Everything Old is New Again

 With Doctor Who circling the drain (because you need more than The First Female Doctor to attract fans, you need good writing and less preachiness), the BBC have gone back in their own time machine and hired Russell T. Davies (RTD) to resurrect the show.

Again.

"Deep Breath" and "Into The Dalek" mini-Who Reviews

Before I begin, I want to make one thing clear:

Steven Moffat is full of himself.

There, now that that's out of the way, we can talk about Peter Capaldi's first two episodes as The Best Doctor Who Ever.

...you know, aside from [insert all your other favorites here], and Patrick Troughton.

Who Review: The Enemy of the World

You really miss something when you only get a dozen episodes of Who a year. Everything is just flung at you with no time for the plot to breathe organically or for the Doctor to really get involved in the setting into which he's been deposited.

The Enemy of the World is from Season Five of the classic series, which means it's in black and white and stars Patrick Troughton, the second Doctor. You might find a bit of Matt Smith in his characterization, especially at the beginning as he strips down to his long johns just to have a bit of a splash in the water. This harmless bit of characterization is probably overdone, but it works nicely because Troughton pulls double duty in this serial and also plays the villain.

Without giving too much away, the Doctor is approached by a resistance group that wants him to impersonate the villainous Salamander so that they (or he) can kill him, although a) not everything is as it seems, and b) the scheme seems to be overly complicated, given that Jamie at one point breaches Salamander's security all by himself. Despite that rather glaring plot hole, the script does move along at a solid pace, drip-feeding you information, innuendo and plot twists at just the right pace. You can watch the entire thing in one sitting without feeling its two-and-a-half hour runtime.

Obviously, goes the usual yarn, you have to make allowances for the shoestring budget and rushed schedule of the classic Who production. To be sure, there is a little bit of that here, but it shows up shockingly late in the serial. No, I'm not talking about the bit where they stick George Pravda in a hallway because they couldn't afford to build a prison cell. That's glossed over about as well as it is in any other serial. No, I'm talking about the underground fallout shelter, about which more later. But while I'm on the production values, I want to praise the team for taking the time to set up a complicated effects shot at the very end of the story, where both of Troughton's characters are in-shot at the same time.

Another amazing thing about this serial is the lack of black and white morality that certain other adventures, both classic and modern, have fallen prey to. To be sure, Salamander is an evil man. The show can never come right out and say this, but it's pretty clear from the subtext that he's taking sexual advantage of his food-taster. But his security chief turns out to be a decent human being, while his bitterest enemy is not quite the saint you might expect him to be. (Of course, the Doctor's suspicions are spot-on from the start.)

The script in general sings, crackling with little bits of characterization to breathe life into ordinarily dry info-dumps. It's astonishing to watch the first episode of this and think that it's written by the same man who wrote The Edge of Destruction, possibly the most boring Doctor Who serial ever. And Barry Letts slips behind the camera and delivers the goods - there's an amazing handheld POV shot from a helicopter taking off that looks like it belongs in a film, not in a notoriously cheap television show.

The pacing is unusually good for a black-and-white serial; it's basically the Doctor Who equivalent of Casablanca, or perhaps The Third Man, given the ambiguous morality of one of the main characters and the fact that a protracted sequence takes place in a tunnel. 

And that brings us to the one significant problem with this otherwise-magnificent gem of a serial. It turns out there are a bunch of underground proles that Salamander has duped in order to carry out his plan (because it's so evil he can't entrust his minions to do it - see what I mean about the unusual morality of this serial?). The problem is, we see these "oppressed underground proles" too often in other serials, and neither their costumes nor their performances are up to par with the rest of the serial. 

The action also gets a little bit confusing towards the end, mainly because they try to pull two switcheroos in a row, making us think in one scene that the Doctor is actually Salamander, and that Salamander is the Doctor in a subsequent scene. The first scene is utterly brilliant and so quintessentially Troughton, but I'm not convinced the payoff is worth the attempt to confuse the audience. The second time, it's pretty obvious what's going on given that "The Doctor" won't speak (Salamander speaks like Speedy Gonzales, and the Doctor mentions a few times that he's concerned he won't be able to master Salamander's accent in time).

