for the woman Idris used to be before she got a TARDIS rammed into her brain.
Niggling complaints out of the way... I love the idea that the TARDIS stole the Doctor and not the other way around. Or rather both. It's the logical conclusion of the aforementioned disaster, The Edge of Destruction, which happens to be the very first time that the TARDIS's sentience is brought up.
"The Doctor's Wife" is the episode for all the Doctor/TARDIS shippers out there. You know who you are. It's a mad, mad, mad, mad, mad episode, where the last thing you should do is take anything seriously. I didn't think Gaiman could be this lighthearted - the closest parallel in his written work is Good Omens, and I chalked all the lighthearted bits in that up to Terry Pratchett after I'd read more of each author's solo work.
Aside from some random Chekhov's Guns being set up at the end, you could probablyuse this to introduce a Classic Who fan to Matt Smith. It doesn't rely on the season's arc for validity - rather, it relies on the series' mythology, the Doctor/TARDIS relationship in particular.
9 out of 10. A great concept let down by some downright terrible TARDIS corridors, this is nevertheless the greatest TARDIS-centric story ever made.
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Who Review: The Hand of Fear
Just pause for a second and consider that title. "The Hand of Fear." Not "the crawling disembodied hand," not "Eldrad Must Live," but "The Hand of Fear." I suspect that title was there to make us wonder, just for a few minutes in Episode 3, whether or not Eldrad was actually the villain, and whether we were all just letting fear control us... No.
...The job of the companion is to scream and ask, "what's that, Doctor?" Lis Sladen was never one for screaming, and after three-plus years, had finally run out of ways to ask that question...
...It's a bit disconcerting to see Lis Sladen walk into a nuclear reactor in her final story...
...For a supposedly feminist character, Sarah Jane says farewell in a story with absurdly nonfeminist themes...
...Gender-bending a good 20 years before any other major SF show tried it...
Okay, I give up. I can't peg down the right way to introduce this one.
It's the last story with Sarah Jane Smith as the companion.
It's the one with the creepy-crawly hand.
It's the one where you'd be forgiven for thinking David Bowie was the villain.
It's the one where Sarah gets possessed. Other than Planet of the Spiders. And another brush with mind-control in The Masque of Mandragora. And another brush with mind-control in The Time Warrior. I'm still probably leaving something out, but I'm done now.
So the plot in a nutshell: the Doctor does something very stupid and nearly gets himself and Sarah killed in an explosion. Sarah is buried under two feet of polystyrene - I mean, rocks - and when they dig her out, she's clutching a hand. Spouting stuff about how Eldrad must live, Sarah walks into a nuclear reactor, and the hand starts crawling. For the Episode 1 cliffhanger, it looks terrifyingly real. Unfortunately, in Episode 2, it's blatantly CSO'd in.
Let me just get this out of the way - Lis Sladen did brainwashed and evil like no other. In The Time Warrior, she's kind of bland and vacant when Lynx zaps her (and she doesn't even get to do full-on evil then), but her performance only improved with time. In Masque she passes as normal so well that her "tell" is something that we all completely missed - hell, she asks a question that's been on our minds for 14 years, and that's what somehow gave her away. Here in The Hand of Fear, she clutches that box, gives shifty, almost nervous looks, and calmly zaps guards with the most ridiculous fashion accessory the show had between Jo Grant and the Sixth Doctor. It's not some alien entity using Sarah's body like a puppet against her will; you really believe that her will has been fundamentally bent. And it's worth pointing out that the cure for this is time - Eldrad stops controlling her once he/she no longer needs her. It's not clear that the Doctor could have saved her.
Moving right along, Eldrad reincarnates in female form. This is the mid 70s, so naturally "the female form" means a skintight diamond-studded bodysuit. (The fact that I just made the outfit seem only mildly cooler than it actually is should tell you something.) Eldrad tells the Doctor what turns out to be an enormous fib, but he takes her back to her home planet anyway. There, she is able to regenerate (no, that's not the term, but what actually happens is considerably less impressive - she gets shot with a booby-trapped poison dart and has to be restored) into a hulking masculine form, which is promptly dispatched by a stunt Tom Baker tried to pull all the way back in Robot.
What exactly are the writers trying to say? That women are sly, seductive liars while men are just outright evil and brainless? There's not a single person who can watch this episode and honestly think that Eldrad is more effective as a man than as a woman, yet Eldrad itself is obviously overjoyed to be done with that lithe figure.
