two things

1) I absolutely refuse to believe that anyone is seriously considering casting Johnny Depp as the Doctor, and I absolutely refuse to believe that anyone is seriously considering another Doctor Who movie. So put that rumor to bed and smother it with a pillow, please.

2) Let's say I accidentally left the water running at my apartment and went on vacation. Then my landlord, who I'll call Barry, prevents my friend from going to my apartment and turning off the water. Then when I get back, Barry expects me to pay for all the lost water and for all the damage to the apartment. If that sounds fair to you, you probably think Obama's doing a bang-up job with that oil spill.

What every customer thinks

For the summer I'm working at a famous downtown Chicago attraction. Guests come from all over the world to see it. Some of them barely speak English. Others can't be bothered to do the tiny bit of research required to figure out how to get back to wherever it is they're going afterwards. Anyway, this is a guest mindset which, in my mind, pretty much sums up how everyone I have to deal with thinks.

Duh, I am the guest. You exist to serve me, peon. I expect you to know anything and everything about not only the attraction you work at, but every other attraction in Chicago. If what I came to see does not work, I will demand a refund and declare my entire day ruined because I can't be bothered to look at the 199 other things that do work. I will complain as though it's your fault, because nothing of mine has ever broken. When I ask you for information, no matter how good your answer is I will nod ignorantly and prompt you to continue. When you're explaining something unprompted, it can't possibly be important so I won't listen. If I give you an attitude you'll just have to deal with it; if you try to point out that I'm wrong, I'll say you're giving me an attitude and demand to see your supervisor. My brat kids will hang off the ticket counter after you tell them not to, and I will avoid the line and march right up to your station. It's your fault if I don't know how to print my tickets off online, or if I can't figure out that you're not free today, or if I mistook your attraction for a different one because I cannot understand English. In short, I am the priveliged guest and you are so far beneath me that I don't have to think twice about stepping on you.

Who Review: Vincent and the Doctor

Okay, now that Doctor Who and the Nice Jem'Hadar is over (no, seriously, the new Silurians look more like the DS9 aliens than their own predecessors),

we move on to a story wherein the Doctor runs into a Famous Historical Person about a year before said Famous Historical Person commits suicide. The Doctor spends half the episode worried that the Famous Historical Person will die before he finishes his work... and then commits suicide.

Does anyone see a serious flaw in that?

They have to team up to fight an invisible monster that only the FHP can see because it represents the FHP's demon. What comes across on screen is Tony Curran waving a stick around and miming, while Matt Smith goes completely ape against a make-believe foe.

Does anyone see a serious flaw in that?

Meanwhile, Amy has absolutely nothing to do except suddenly develop a massive and hitherto-never-before-seen crush on a doomed FHP. This might have something to do with the fact that her boyfriend was killed off and erased from her mind in the previous episode.

Okay, what worked was Matt Smith completely taking the p*ss during the invisible monster fight. The script at least cleverly acknowledges its own shortcomings. But what we're left with is a story where the Doctor insists that he made a difference because a parrot-lizard-hyena thing disappeared from one of Van Gough's paintings. Also, despite only being able to see the thing in the mirror, the Doctor constantly looks over his shoulder. Wha...?

I'm seriously wondering how this story made it to the screen. This is a show where gigantic eyeballs can threaten to destroy the planet, where the British had Mars Probes in 1970, where spaceships kept showing up in 2006... but "the past" is absolutely sacrosanct. We're left with the Doctor cheerfully bidding Vincent farewell, knowing full well he's going to off himself soon. Eh? This is what the Doctor does? (Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeell, way back in The Aztecs, he and his companions manipulated the populace into thinking Barbara was a god, and in The Time Meddler, he pretty much guaranteed that the villagers he met and befriended would get wiped out by vikings. Yay moral relativism.)

I can't fault the acting, because Tony Curran carries this episode so well. The script is seriously wack, though.

Who Review: Cold Blood

The first half of "Cold Blood" was an excellent exercise in contrasting valiant optimism with an increasing sense of dread. I thought the narration at the beginning gave the game away just a bit, but no - the Silurians (still not calling them homo-reptilia, sorry) don't emerge now, they do so in 1,000 years. This has the wonderful advantage of not screwing up much of the series' timeline. (Although Frontier In Space needs to happen before 3020, or else the Humans will have two different sets of cold-war-parable-reptiles on their hands at once.) ("The Beast Below" takes place in the 29th century and shows that Humankind has evacuated the planet, so the Silurians aren't exactly going to have to share... more on this in a moment.)

Complaints in the first half: it was so obvious the moment the scientist told the Doctor to go on ahead, he'd catch up, that he wasn't going to live to see the credits. Mo seems awfully comfortable talking to Malokeh considering the latter dissected him a bit earlier. Eldane seems perfectly happy to share the planet with "Apes," which is not an opinion that any previous Silurian has ever held without first being persuaded by the Doctor- it makes pretty much everything feel contrived. Still, I absolutely loved the first half of this episode, and felt that it was everything that part two of a two-parter should be.

