Who Review: Season 31 Wrap-Up

"The Big Bang" plotted a screwball course between epic and corny, and I finally realized that I'm probably just outside the target demographic. Ah well. I'll always have Seasons 7, 10, and 12-14. Anyway, the change from "end of the world" to "wedding day" for the clap-your-hands-if-you-believe deus ex machina (cf. "Last of the Time Lords") was probably for the better, and I can accept the Doctor doing all that paradox-mancy at the beginning because, let's face it, that cliffhanger was a bit... much.

Okay, folks, here's a random idea. No more super-doom cliffhangers that require absurd amounts of deus-ex or suspension of disbelief or whatever. People will watch the show regardless of whether the cliffhanger involves, just to pick two random examples from the 60s, a toilet plunger menacing someone or the Doctor dying and turning into someone else. I could do the whole "the show is tired, out of ideas, and still pretending to be Buffy" shtick, except that it seems to have graduated, if the hero-can't-function-socially subplot of "The Lodger" is anything to go by, to pretending it's Angel. Although it's still got a lot of fairytale elements, and NO FRIKKING EXPLANATION AT ALL for why the TARDIS went and 'sploded.

That said, the "something blue" bit was hilarious, even if the "new" bit was a tad forced. The idea of the Doctor going back on his own timestream is a bit "huh?" when you consider that Amy shouldn't even be able to remember that she's supposed to remember something (that's going to make my head hurt), but seeing him get away with it was pretty cool. Getting Rory back for reals was a nice touch, as was the notion of him standing guard over the Pandorica for a 1,894 years.

(He-e-e-ey... li'l Amelia opens the Pandorica in 1996, but the Doctor seems to think, judging by both his rescue of River and his "eye of the storm" comments, that it's 2010. Maybe that's just me remembering it wrong, though.)

All in all, the finale and season 5 as a whole was a bit hokey, but the show has never not been that. Besides, you can't quite fathom RTD coming up with a story this mad - let's face it, aside from, er, The War Games and The Green Death, there aren't very many stories that concern themselves with what happens after the main crisis is averted. You could almost see this as a regeneration story, except that the Doctor gets saved by a girl who never gave up on her imaginary friend. How sweet. I'm optimistic for the future.

Who Review: the Pandorica Opens

or: Steven Moffat's continuing attempt to be Russell T Davies.

alternatively: the first indicators we get that Moffat likes Battlestar Galactica a tad too much (see also that crap next season with the Gangers).

The Doctor gets a message from River Song, which eventually leads him to a Roman camp near Stonehenge. Beneath it, they find the Pandorica, a prison designed to contain a demon or a trickster that comes out of the blue and wrecks your whole day. No, that doesn't sound like anyone we've heard of.

It turns out that Rory is among the Romans, except when Amy remembers him, his sleeper personality comes to the fore and he shoots her, because he's actually a Cylon. I mean, an Auton, but he looks a hell of a lot more Human than they normally do. Meanwhile a ton of baddies show up and imprison the Doctor in the Pandorica. End of episode.

First off, what the hell was that picture of Rory doing in Amy's room? She doesn't remember him, and he's been erased from existence so... er, why is that picture there? You can't have a photograph of someone who was never born! How did the Nestenes raid her memories if she doesn't have any of him?

Also, what the Pandorica contains: something that just shows up out of the blue and spoils your day? Sounds exactly like the Doctor. So really, the only surprise in regards to its contents is that he's not in there already.

Okay, obviously the whole guest-star reunion thing's getting a bit tired and I'm hoping Moffat and co do something different next year. Aside from a throwaway line in The Time Meddler, the series has never done Stonehenge before, so that was a good call.

Now for the big one. The idea of all the villains teaming up to defeat the Doctor... good lord, that's camp.

Who Review: The Lodger

Good grief! For all my prattling on about The Time Meddler in my hyper-extended reviews of The War Games and "Amy's Choice" (or rather, my one-second blurb about "Amy's Choice" at the beginning of my "The Hungry Earth" review), I did not expect the twist at the end of "The Lodger."