It only becomes really obvious in the last episode, but it's worth stating: there is nothing for the Doctor to do in all four episodes. Okay, here is a complete run-down of what he accomplishes.
He gets himself and his companion nearly blown up.
He gets a laughably bad fight scene.
He gets to stand around saying "I told you so" during an airstrike.
He gets duped by the villain and then gets to stand around and watch as a long-dead force derails the villain's plan. (This might be why Harrison Ford didn't like Blade Runner very much, and also why Asimov's Foundation series is pretty much unfilmable.)
And that is it. There is not a single spark of cleverness, no quintessential "Doctor" moment here... and nor is there much of Tom Baker gooning about. Between Eldrad's shenanigans and Sarah's departure, there's not a lot of stuff for him to do.
Sarah's departure is odd. She's maybe fed up with being brainwashed and possessed, but she might just be bluffing to try to get some reaction out of the Doctor. (This is also the start of Tom Baker being completely insufferable and not giving a damn what happens to anyone else, be they fictional companions or real-life co-stars. It's worth noting that it's at this point that the show starts to unravel; by the time he was on speaking terms with Louise Jameson, Phillip Hinchcliffe had been sacked as producer and the show was in decline.) Meanwhile, the Doctor gets a distress call from Gallifrey and has to leave her behind - but come on, Sarah's the most blatant precursor to Rose that the show ever had! The woman had a day job, for crying out loud! There is absolutely no reason that the Doctor couldn't have come back and picked her up again after sorting out that business with the Master. (In the original draft, Sarah was due to be killed off... make of that what you will.)
Okay, that's the griping over and done with. Lis Sladen may have been ready to leave, but you'd never know it from her performace. There's one last great Sarah-Doctor moment when, after she recovers from her possession, she zones out for a second and goes "Eldrad must live." She's just riling the Doctor up, and he loves it. Episode Three belongs to Judith Paris, who plays Female Eldrad and generally makes the second half of the story watchable; no wonder Episode Four is terrible. There are nice touches with the nuclear plant's director phoning his family and trying to pick up the pieces, and it's genuinely surprising that he lives through it all.
Episodes One and Two are fantastic at building the tension. Episode Three is truly wonderful; Episode Four is just such a terrible letdown.
7 out of 10, which is quickly becoming my go-to score for "great setup, terrible resolution."
...The job of the companion is to scream and ask, "what's that, Doctor?" Lis Sladen was never one for screaming, and after three-plus years, had finally run out of ways to ask that question...
...It's a bit disconcerting to see Lis Sladen walk into a nuclear reactor in her final story...
...For a supposedly feminist character, Sarah Jane says farewell in a story with absurdly nonfeminist themes...
...Gender-bending a good 20 years before any other major SF show tried it...
Okay, I give up. I can't peg down the right way to introduce this one.
Facts:
It's the last story with Sarah Jane Smith as the companion.
It's the one with the creepy-crawly hand.
It's the one where you'd be forgiven for thinking David Bowie was the villain.
It's the one where Sarah gets possessed. Other than Planet of the Spiders. And another brush with mind-control in The Masque of Mandragora. And another brush with mind-control in The Time Warrior. I'm still probably leaving something out, but I'm done now.
So the plot in a nutshell: the Doctor does something very stupid and nearly gets himself and Sarah killed in an explosion. Sarah is buried under two feet of polystyrene - I mean, rocks - and when they dig her out, she's clutching a hand. Spouting stuff about how Eldrad must live, Sarah walks into a nuclear reactor, and the hand starts crawling. For the Episode 1 cliffhanger, it looks terrifyingly real. Unfortunately, in Episode 2, it's blatantly CSO'd in.
Let me just get this out of the way - Lis Sladen did brainwashed and evil like no other. In The Time Warrior, she's kind of bland and vacant when Lynx zaps her (and she doesn't even get to do full-on evil then), but her performance only improved with time. In Masque she passes as normal so well that her "tell" is something that we all completely missed - hell, she asks a question that's been on our minds for 14 years, and that's what somehow gave her away. Here in The Hand of Fear, she clutches that box, gives shifty, almost nervous looks, and calmly zaps guards with the most ridiculous fashion accessory the show had between Jo Grant and the Sixth Doctor. It's not some alien entity using Sarah's body like a puppet against her will; you really believe that her will has been fundamentally bent. And it's worth pointing out that the cure for this is time - Eldrad stops controlling her once he/she no longer needs her. It's not clear that the Doctor could have saved her.