These are ultimately minor quibbles. It's great to have this back in the archive after 35 years. Bravo to the people who found it, and double bravo to the people who made it. Final grade: A-.

No, "James Bond" is not a code name.

There was supposed to be a Thunderball review up today but then things happened. So you get this tripe instead.

Jumping-off point: this Cracked article.

Under this theory, each actor played a different secret agent, but each of these different secret agents used the code-name "James Bond," which explains the little differences between them like the fact that Roger Moore, unlike any of his colleagues, can disarm a nuclear bomb, or that Timothy Dalton would rather set his enemies on fire while Pierce Brosnan preferred punning them to death.  Some details seem to fit: “Sean Connery” retired after being forced to work with the self-evidently insane Tiger Tanaka in You Only Live Twice ("Yes, Mr. Bond, now you need to go undercover as Japanese. No, I will not give you any accent coaching, only a horribly insulting makeup job"), only for his replacement to resign out of grief as soon as his wife was killed, prompting "Sean" to come out of retirement for one more go before they could hire Simon Templar's Eyebrows; “Roger Moore” was finally given his pension and chucked out, and “Timothy Dalton” went rogue. One only hopes that "Pierce Brosnan" is still locked up in that North Korean prison and that all of Die Another Day only took place in his head.

Right, one of the worst mistakes of 2013 was Doctor Who's 50th anniversary

Or so say the folks at io9, in between implying someone should be blacklisted just because they share the same political views the President of the United States professed to hold back when he was running for office.

Truthfully, the "futurists" (Marxist-progressives) at io9 are just upset that the Doctor hasn't turned into a woman yet.

Expanding on "Time of the Doctor", part 1 of X

In this post I explicitly want to limit myself to just the regeneration, and discuss both the 13-life limit and the "farewell tour."

"The Time of the Doctor" impressions

• Large chunks of the middle were an exercise in marking time. The Doctor sends Clara away, lets her back, sends her away, and lets her back again
• The aging makeup is no better than it was in "The Girl Who Waited"
• Having Smith regenerate twice was stupid, anticlimactic, and annoying
• Bringing back Karen Gillan for the regeneration was a tremendous insult to Jenna Coleman
• Where the hell is the Valeyard?
• "I'm not talking to you," shouted the girl in the middle of the truth-field

Two out of ten.

When I joked about not wanting to draw parallels between Jon Nathan-Turner and Steven Moffat, some part of my brain went ping

• They both cast the youngest actor to play the Doctor to date the first chance they got to re-cast the role (Peter Davison and Matt Smith)
• They both oversaw an anniversary special that was somewhat marred by the fact that a recent Doctor (Tom Baker/Christopher Eccleston) couldn't be convinced to come back
• They both revisited old and forgotten enemies during the run-up to that anniversary special
• They both wouldn't leave the title sequence and theme tune alone
• They both tried to do really complicated seasonal arcs with limited success
• They both cast someone who had appeared on the show before (Colin Baker/Peter Capaldi) as a "darker" Doctor the second chance they got to re-cast the role
• If you consider John Hurt a "re-cast" rather than a special guest star, you can change "the second chance..." to "after killing off two Doctors" (because Tom Baker did one season under JNT)

Doctor Who fake titles

generated here
and here

(Incidentally, they both eventually generated "The Massacre," which is the official title of a Season 3 serial.)

Here are some of the ones that could be Doctor Who episode titles

• The Mercy of a Doctor
• The Brain of the Cybermen
• Just don't be "Spock's Brain"
• Massacre of the Lazarus Planet
• Attack of the Lazarus Planet
• The Ultimate Infinity
• Hey, they did a serial called The Deadly Assassin
• The Mind Dominators of Empty Daleks
• The Android of Death
• So close
• The Future Robbers
•  Children of Time
• Deep Space 9 beat you to it
• The Time Mists
• Time of Horror
• A Day in the Ice
• In which four Ice Warriors form a band that one of their girlfriends breaks up
• The False God
• Spoiler: it's the Doctor
• The Fear of the Angel
• Vengeance of the Keeper
• If not Doctor Who then Mass Effect
• An Abominable Light
• Hey, we already did shadows...