Then, er... in the space of about 5 minutes, we get two Humans deciding to stay below ground (and Eldane is perfectly happy with this, as he is to murder some of his own people), the bloody "cracks in time" show up again, the Doctor does something incredibly stupid, like stop running from an upcoming explosion to stick his hand in an even more dangerous one, and oh yeah, a companion freakin' dies. He dies so dead he gets erased from time and doesn't reappear at the end alongside future-Amy, which nicely explains the scene at the beginning. It's pretty clear that Steven Moffat has a different idea of how time works than, say Russell T Davies, but then again, Rusty had a different idea than, say, Barry Letts (cf. Day of the Daleks and compare that with how the Doctor screws up Harriet Jones' New Golden Age in "The Christmas Invasion"). That said, er, how can his engagement ring still be in the TARDIS? And doesn't the TARDIS have a state of temporal grace? (Funny how the last time it clearly didn't have that temporal grace thingy was, er, Earthshock, which was the last time a companion died... and stayed dead. No amount of techno-hocus-pocus is going to explain the ending of The One I Don't Want to Think About.)

I praised Sherlock Holmes the most when I thought they'd killed off Watson, and likewise I congratulate the showrunners here for killing a companion for the first time in 28 years (again, no, neither Peri nor Grace counts). The series could have gone somewhere fascinatingly different if Rory hadn't been instantly consumed by the Crack of Reset-Button, but expecting Doctor Who to live up to my expectations is pretty much the same thing as anyone with a basic understanding of mechanical physics steadfastly believing that Santa Claus visits every single home in the world in a 24-hour period.

Also: "We'll give you our technology in exchange for a place to live?" It's amazing they didn't give Restac a chance to yell about appeasement.

Let's talk about fixed points in time. It's been 47 years since William Hartnell insisted that you can't even change one single line of history, and it's been 42 years since Jon Pertwee proved him wrong by blowing up a house full of Daleks.

But even ignoring all this, the Doctor's clearly changed history at some point. After all, The Daleks' Master Plan took place in the year 4000, and there's no indication there that Earth was ever evacuated a thousand years previously. Far more recently, we've had "The Long Game," set in 200,000, and "The Parting of the Ways" one hundred years after that, and we saw the planet there. Clearly, when the script editors aren't blatantly ignoring what came before (and let's face it, we don't really want a rematch with Yartek, Leader of the Alien Voord, do we?), they're implying that the Doctor has changed history. Just, you know, never in the past. Except "Fires of Pompeii," where he made the present. So in that case we see the changed future before he changed it, but pretty much everwhere else, especially in this story, history changes as, er, the Doctor changes it.

Anyway, Moffat's really, really got enough rope to hang himself with now. This crack-in-time thing had better be pretty damned impressive, considering that it's intruded on the ending to both this season's two-parters so far.

Who Review: Frontier in Space

Let's turn the clock back to 1973 for a moment. Doctor Who is in its tenth season and all is going swimmingly. Yes, Producer Barry Letts and Script Editor Terrance Dicks are trying to move on to other things (because it just wouldn't be Doctor Who any time prior to 2005 if the producer actually wanted his job). Yes, Roger Delgado (the Master, if you needed to be told) was trying to get his character killed off (tragically...)

Anyway, Whoville's resident Communist, Malcolm Hulke, was asked to come up with another Cold War parable wherein the Doctor tries to prevent Humans and reptiles from killing each other (cf. Doctor Who and the Silurians and The Sea Devils). What he gives us is an abject lesson about not letting fear get the better of us. In fact, as with Silurians, the only real weak point of this serial is the ending, which was crafted as a lead-in to Terry Nation's "newest" Dalek story.

This differs from Hulke's previous work in one very important way: the introduction of a third party. Well, okay, Colony in Space and The Sea Devils both had the Master around to raise further hell, but in both cases the trouble was already started without him. This time around, he's the main instigator, which means that the reptiles are actually decent people.

And this is where the Cold War parable falls to itty bitty bits because with hindsight we know that the Soviets weren't exactly decent people. Then again, it's the Humans who have the political prisons (on the moon!) while the Draconians start a fight with almost no provocation (Viet-something-or-other, perhaps?) Given what previous directors have done with Hulke's scripts - note how both Silurians and Sea Devils are shot (and scored) as though reptilian life is the norm and these apes are just an intrusion - it's not unthinkable that Hulke, whose sympathies lay with the East anyway, cast the Soviets as the Humans this time around. And in this perspective, the age-old left-wing comment about Soviet Russia, that it was a good idea executed by very bad men, definitely applies to General Williams.