Moving right along, Eldrad reincarnates in female form. This is the mid 70s, so naturally "the female form" means a skintight diamond-studded bodysuit. (The fact that I just made the outfit seem only mildly cooler than it actually is should tell you something.) Eldrad tells the Doctor what turns out to be an enormous fib, but he takes her back to her home planet anyway. There, she is able to regenerate (no, that's not the term, but what actually happens is considerably less impressive - she gets shot with a booby-trapped poison dart and has to be restored) into a hulking masculine form, which is promptly dispatched by a stunt Tom Baker tried to pull all the way back in Robot.
What exactly are the writers trying to say? That women are sly, seductive liars while men are just outright evil and brainless? There's not a single person who can watch this episode and honestly think that Eldrad is more effective as a man than as a woman, yet Eldrad itself is obviously overjoyed to be done with that lithe figure.
It only becomes really obvious in the last episode, but it's worth stating: there is nothing for the Doctor to do in all four episodes. Okay, here is a complete run-down of what he accomplishes.
He gets himself and his companion nearly blown up.
He gets a laughably bad fight scene.
He gets to stand around saying "I told you so" during an airstrike.
He gets duped by the villain and then gets to stand around and watch as a long-dead force derails the villain's plan. (This might be why Harrison Ford didn't like Blade Runner very much, and also why Asimov's Foundation series is pretty much unfilmable.)
And that is it. There is not a single spark of cleverness, no quintessential "Doctor" moment here... and nor is there much of Tom Baker gooning about. Between Eldrad's shenanigans and Sarah's departure, there's not a lot of stuff for him to do.
Sarah's departure is odd. She's maybe fed up with being brainwashed and possessed, but she might just be bluffing to try to get some reaction out of the Doctor. (This is also the start of Tom Baker being completely insufferable and not giving a damn what happens to anyone else, be they fictional companions or real-life co-stars. It's worth noting that it's at this point that the show starts to unravel; by the time he was on speaking terms with Louise Jameson, Phillip Hinchcliffe had been sacked as producer and the show was in decline.) Meanwhile, the Doctor gets a distress call from Gallifrey and has to leave her behind - but come on, Sarah's the most blatant precursor to Rose that the show ever had! The woman had a day job, for crying out loud! There is absolutely no reason that the Doctor couldn't have come back and picked her up again after sorting out that business with the Master. (In the original draft, Sarah was due to be killed off... make of that what you will.)
Okay, that's the griping over and done with. Lis Sladen may have been ready to leave, but you'd never know it from her performace. There's one last great Sarah-Doctor moment when, after she recovers from her possession, she zones out for a second and goes "Eldrad must live." She's just riling the Doctor up, and he loves it. Episode Three belongs to Judith Paris, who plays Female Eldrad and generally makes the second half of the story watchable; no wonder Episode Four is terrible. There are nice touches with the nuclear plant's director phoning his family and trying to pick up the pieces, and it's genuinely surprising that he lives through it all.
Episodes One and Two are fantastic at building the tension. Episode Three is truly wonderful; Episode Four is just such a terrible letdown.
7 out of 10, which is quickly becoming my go-to score for "great setup, terrible resolution."
Who Review: "The Impossible Astronaut"/"Day of the Moon"
MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD. This is pretty much unavoidable, but by this point I think everyone’s seen the episodes, so oh well.
The story opens in 2011. It’s been a few months since Amy and Rory have seen the Doctor, it’ll be a few months until River experiences “The Big Bang” (no, not that. Get your mind out of the gutter), and it’s been about 200 years for the Doctor. We’ll call this Doctor 11.2. They all meet in America, and the Doctor and River compare diaries.
As a side note, why do they do this? Aside from this one time, the Doctor and River always meet in reverse order – the Doctor’s traveling backwards along River’s timeline. This means that if River has experienced Event X yet, then the Doctor hasn’t, and all she’s doing is spoilering it. Or maybe – hey, here’s a thought – the Doctor set up the diary thing with River specifically to manipulate her to this point, this one precious time when they do sync up. Given that 11 is shaping up to be the most manipulative and devious Doctor since 7 (and clearly draws a lot of inspiration from the quintessential wolf in sheep’s clothing, 2), I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that…
That what, this is some secret test of character? Hey look, I’m rambling.
Anyway, the Doctor suggests they go watch the Moon landing, but then takes them on a picnic instead, where he gets shot and killed mid-regeneration by a spacesuit that may or may not have someone inside, and if there is someone inside, it may or may not be a little girl, and the little girl may or may not be Amy’s daughter but is definitely a Time Lord. (I did say there would be major spoilers.)