I don't like the Series 7b credit sequence

First of all, recoloring the "Doctor Who" title every time is the sort of stupid cheap (I'm inclined to say "naff" but that might result in me failing British 101) gimmick that reminds me far too much of the JNT era.

The starfield itself actually reminds me more of Star Trek than 80s Who.

This could be because Tom Baker is My Doctor(c) and thus any opening sequence that's not the time tunnel is a hideous sacrilege.

The point is, if I were Moffat, I'd be doing everything in my power to avoid drawing similarities between my era and JNT's. (Hey, maybe that's why Doctors Five through Seven had nothing to do with the 50th anniversary.)

Who Review: Cold War

In November of 1984, shortly before Gorbachev came to power, a Typhoon-class Soviet sub surfaced just south of the Grand Banks.
It then sank in deep water, apparently suffering a radiation problem. Unconfirmed reports indicated some of the crew were rescued.
But according to repeated statements by both Soviet and American governments, nothing of what you are about to see...

ever happened.

 

Wait, sorry, where was I? Oh, right, Davos Seaworth is a Soviet submarine captain, Edmure Tully is his political officer, and Chancellor Gorkon is some random scientist who likes listening to degenerate imperialist music. Oh, and he's dug up an Ice Warrior.

Gee, first the Great Intelligence and now the Ice Warriors. Hey, 2013 wouldn't happen to be, say, an anniversary year, would it? What's next? The Black Guardian? Yartek, leader of the alien Voord? Sutekh? Magnus Greel? (Downside to nuking Gallifrey: traditional anniversary villain Omega has to be a no-show, although he did get a shoutout in The Day of the Doctor.)

So it turns into Alien on a submarine, and the weirdest thing about the cast isn't the fact that the three main guest stars are extremely recognizable, but that they don't do frickin' Russian accents. But then, neither did Sean Connery, but then, Sean Connery was James Bond.

I'm going to review The Aztecs soon, and I was going to hold off on mentioning it until then, but it comes up in this episode: in very early Classic Who, before the Doctor was really a hero (remember, in the very first serial of the show, he was all set to bash a caveman's head in with a rock in order to get back to his ship*), every serial had to come up with some sort of contrivance to keep the Doctor and company from leaving before the plot was resolved. They'd be captured by cavemen, captured by Daleks, captured by Marco Polo, locked out of the TARDIS by a telepathic forcefield, lose the TARDIS in some Indiana Jones-style tomb, etc. So here as soon as the Doctor and Clara hop aboard the Red Onion, the TARDIS activates its emergency displacement system and jumps away to the south pole. (In 1983. Not sure how time works, but if I were the TARDIS, I wouldn't go to the place where my owner was destined to die for the first time three years hence. Wouldn't that leave a wound in time or something?)

*Yes, One called it "the Ship" far more often than he called it "the TARDIS."

The Ice Warrior gets loose and everything goes to hell. Edmure Tully turns out to be just as much a screwup in this universe as in Game of Thrones and gets himself offed, but eventually the Doctor and Clara are able to make the Ice Warrior understand this thing called mercy, so when his ship comes to get him he refrains from using the sub's nukes to start Operation Planetary Eradication. (OPE - yup, that's a Doctor Strangelove reference thrown in among my Hunt for Red October references.) In the process, the Doctor once again rehashes the whole Time War Thing And How It Relates To This Episode, just in case we'd all forgotten in the long gap since "A Town Called Mercy."

Let's get the obvious comparison out of the way. It takes place in XX83, during a cold war, underwater, with a returning foe, and has some sketchy effects. It is, basically, Warriors of the Deep done "right." (I confess, while the rest of Warriors was a mess, I liked the way it ended: with everyone dead. The Doctor's moral high ground can't save everyone if one side has no interest in salvation.) I disagree with the idea of doing the Ice Warrior's head in shockingly obvious CGI, especially when his hands were animatronics. We're twenty years on from Jurassic Park, which flipped between the two flawlessly, and yet you can still tell the difference on a TV budget. 