Now, in my defense, there was a terrible bit of mis-casting going on here. The second incarnation of the Pilot looked an awful lot like the first victim. So I thought we were looking at a rip-off of that one early Angel episode where the killer takes over the body of its latest victim. That's entirely in line with what I expected from the guy who brought us gas-mask zombies and piranha shadows.

Okay, bits that worked: sidelining the compaion and the TARDIS and very nicely forcing the Doctor to work without his sonic screwdriver for one (again). I even forgot, until this episode, that each of the regulars has to miss one episode a year. This was a great way to write Amy out for a little while, and the parts with the Doctor trying to be a normal person were easily this episode's greatest selling point.

Bits that didn't: there's no nice way to get around this. This is a story where two people manage to realize that they're in love with each other (and thus conveniently save the planet), but even though the Doctor figures this out in no time, he's still overly obsessed with trying to solve the mystery. The Doctor being Mr. Awesome Football/Soccer player was, er, well...
...and here's the other problem with the story. It forces the Doctor to be a lot thicker about Humanity than he's been in the past. He's way off on their customs, even though Tennant et al never really had this problem. And yet, this is yet another episode, along with "The Eleventh Hour," "Vampires of Venice," and "Vincent and the Doctor," that goes to extreme lengths to assure us that yes, this is the same show that once starred William Hartnell back in the Beatles' heyday.

My complaints about this episode, then, are basically my same complaints for the entire season so far: Moffat and co. are too comfortable to sit tight in areas they should be branching out, too continuity-minded (and here an absolutely grisly thought crosses my mind, because continuity-obsessed JNT was rather good in his first few seasons too)... and yet they don't seem to be entirely sure who the Doctor is. The best episode so far this season ("Cold Blood," in case you needed to be told) was nearly wrecked because the Silurian leader was so unlike any reptile ever seen before on the show. Here is the paradox: on the one hand, they're determined to remind us that this is Doctor Who we're watching, and on the other hand, they're trying to change it. They should be trying harder.

Look. We understand that change happens. This is a program that thrives on it. When the original star became too sick to work, he was written out. When the color budget wouldn't let them go to a new planet every month, the show was grounded on Earth for three years. In fact, some of the worst bits of the show (Pertwee's last year, Tom Baker's last few years, the last few years of Classic Who) are bad because important people (Letts, Dicks, Pertwee, Baker, Nathan-Turner) were too set in their ways. Steven Moffat is not RTD, nor is he JNT, Graham Williams, Phillip Hinchcliffe, Barry Letts, Derrick Sherwin, Peter Bryant, Innes Lloyd, John Wiles, or Verity Lambert. It's time he embraced that.

Happy 4th of July, Everyone!

Ah, independence. There's nothing quite like it. Today's a great day to reflect on it, on the people who fought and died over unfair taxes and a lack of representation.

...just sayin'. I'm sure the Earth's orbit has gotten a bit more erratic since November 2008. Must be all the Founding Fathers spinning in their graves.

Just to recap: there's a "health" bill that nobody's actually read and most people actually don't want, but the gist of it is that the government now controls your healthcare. There's a "stimulus" that's lining the pockets of various cronies. There's a nominee for the Supreme Court who can't give a straight answer to any question asked by a Republican. There's a President who's far more concerned with finding out whose ass to kick than he is with actually cleaning up the mess. We're probably on the verge of a double-dip recession.

But the good news is, fireworks are cool and we get to make platitudes to freedom. Ah, that makes up for it.

My Life, Chapter DXLIX

(or, for those of you who can't read Archaic, 549. I just picked the number out of thin air)

I finally got fed up with my iPod mini (tm, C and all that other nonsense) and finally upgraded to a nano. So I was up early this morning to put all my old songs on it. This took considerably less time than I thought it would, so I went on the internet, only to find that the internet is just as dead on a Saturday morning in the summer as it is on a Saturday morning during the school year.

So I'd like to know who decided that the internet could just die on weekends? Some of us need to be entertained, you know. It's not like we can go to bed Friday night, wake up in time for Doctor Who on Saturday evening, and then sleep until Monday (which reminds me that Who's on hiatus this weekend...)

In the plus column, there's more coming out of the "Who Review" vaults in the near future. And probably some ranting about the 4th of July as well.