Okay, here are a number of facts that we need to consider before we go any further.
1. River is in prison for killing a good man, the best man she ever met. You have eleven guesses as to who that might be.
2. We never see the astronaut’s face during the shooting sequence. For that matter, we learn that the suit is capable of moving on its own.
3. Aside from her death in “Forest of the Dead,” a death that would have permanently killed 10 (a Time Lord), we never see River get injured.
4. River knows how to fly the TARDIS, and she’s had lessons from the best. It’s implied that she means the Doctor, but one never knows.
5. Amy is pretty clearly not a Gallifreyan – she would have regenerated at the end of “The Pandorica Opens” if she were.
6. Rory is… clutzy, nerdy, picks up the phrase “dimensionally transcendental” a lot faster than any other companion except River, and while it’s true that he did die that one time, the Silurians have fought the Doctor before and it’s not entirely unthinkable that they developed anti-Time Lord technology. (Do remember, the woman who shot him was aiming for the Doctor.) Alternatively, he may have been in shock.
7. The River/Doctor story is a pretty blatant re-imagining of “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” At one point(s) in that novel, the time traveler and his wife try to have a kid. It doesn’t go very well, because the fetus inherits Dad’s ability to jump through time and space… Meanwhile, Amy may or may not be pregnant. Yikes.
8. As confirmed in “The Doctor’s Wife,” Time Lords can indeed change sex when they regenerate.
Is any of this in any way conclusive? No, but I have hunches, and I can’t wait to see if they’re right or not.
Anyways, with 11.2 dead, 11.1 shows up. He’s 200 years younger and it hasn’t been that long since the events of “A Christmas Carol” for him. They all pack off for 1969, with Amy clearly dying to tell the Doctor what’s going to happen to him in 200/42 years. They get to the White House and meet President Nixon, as well as former FBI agent Canton Everett Delaware III. I’m just going to call him “Agent Badger.” Agent Badger starts working with the Doctor to investigate a case of a mysterious girl who keeps calling the President. However, they quickly run into a bunch of aliens they forget about as soon as they look away, and the astronaut shows up again. Amy reveals that she’s pregnant, and then shoots the astronaut, who had just lifted her helmet to reveal a little girl inside.
“Day of the Moon” inexplicably opens 3 months later. Amy doesn’t look any different, aside from the fact that she’s got some marks on her arms – she’s been keeping track of how many monsters she’s seen. Agent Badger has been reinstated and is hunting down all the Doctor’s associates. Amy and Rory are shot, and River jumps off a building because “she does that.” But it turns out that they’re not really dead, Badger’s still working with the Doctor, and everything’s hunky-dory aside from the fact that the aliens – the Silence – have been secretly ruling the Earth for forever. The Doctor examines the spacesuit and finds that it’s capable of moving on its own, though whatever implications that has for the case of his murder remain unclear. He also advises Nixon to record all of his conversations because of the Silence (ha!) and he later mentions that they’ll never forget Nixon (double ha!).
The climax is genuinely clever, even though it leaves so much unsolved (who’s the girl, why was she in that spacesuit, why is Amy important to the Silence, was anyone in the spacesuit when the Doctor was shot, and if so, who?) The Silence work via post-hypnotic suggestion; you forget them the moment you look away, but you remember their commands. So the Doctor gets one of them to say “you should kill all of us on sight” into Amy’s video-phone, and then broadcasts that during the Moon landing. Once again, if only this guy had been sent to murder the Daleks instead of Scarfman…
On its own, this two-parter has the same problem that "The Big Bang" did, in that it didn't completely wrap up the story, and there are still a number of threads left hanging. That's much less of a problem for a season opener than it is for a season finale, though. Because Moffat seems to be an arc-heavy writer, I've decided that all scores for Season Six are going to be tentative until after the season finale, at which point I'll fix them.
For now, "The Impossible Astronaut" and "Day of the Moon" have scores of 7 and 7.5 out of 10. Strong opening, good conclusion. The .5 is there to indicate that although I did like "Day of the Moon" a bit more, I don't particularly like the three-month gap in between the two stories, and I'm blaming "Day of the Moon" for that for now.
...as one final side note... 10 saw the Moon landing four times while he was stuck in 1969 (cf. "Blink"). Shouldn't the Doctor be brainwashed to kill the Silence on sight, and if so, why does he not?