It is Doctor Who's most blatant attempt to do Alien ever, which is a) a good thing, because I was really afraid it was going to be "Dalek on a submarine" and b) quite amusing when you consider the following things:

• Ridley Scott was this close to being the production designer for Doctor Who's second serial ever. You know, The Daleks.
• Doctor Who did a serial in 1974, five years before Alien, with basically the exact same premise (minus Alien's most famous scene)
• Speaking of Alien's most famous scene, John Hurt shows up at the end of this season.

This is a tough episode for me to grade because I like The Hunt for Red October and I like Game of Thrones and there's plenty of appeal for me in it. But as I hinted above, the Doctor basically gets to do the exact same thing he did in "A Town Called Mercy." There's more for the companion to do this time (and Jenna Coleman looks damn fine in a military jacket), but... something just doesn't quite click.

5 out of 10.

Yes, Matt Smith is the 11th Doctor. Yes, he's also on his 13th and final life. It is not complicated

and if Steven Moffat is making it complicated then that's sad.

Look. A Time Lord can regenerate 12 times for a total of 13 lives. The first time the Doctor regenerated was when he changed from the First Doctor to the Second...

Regeneration - Actor - Doctor - Life

     0.  William Hartnell - 1st Doctor - 1st life

1. Patrick Troughton - 2nd Doctor - 2nd life
2. Jon Pertwee - 3rd Doctor - 3rd life
3. Tom Baker - 4th Doctor - 4th life
4. Peter Davison - 5th Doctor - 5th life
5. Colin Baker - 6th Doctor - 6th life
6. Sylvester McCoy - 7th Doctor - 7th life
7. Paul McGann - 8th Doctor - 8th life
8. John Hurt - War Doctor - 9th life
9. Christopher Eccleston - 9th Doctor - 10th life
10. David Tennant - 10th Doctor - 11th life
11. Meta-crisis ("Journey's End")/David Tennant - 12th life
12. Matt Smith - 11th Doctor - 13th life

No, the events of "The Impossible Astronaut" aren't a problem because it was a shapeshifting robot duplicate. And the Doctor using regeneration energy to heal River's wrist in "The Angels Take Manhattan" just has to be residual energy from the time she burned up all her regenerations saving his life in "Let's Kill Hitler." (Because the alternative is that Moffat invented the War Doctor after Season 7a.)

When Showrunners Write for Shows

I was reading About Time Volume 7, and it was explaining that part of the reason why the characterization (of everyone, but especially Rose and Mickey) went to hell in Season Two is because RTD was too busy working on his own scripts to actually do the script-supervising job.

And it occurred to me that Steven Moffat has the same problem. After all, the guy was a beast under RTD, but the only thing he's written since taking over the show that comes close to being as good as "Blink" was "A Christmas Carol." And this makes a certain amount of sense; prior to Doctor Who getting shoved around the calendar year, it's safe to assume that Moffat had more time to work on the Christmas specials than he did on regular episodes.  (I'd also like to note that the absolutely Santa-awful "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe" was dumped on us immediately after the schedule hijinks began, and that only five episodes aired between that and the following Christmas special, "The Snowmen," which was something of a return to form.)

Going back and looking at periods in which the script editor wrote for the show, one notes that the only person who could pull this off without wrecking the rest of the season was Robert Holmes (unsurprisingly) in Season 14 (and probably in Season 12, given what people have said about Terry Nation's script for Genesis of the Daleks). Terrance Dicks wrote "Robot" at the end of the subpar Season 11. Douglas Adams sunk his entire creative talent into "City of Death," the only thing worth watching from Season 17. (Eric Saward got the job because of "Earthshock," so we can't blame him for the rest of Season 19.) (And it's possible that the black & white script editors like Tosh or Spooner pulled it off, but with so many episodes missing from the archive I really can't make that call.)

Curiously, Nu Who's American counterpart and most obvious inspiration, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, had the exact opposite problem. When Joss Whedon took a vacation to write Season Six's "Once More With Feeling," he left the show in less capable hands and the rest is history. (And I'd like to point out that Buffy aired almost twice as many minutes per year as Doctor Who does, which makes me incredibly skeptical whenever somebody tries to defend the recent scheduling shenanigans.)