But rather than accuse Hulke of anything other than idealism about peaceful coexistence between East and West, let's divorce the serial from the context in which it was made and examine it in a modern light. Yes, the effects work is shoddy but above-average for Doctor Who. Gerry Anderson's models make all the difference. The script does seem to be oddly focused on keeping the Doctor and Jo locked up forever, but Hulke was making the point that in any situation, peaceniks are going to be sidelined by warmongers. Again, the only major complaint I have with the script involves the ending, which isn't Hulke's fault; he was told how it had to end, and the director and effects team couldn't realize it properly. A slightly minor quibble is the Doctor suddenly revealing that he's a noble of Draconia in Episode Five, which seems perfectly in keeping with Pertwee's version but no other. And when exactly did the Doctor go to a peace conference with a giant rabbit, a pink elephant, and a yellow horse with purple spots? It clearly wasn't Pertwee, who's been stuck on Earth up until now, Hartnell wouldn't have done it before the show started, and it seems somewhat out of character for the mischievous Troughton.

Whatever. The entire cast is on form here (special props to Delgado in what was unfortunately his last turn ever as the Master) and the direction, which has to shoot through prison bars and awful lot, is competent. All in all it's hard, given the logistical constraints of this story and the unfortunate benefit of hindsight, not to rank it anything lower than a 8, which as you'll see is high for a six-parter. And frankly, it's watchable. Going on to Planet of the Daleks after this is a major drag, because that story's boring. With this one, you actually want to know what happens next, which is why this is one of only three 6-parters (the other being Genesis of the Daleks and The Talons of Weng-Chiang) to get a 9.

What kicks it up into 9/10 territory for me is, again, that the lizardmen aren't actually evil. It's much easier to believe that the Draconians are sincere in their professed love of peace than it is to believe the same of the Earth-reptiles, who go around mucking things up for an episode or two before revealing themselves. The ending, of course, is a letdown. You can't blame Hulke for that, but you can blame Terry Nation, who told him to end it with the Doctor unconscious and heading for Spiridon, and the director, for making such a hash of the Ogron pillow-god that the producer elected not to use it in the final sequence, thus depriving it of a whole lot of sense.

Who Review: The Hungry Earth

So the production team has decided to honor Barry Letts' memory by commissioning a story that's basically a rehash of the first story he produced (Doctor Who and the Silurians) without making any concessions to anyone who didn't see it.

I wholeheartedly approve of this as a Doctor Who fan, because I don't think that the Doctor really needs to relate all of his adventures from when he had curly hair and a silly dress-sense to anyone who isn't KAREN GILLAN'S LEGS his companion.

(Speaking of the companions, by the way, and more specifically about KAREN GILLAN'S LEGS, why all that talk about Rio? She would have dressed like that no matter where they went.)

Besides, Silurians was so good they already re-made it as The Sea Devils and plundered its Humans-vs-Lizardmen-while-the-Doctor-tries-to-make-peace bit for Frontier in Space, so anyone without any idea as to the plot is really not paying much attention to the show's history.

Having said that, though, these Silurians (and no, I will not refer to them as homo-reptilians) have undergone a few changes, which seems like an odd move, considering how much this story tries to pander to the old viewers after the inane misdirection that was the whodunit (pardon the pun) part of "Amy's Choice" (was there anyone who didn't think, just for a moment, that it might have been the Monk or the Valeyard?) The Silurians have lost their third eye and are now fundamentalist zealots instead of Commies (what, you thought that "I will die to start a war" part was just posturing?) On the plus side, this is probably Doctor Who's most politically aware moment since, er, Captain Jack Harkness set off to distract a guard in "The Doctor Dances," and perhaps since Barry Letts was the producer. On the minus side, a story that relies so heavily on continuity from forty years ago probably shouldn't try recasting the villains like that, even if it is to suit contemporary feelings. (I can imagine another Silurian rehash thirty years from now, where they're - gasp!- right-wing Americans! Except wait, then the Doctor wouldn't have any qualms about wiping them out.)

I do like the fact that we finally see a female Silurian (stop me if I'm wrong, but after the Vinvocci scientist in "The End of Time," that's only the second girl-in-a-mask in the entire new series and maybe the third or fourth overall? ...although dwelling too long on either The Web Planet or Time and the Rani makes my head hurt). (Edit: forgot about Jade in "The End of the World" and the cat-people in "New Earth." Chan and Chan'tho tho.) I also like that the production team finally has enough money to show us an entire Silurian city. The pacing is excellent - we get our first real look at a Silurian a third of the way through this two-parter, just as we got our first real look at the end of Silurians' third of seven episodes. The gimmick with the creaky door was fairly well done, but the initial plot - the earth is eating you - was very poorly realized. In fact, I may have to chalk this one up as the worst-directed episode of the season, which is funny, because it also gives us the clearest view of what the interior of the TARDIS actually looks like, and this is including the previous episode, which spent half its time there.

Oh, and there's no dinosaur. I actually honestly feel cheated by that.