The story opens in 2011. It’s been a few months since Amy and Rory have seen the Doctor, it’ll be a few months until River experiences “The Big Bang” (no, not that. Get your mind out of the gutter), and it’s been about 200 years for the Doctor. We’ll call this Doctor 11.2. They all meet in America, and the Doctor and River compare diaries.
As a side note, why do they do this? Aside from this one time, the Doctor and River always meet in reverse order – the Doctor’s traveling backwards along River’s timeline. This means that if River has experienced Event X yet, then the Doctor hasn’t, and all she’s doing is spoilering it. Or maybe – hey, here’s a thought – the Doctor set up the diary thing with River specifically to manipulate her to this point, this one precious time when they do sync up. Given that 11 is shaping up to be the most manipulative and devious Doctor since 7 (and clearly draws a lot of inspiration from the quintessential wolf in sheep’s clothing, 2), I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that…
That what, this is some secret test of character? Hey look, I’m rambling.
Anyway, the Doctor suggests they go watch the Moon landing, but then takes them on a picnic instead, where he gets shot and killed mid-regeneration by a spacesuit that may or may not have someone inside, and if there is someone inside, it may or may not be a little girl, and the little girl may or may not be Amy’s daughter but is definitely a Time Lord. (I did say there would be major spoilers.)
Okay, here are a number of facts that we need to consider before we go any further.
1. River is in prison for killing a good man, the best man she ever met. You have eleven guesses as to who that might be.
2. We never see the astronaut’s face during the shooting sequence. For that matter, we learn that the suit is capable of moving on its own.
3. Aside from her death in “Forest of the Dead,” a death that would have permanently killed 10 (a Time Lord), we never see River get injured.
4. River knows how to fly the TARDIS, and she’s had lessons from the best. It’s implied that she means the Doctor, but one never knows.
5. Amy is pretty clearly not a Gallifreyan – she would have regenerated at the end of “The Pandorica Opens” if she were.
6. Rory is… clutzy, nerdy, picks up the phrase “dimensionally transcendental” a lot faster than any other companion except River, and while it’s true that he did die that one time, the Silurians have fought the Doctor before and it’s not entirely unthinkable that they developed anti-Time Lord technology. (Do remember, the woman who shot him was aiming for the Doctor.) Alternatively, he may have been in shock.
7. The River/Doctor story is a pretty blatant re-imagining of “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” At one point(s) in that novel, the time traveler and his wife try to have a kid. It doesn’t go very well, because the fetus inherits Dad’s ability to jump through time and space… Meanwhile, Amy may or may not be pregnant. Yikes.
8. As confirmed in “The Doctor’s Wife,” Time Lords can indeed change sex when they regenerate.
Is any of this in any way conclusive? No, but I have hunches, and I can’t wait to see if they’re right or not.
Anyways, with 11.2 dead, 11.1 shows up. He’s 200 years younger and it hasn’t been that long since the events of “A Christmas Carol” for him. They all pack off for 1969, with Amy clearly dying to tell the Doctor what’s going to happen to him in 200/42 years. They get to the White House and meet President Nixon, as well as former FBI agent Canton Everett Delaware III. I’m just going to call him “Agent Badger.” Agent Badger starts working with the Doctor to investigate a case of a mysterious girl who keeps calling the President. However, they quickly run into a bunch of aliens they forget about as soon as they look away, and the astronaut shows up again. Amy reveals that she’s pregnant, and then shoots the astronaut, who had just lifted her helmet to reveal a little girl inside.
“Day of the Moon” inexplicably opens 3 months later. Amy doesn’t look any different, aside from the fact that she’s got some marks on her arms – she’s been keeping track of how many monsters she’s seen. Agent Badger has been reinstated and is hunting down all the Doctor’s associates. Amy and Rory are shot, and River jumps off a building because “she does that.” But it turns out that they’re not really dead, Badger’s still working with the Doctor, and everything’s hunky-dory aside from the fact that the aliens – the Silence – have been secretly ruling the Earth for forever. The Doctor examines the spacesuit and finds that it’s capable of moving on its own, though whatever implications that has for the case of his murder remain unclear. He also advises Nixon to record all of his conversations because of the Silence (ha!) and he later mentions that they’ll never forget Nixon (double ha!).