I'm not really going anywhere in particular with this. 

Who Review: "The Angels Take Manhattan"

I've started off a few of my more recent reviews with something along the lines of "Steven Moffat has a problem," and I'm going to start this one off by wondering whether Moffat knows why the Angels were such a creepy, scary threat to begin with. So I wanted to preface this by saying that Moffat's easy prey right now since he's the showrunner, but that's not why I keep criticizing him. See, after "Blink" aired, I wrote a list of Doctor Who episodes I owned and a brief synopsis of each one, and at the end of the "Blink" synopsis I said something along the lines of "Moffat should be the next showrunner." Seriously, the first three years the show was back, Moffat consistently wrote the best episodes each season. He rightfully snatched a Hugo for "The Empty Child," beating out Battlestar Galactica's "Pegasus," and then his "Girl in the Fireplace" stole a Hugo from BSG's "Downloaded."

So I'm not trying to say that Moffat is the biggest hack on Doctor Who since Terry Nation. That's not what I'm getting at here. Nation was a guy who wrote (and snagged the copyright for) the Daleks, and yet the best-remembered Dalek serials (The Evil of the Daleks, Day of the Daleks, Genesis of the Daleks) weren't written by him (Genesis is credited to him, but the whole concept was outgoing Script Editor Terrance Dicks's idea, and it was heavily re-written by incoming Script Editor Robert Holmes). In contrast, Moffat actually came up with several good monsters, it's just that he went and milked his most famous one far too hard.

Case in point: the climax of "The Angels Take Manhattan" involves the Doctor, River and Amy arguing in a graveyard while a statue points at Amy. The Weeping Angels work in dark rooms with flickering lights, which, admittedly the first half of the episode has in spades. The don't work outside in broad daylight. The tag at the end of "Blink" - showing a bunch of statues outside in broad daylight - worked as kind of a stinger because it didn't require us to think about it too much, and it was an effective capstone on the previous 44 minutes of pure terror.

Also... the decision to treat the Statue of Liberty like the T-rex when up until this point the Angels have been Velociraptors... it doesn't work.  The Angels aren't scary when the camera holds on them for a very long time, which is basically what happens with Lady Liberty in the background of all the rooftop scenes. It's hard to fault the director for not "getting" the Angels because there are parts of this episode that do work as well as the scariest parts of "Blink." In particular, the little kid statues that keep terrorizing Rory went a long way towards making the Angels scary again. (Although, how did those statues get Rory out of the basement and over to their farm? They didn't zap him through time...)

By far the most frustrating thing about this episode is the fact that 1938 is somehow a TARDIS-proof year. Daffy Duck was named, the March of Dimes was established, Hitler assumed control of the German military, and the Munich Agreement was signed. Okay, those are fairly important things. But hang on; back in "The Empty Child," the TARDIS managed to land in 1941. Ah well, different production teams, different rules, ri... oh, wait, "The Empty Child" was written by Moffat. Why couldn't the Doctor have popped back to 1941 and picked up Amy and Rory after three years? Because the plot demanded it?

By far the most ludicrous thing about "The Angels Take Manhattan" (and it's a close tie between this, the Godzilla Lady Liberty, and the Graveyard Scene) sees the Doctor running in slow-motion to recover the last page on the novel he was reading as if it's the key to resolving the episode's crisis and not just a little epilogue on the Ponds.

Still, aside from Martha Jones, Amy probably gets the most dignified companion exit of New Who, and I guess that's saying something.

6 out of 10.

No, you don't need every Doctor to show up in an Anniversary Special

(And other assorted defenses/critiques of Steven Moffat)

The most persistent criticism I've seen of The Day of the Doctor is that, aside from David Tennant and a Tom Baker cameo (and a Hartnell soundalike recording one new line of dialogue to play over stock footage), the other Doctors were present for about ten seconds in the form of stand-ins or stock footage.

Fiddlesticks.

Who Review: The Power of Three

Hey you guys, remember that show Star Trek: Voyager? Remember the "Year of Hell" two-parter?

Oh, you don't? Okay, the quick and dirty is that over the space of a year, Voyager gets the snot beaten out of it, there's actual tension, conflict and character development among the crew (and then the reset button is pushed, naturally).