The climax is genuinely clever, even though it leaves so much unsolved (who’s the girl, why was she in that spacesuit, why is Amy important to the Silence, was anyone in the spacesuit when the Doctor was shot, and if so, who?) The Silence work via post-hypnotic suggestion; you forget them the moment you look away, but you remember their commands. So the Doctor gets one of them to say “you should kill all of us on sight” into Amy’s video-phone, and then broadcasts that during the Moon landing. Once again, if only this guy had been sent to murder the Daleks instead of Scarfman…
On its own, this two-parter has the same problem that "The Big Bang" did, in that it didn't completely wrap up the story, and there are still a number of threads left hanging. That's much less of a problem for a season opener than it is for a season finale, though. Because Moffat seems to be an arc-heavy writer, I've decided that all scores for Season Six are going to be tentative until after the season finale, at which point I'll fix them.
For now, "The Impossible Astronaut" and "Day of the Moon" have scores of 7 and 7.5 out of 10. Strong opening, good conclusion. The .5 is there to indicate that although I did like "Day of the Moon" a bit more, I don't particularly like the three-month gap in between the two stories, and I'm blaming "Day of the Moon" for that for now.
...as one final side note... 10 saw the Moon landing four times while he was stuck in 1969 (cf. "Blink"). Shouldn't the Doctor be brainwashed to kill the Silence on sight, and if so, why does he not?
Thursday, May 5, 2011
3 things Obama has done recently that I agree with
For my 300th post, I thought I'd do something completely different. I'm not a big fan of the statist in the White House, but hey, that's democracy for you. Nevertheless, the President has recently done three things I wholeheartedly agree with.
1) Released his birth certificate.
About damn time, in my opinion. What, did it take him three years to mock up a passable fake? No, I kid, the evidence is there, he was born in America, drop the issue. Now that the matter of his legitimacy is no longer an issue, we can actually start criticizing his actual policies. On top of that, it makes Trump look like an attention-grabbing blowhard.
2) Gave the "kill" order.
Yes, the story is ever changing. Osama had a weapon. He used his wife as a human shield. Or not. Whatever. Why they need to hide behind self-defense jargon is beyond me. The man was evil and had to be put down. No matter how little else President Obama did, he still deserves credit for sparing us a lengthy media circus and trial, and instead giving the go-ahead to just shoot the bastard.
3) Won't release the death photos.
Because releasing the photos worked so well with Che. You want proof that Satan's Little Helper is dead? See if any more of his little vlogs turn up. (Note: if he flip-flops on the death photo issue, call him out on it.)
1) Released his birth certificate.
About damn time, in my opinion. What, did it take him three years to mock up a passable fake? No, I kid, the evidence is there, he was born in America, drop the issue. Now that the matter of his legitimacy is no longer an issue, we can actually start criticizing his actual policies. On top of that, it makes Trump look like an attention-grabbing blowhard.
2) Gave the "kill" order.
Yes, the story is ever changing. Osama had a weapon. He used his wife as a human shield. Or not. Whatever. Why they need to hide behind self-defense jargon is beyond me. The man was evil and had to be put down. No matter how little else President Obama did, he still deserves credit for sparing us a lengthy media circus and trial, and instead giving the go-ahead to just shoot the bastard.
3) Won't release the death photos.
Because releasing the photos worked so well with Che. You want proof that Satan's Little Helper is dead? See if any more of his little vlogs turn up. (Note: if he flip-flops on the death photo issue, call him out on it.)
Wednesday, May 4, 2011
Who Review: Planet of Evil
When the news broke that Elisabeth Sladen died, the third thing that crossed my mind was, "I should do a review of one of the serials that best highlight her rapport with Tom Baker."
The first thing that crossed my mind, incidentally, was "What?" and the second thing was "Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!"
Anyway, my first thought for highlighting the Baker-Sladen dynamic, which I maintain was the best ever in the entire history of the show, was Pyramids of Mars. Since I misplaced that DVD, you get Planet of Evil instead.
Which is good, in a way, because if you're a new-Who fan, and you've done a tiny bit of research on the old series, you probably know exactly two things about Planet of Evil.
1) the plot is ripped straight from Forbidden Planet, and
2) the planet set is the greatest set the show ever made. (Too bad the other sets all suck in comparison.)
Strangely enough, the script and the sets tend to be the things I focus on in my reviews - hell, I'm going to keep The Caves of Androzani from getting a perfect 10 because its "caves" all have flat floors - and yet, because those two things are what everyone else already knows, this gives me the perfect chance to actually look at the interaction between Baker and Sladen. Which is exactly what I wanted to do in the first place.
So the episode begins on the titular planet, which does in fact look like an alien world. It's so good, it kind of looks like the zerg-infected areas of Starcraft II. Professor Sorenson won't be persuaded to leave his work just because night is coming, so his co-worker leaves without him. The co-worker travels from a television studio to a film set, where we get the full effect of the awesome set design, and then he and another person die fighting an invisible monster, which is no more convincing than it was in "Vincent and the Doctor." Some things never change.