So when I saw the preview for this episode at the end of "A Town Called Mercy," where Amy described the plot as "the year of the slow invasion... when the Doctor came to stay," I figured it could be something like that.

It's not.

The Doctor gets terminally bored with the slow invasion and wanders off on some other adventures, getting Amy married to Henry VIII in the meantime, before he returns, waves his magic wand at the problem, and makes it go away.

It's supposed to be about, I think, Amy and Rory deciding whether to live at home or keep traveling with the Doctor. You know, that decision they've been putting off ever since "Hotel Labyrinth" "The God Complex." Would you care to guess what they do here? Oh, that's right, they put the decision off again.

Meanwhile, Rory's Dad is back for a repeat performance, because hey why not, and he's knocked unconscious by the alien menace that's trying to kill humanity.  Knocked unconscious, rather than killed, by the alien menace who's trying to kill humanity.

The one thing the episode has going for it is that it finally came up with a role appropriate for the sort of child actors they can afford (as opposed to the ones Game of Thrones can afford, which are much better). Namely, a kid who literally does not speak, does not emote, does not have to do anything except act like a robot.

Three out of ten. I would rather Steven Moffat reduce the number of episodes per year (or, given his strengths and weaknesses, make fewer, longer episodes per year a la Sherlock) than dish out crap like this.

Who Review: The Day of the Doctor

This is an anniversary special unlike no other. Let's start with the obvious: in The Three Doctors, The Five Doctors, and even, God help us, Dimensions in Time, efforts were made to represent all the Doctors.

No, no, please come back, this isn't another Classic Who rant about how Colin Baker should have been in it. When you have twelve Doctors, you will swamp the plot if you try to include them all. Hell, The Five Doctors is padded enough without an actual appearance by Tom Baker. And, well, look, between Baker's stock footage in that and Hartnell's cue-card-reading performance in The Three Doctors, it's fair to say that they've never, really, done a multi-Doctor story that adequately featured every incarnation of the Doctor, and oh well.

Speaking of padding the script, have you noticed that each of the previous anniversary specials just had the one plot? Some super-villain that requires the presence of all the Doctors, or else some super-villain who's deliberately drawn all the Doctors into his trap? Yeah, The Day of the Doctor doesn't even have a proper villain. Or a single plot. The latter is a staple of the show under Steven Moffat (a man who once said that Douglas Adams needed someone to stop him from including every wacky idea he had in the show). The former is... probably the first time this has happened since, oh, The Edge of Destruction.

Now you're going to needle me and say, "Look, the episode has Zygons and Daleks in it! How can you say it doesn't have a villain?" And my answer is that it doesn't have a villain. They're there, but... they're not.  The Zygon plot disappears, and the resolution to the story is basically the Doctors saving Gallifrey from themselves, rather than from the Daleks.

Okay, the plot, briefly. In the present day, Clara and the Doctor are taken to UNIT because there's a problem. The Doctor is shown a Gallifreyan painting - a moment frozen in time - that's either called "No More" or "Gallifrey Falls." It's called "Gallifrey Falls" because that's what's happening - begging the question of who made that painting - and it's called "No More" because that's what the Hurt Doctor carved on a wall with a laser-gun, for some reason. Then he went and stole the Moment, a weapon so sophisticated it grew a conscience.

Okay, remember when I did my review of "Asylum of the Daleks" in the (written) style of Chester A. Bum? Because I'm trying to picture Moffat pitching this script and not using that persona. "So there's this weapon that's so sophisticated that it actually grew a conscience - like Hactor from Life, the Universe and Everything, and it takes the form of Rose Tyler because, well, the fans just can't get enough of her.* And then Ten and Eleven are fighting the Zygons!"

*If Rose hadn't appeared since the end of Season 2, it would be perfectly fine by me. Just in case I never made that clear in any of my other reviews.

Anyway, Head!Rose (she calls herself the Bad Wolf, but, look, from the moment it's revealed that only the Hurt Doctor can see her, I've decided that Doctor Who and BSG take place in the same universe, or at least in universes that have the same God) tells the Hurt Doctor not to make everything go boom and then kind of does a reverse Christmas Carol. "Reverse" in both the sense that we only travel to the Doctor's future, and in the sense that it doesn't change him. After he witnesses Ten and Eleven sort out the whole Zygon thing (by having them negotiate for... what, exactly? Are the Doctors content to let Zygon shapeshifters live among us unsuspecting apes?), he decides that he has to go through with killing Gallifrey and the Daleks because... of... quantum.

10 and 11 go along with him, but then decide to take a third option by slotting Gallifrey into a pocket in time. They get the First Doctor to start the calculations (somehow) so that all the Doctors know what to do (somehow), but everyone except 11 and possibly 10 forget about their efforts because of the unstable timeline or some such. (Look, until "Time Crash," we never had a case of the Doctor remembering experiencing the events of a multi-Doctor episode from his younger self's perspective before. Now suddenly the show has to delve into fanwank to explain his amnesia . Joy.)

I think this is the part where certain fans whine about how saving Gallifrey undoes all the angst that Nine and Ten had. Piffle and Phooey.  1, raise your hand if you expected Gallifrey to stay dead forever. 2, raise your hand if you were sick and tired of hearing about the Time War.

I love how Hurt doesn't do the Espresso routine that everyone from Eccleston on has done, and that he is apprehensive at best about the prospect of turning into the excitable, overeager lads that are Ten and Eleven. I really hope that Peter Capaldi will be as laid-back as Hurt, but I'm a killjoy that way. (I'm overall torn on the whole concept of the Hurt Doctor. On the one hand, he throws the numbering out of whack, makes Matt Smith the twelfth regeneration, and forces the show to address the 13-life limit now rather than when Capaldi leaves. On the other hand, it's John Freaking Hurt, who, assuming we don't count the 60s Dalek films with Peter Cushing, is probably the most renowned actor ever to play the Doctor. And he frakking nails it.)

I also liked how the "use the same screwdriver to do the 400-year calculation" gimmick (even though 10 lost his on the moon and 11 certainly implied that his screwdriver was new) set up the resolution. Nice touch there. Moffat's getting better at this sort of thing.

As my recap might have hinted, it is not perfect. And it's not because of the lack of other Doctors - look, three are dead, four don't look like themselves anymore, and one probably won't touch this series again for anything short of the Crown Jewels.  I think we'd all rather our Doctors be represented by stock footage rather than by re-casting (though I'd love to know what the Hartnell fans thought of David Bradley in An Adventure in Space and Time), which means that stock footage is really what we're going to get.  ...And I'm not writing off the other Doctors just because I'm a Tom Baker fanboy and the man himself got a cameo at the end of this special. As I said in the AAiSaT review, I thought his cameo went on for a tad too long and wasn't vague enough as to who or what Tom's character was and what message he was giving Eleven. 

Now comes the part where I have to slap a number on this thing. It's hard to do this with the "special" episodes because they, even moreso than the normal episodes, are not aimed at me, a 25-year-old American. So if I had to nitpick, I'd say that this episode, being the fiftieth anniversary episode and all, is geared towards a broader audience, and it tells that broader audience that Doctor Who is silly, stuffed, and at times incoherent. Which is a pretty accurate description of the show right now, honestly. But it also tells them that Doctor Who is good fun, as it always was, and has decent effects nowadays too.

Well, with that in mind, I'd say that this is the second-best special the revival series has done, the best being, obviously, "A Christmas Carol." I gave that one... well, shoot, my review of "A Christmas Carol" was two sentences long. I hereby retroactively give that one a 9 and this one an 8 out of 10.

Who Review: An Adventure in Space and Time

It is fair to say that David Bradley has now emotionally destroyed the fandoms of both current TV shows I watch: first as Walder Frey, executor of the Red Wedding on Game of Thrones and then as William Hartnell, the tragic hero of the docu-drama An Adventure in Space and Time, which catalogs  the first three years of the show and takes a few, ah, licenses with history.