Let me just interrupt here and say something that might go over the heads of younger viewers, or people who never saw Monty Python, or whatever. Part of the reason the planet set looks so damn good is because they shot it on film. That's not because film magically hid the wobbliness of it or whatever, but rather because in 70s British TV, film was used when they needed to go on location, and videotape was used in the studio. So going to a film studio and shooting the planet set on film made everyone who could tell the difference between film and videotape (and really, that should be everyone under 50) briefly think that they actually shot the planet stuff on location.
Okay, after two "gruesome" deaths, we get to the Doctor and Sarah. By the end of Season 12 (Tom Baker's first season), Lis Sladen wanted out of her contract because the character seemed to have regressed. The producers agreed about the regression, but not about letting her go, and instead to their credit focused on the Sarah-Doctor relationship. No, Rose/Ten shippers, not like that.
Their first scene is a great example of what I'm talking about. Sarah's confident enough in her relationship with the Doctor to jokingly berate him for being unable to get her home. The Doctor's actually on the defensive about his inability to fly the TARDIS - showing any sort of vulnerability is pretty much anathema to Tom Baker's Doctor, so the fact that he does it here demonstrates either how much Baker and Sladen were able to get along, or else how much the Fourth actually cares about Sarah's opinion.
Here's another thing: shortly after arriving on the planet, the Doctor finds "a hand tool of some sort." Sarah deduces that they must be humanoid because "they've got hands." This never happens on the new series, and it rarely happens on the old series. On the one hand, Sarah Jane Smith the character is stating the obvious because the writers know they don't have the budget to do a non-humanoid monster (well...) On the other hand, Lis Sladen sells us on the notion that Sarah's an incredibly insightful character who has had (offscreen) adventures with the Doctor involving people who don't have hands. It's touches like this that bring the magic.
A spaceship arrives, carrying a crew led by a young idiot who has no idea what he's doing, while the second-in-command is a white-haired old guy who does know what he's doing but pretty much stays in the background. Draw your own conclusions about unintentional parallels to certain US Presidents and Vice-Presidents.
Anyway, the crew gets slaughtered one by one while the Doctor gets accused of doing the slaughtering, and really it's just Forbidden Planet with Doctor Who trappings. The only major difference is that the "for science" guy doesn't get it at the end. There's really not a lot of point in going over the plot in detail.
In Genesis of the Daleks, Sarah Jane was reduced to nearly being radiation-poisoned and tortured to make the Doctor give up information. In this story, her biggest near-death experience is when she's almost flushed out an airlock - and the Doctor is right alongside her. This was the start of Sladen's third year in the role, and it's at about this point that it stops being "The Doctor and a companion" and starts being "Four-and-Sarah." It's even more evident in a specific scene in the next serial, the aforementioned Pyramids of Mars, when the two of them enter a room, notice the villain, and turn and exit as one.
It's still the Doctor's show; with Tom Baker settling into his role, it's impossible for it not to be. But by establishing such a strong rapport with Baker (and by using her own not-inconsiderable acting chops), Sladen was able to grab a decent section of the spotlight herself. With the benefit of hindsight, Rose is going to be "the Doctor's first serious love interest," Ace is going to be "that girl who blew things up," and Romana is going to be "the one who was in book-smarts what the Doctor was in experience." But Sarah Jane Smith will always be Sarah Jane Smith. No glib summary will suffice.
On the strength of the set and the Baker-Sladen tag-team alone, Planet of Evil gets an 8 out of 10.
Next review: The Masque of Mandragora.
The first thing that crossed my mind, incidentally, was "What?" and the second thing was "Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!"
Anyway, my first thought for highlighting the Baker-Sladen dynamic, which I maintain was the best ever in the entire history of the show, was Pyramids of Mars. Since I misplaced that DVD, you get Planet of Evil instead.
Which is good, in a way, because if you're a new-Who fan, and you've done a tiny bit of research on the old series, you probably know exactly two things about Planet of Evil.
1) the plot is ripped straight from Forbidden Planet, and
2) the planet set is the greatest set the show ever made. (Too bad the other sets all suck in comparison.)
Strangely enough, the script and the sets tend to be the things I focus on in my reviews - hell, I'm going to keep The Caves of Androzani from getting a perfect 10 because its "caves" all have flat floors - and yet, because those two things are what everyone else already knows, this gives me the perfect chance to actually look at the interaction between Baker and Sladen. Which is exactly what I wanted to do in the first place.
So the episode begins on the titular planet, which does in fact look like an alien world. It's so good, it kind of looks like the zerg-infected areas of Starcraft II. Professor Sorenson won't be persuaded to leave his work just because night is coming, so his co-worker leaves without him. The co-worker travels from a television studio to a film set, where we get the full effect of the awesome set design, and then he and another person die fighting an invisible monster, which is no more convincing than it was in "Vincent and the Doctor." Some things never change.
Let me just interrupt here and say something that might go over the heads of younger viewers, or people who never saw Monty Python, or whatever. Part of the reason the planet set looks so damn good is because they shot it on film. That's not because film magically hid the wobbliness of it or whatever, but rather because in 70s British TV, film was used when they needed to go on location, and videotape was used in the studio. So going to a film studio and shooting the planet set on film made everyone who could tell the difference between film and videotape (and really, that should be everyone under 50) briefly think that they actually shot the planet stuff on location.
Okay, after two "gruesome" deaths, we get to the Doctor and Sarah. By the end of Season 12 (Tom Baker's first season), Lis Sladen wanted out of her contract because the character seemed to have regressed. The producers agreed about the regression, but not about letting her go, and instead to their credit focused on the Sarah-Doctor relationship. No, Rose/Ten shippers, not like that.
Their first scene is a great example of what I'm talking about. Sarah's confident enough in her relationship with the Doctor to jokingly berate him for being unable to get her home. The Doctor's actually on the defensive about his inability to fly the TARDIS - showing any sort of vulnerability is pretty much anathema to Tom Baker's Doctor, so the fact that he does it here demonstrates either how much Baker and Sladen were able to get along, or else how much the Fourth actually cares about Sarah's opinion.
Here's another thing: shortly after arriving on the planet, the Doctor finds "a hand tool of some sort." Sarah deduces that they must be humanoid because "they've got hands." This never happens on the new series, and it rarely happens on the old series. On the one hand, Sarah Jane Smith the character is stating the obvious because the writers know they don't have the budget to do a non-humanoid monster (well...) On the other hand, Lis Sladen sells us on the notion that Sarah's an incredibly insightful character who has had (offscreen) adventures with the Doctor involving people who don't have hands. It's touches like this that bring the magic.
A spaceship arrives, carrying a crew led by a young idiot who has no idea what he's doing, while the second-in-command is a white-haired old guy who does know what he's doing but pretty much stays in the background. Draw your own conclusions about unintentional parallels to certain US Presidents and Vice-Presidents.
Anyway, the crew gets slaughtered one by one while the Doctor gets accused of doing the slaughtering, and really it's just Forbidden Planet with Doctor Who trappings. The only major difference is that the "for science" guy doesn't get it at the end. There's really not a lot of point in going over the plot in detail.
In Genesis of the Daleks, Sarah Jane was reduced to nearly being radiation-poisoned and tortured to make the Doctor give up information. In this story, her biggest near-death experience is when she's almost flushed out an airlock - and the Doctor is right alongside her. This was the start of Sladen's third year in the role, and it's at about this point that it stops being "The Doctor and a companion" and starts being "Four-and-Sarah." It's even more evident in a specific scene in the next serial, the aforementioned Pyramids of Mars, when the two of them enter a room, notice the villain, and turn and exit as one.
It's still the Doctor's show; with Tom Baker settling into his role, it's impossible for it not to be. But by establishing such a strong rapport with Baker (and by using her own not-inconsiderable acting chops), Sladen was able to grab a decent section of the spotlight herself. With the benefit of hindsight, Rose is going to be "the Doctor's first serious love interest," Ace is going to be "that girl who blew things up," and Romana is going to be "the one who was in book-smarts what the Doctor was in experience." But Sarah Jane Smith will always be Sarah Jane Smith. No glib summary will suffice.
On the strength of the set and the Baker-Sladen tag-team alone, Planet of Evil gets an 8 out of 10.
Next review: The Masque of Mandragora.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Post-Craig review: Goldfinger
Goldfinger is the Donald Trump of Bond Films, and I'm not talking about the titular character being a fat swindler with a penchant for g...
-
Every once in a while there's a fortuitous intersection of two unrelated stimuli that provokes a profound reaction and inspires the incr...
-
Goldfinger is the Donald Trump of Bond Films, and I'm not talking about the titular character being a fat swindler with a penchant for g...