Now, I'll just get this out of the way, the waterworks were flowing pretty consistently from around the time Hartnell's granddaughter told him he said "gloves" instead of "drugs" and then came up with a beautiful kiddie explanation for why the Doctor would really need "anti-radiation gloves."  I thought the whole thing was utterly fantastic, and certainly more of an emotional gut-punch than The Day of the Doctor. (TDotD is gimmicky silly fun that - thanks in part to John Hurt reacting to 10 and 11 exactly the way Classic Who fans did - never takes itself anywhere in the vicinity of seriously.  More on that in a future post.)

Waitaminit... is Peter Capaldi the Valeyard?

Fact: We know that the Valeyard is a darker incarnation of the Doctor, a manifestation of all his evil, that's supposed to pop up between his twelfth and final regeneration.

Fact: We know that Capaldi's Doctor is going to be "darker" than the previous ones.

Fact: The addition of the Hurt Doctor, combined with Tennant's bogus regeneration in "Journey's End," means that the Smith Doctor is actually the twelfth regeneration!

Do I need to explain that last one? Okay here we go.

• We know the Morbius Doctors are bogus because Peter Davison explicitly refers to himself as the fourth regeneration (meaning the Fifth Doctor - the First Doctor wasn't a regeneration, but the real deal) in The Five Doctors.
• Oh, you want to subscribe to the hodokery that Hartnell -> Troughton was a "renewal" and Troughton -> Pertwee was a "change of appearance?" Three words: "Blinovich Limitation Effect." Go look it up, ya fanwank menace.
•  That means that the Sixth Doctor is the fifth regeneration, the Seventh Doctor is the sixth regeneration, and the Eighth Doctor is the seventh regeneration. So far so good.
• Then McGann (Eight) turns into Hurt. This is the eighth regeneration. The Doctor is now on his ninth life, regardless of whether he calls himself "The Doctor" in this life.
• And on that note, the notion that the Doctor is called the Doctor because he helps people, and chose that name because he makes people better, go back and watch An Unearthly Child, in which the First Doctor advises leaving a wounded caveman to die because helping them jeopardizes their escape.
• Hurt regenerates into Eccleston. The ninth regeneration therefore creates the character we know as "the Ninth Doctor."
• Eccleston regenerates into Tennant. This is the tenth regeneration.
•  Tennant regenerates into Tennant, and uses the energy to heal himself and create a clone of himself ("Journey's End"). This is the eleventh regeneration.
• Tennant regenerates into Smith. This is the twelfth and final regeneration.

 To continue...

Fact: as anyone who's seen Logopolis knows, "these don't quite count" versions of the Doctor have shown up before to help the Doctor through his regeneration.

Fact: Capaldi showed up ahead of time in The Day of the Doctor.

What if, and bear with me here, Matt Smith's Doctor dies? He doesn't regenerate at the end of the Christmas Special? He just lays there for a minute... and then Capaldi comes in and says something silly like "I think you need a Doctor." And then we learn that he's the Valeyard, and he's going to ensure that the Doctor gets additional regenerations? Moffat can come up with some way to rationalize this vis a vis his behavior in Trial of a Time Lord.

Just saying.

Who Review: A Town Called Mercy

It's the one with the cyborg cowboy. He shoots a guy, the guy asks "Am I the last one," and the cyborg says "there's one more: the Doctor."

The Doctor arrives at a town called Mercy and finds a load of stones and lumps of wood. The cyborg is tracking him. Mercy may look familiar: it's the set of pretty much every Spaghetti Western ever. Mercy has electricity too early, and the Doctor mentions his Christmas list for the second time in two episodes.

Everyone in the saloon looks up when the Doctor enters. When he says he's the Doctor, the undertaker starts measuring him for a suit. Then when he says he's an alien, they pick him up and carry him out of town. And then point a lot of guns at him. And then the cyborg shows up. The townsfolk start praying, which has to be a first on this show. Then the sheriff - That Guy From Farscape - orders the Doctor back across the town boundary.

Inside the sheriff's office, the sheriff explains everything. The cyborg has erected a boundary around the town and kills everyone who crosses it. The Doctor works out that "the alien doctor" isn't him. It's a guy named Kahler-Jex. He crashed here, and he saved the town from an outbreak of cholera.  And he also rigged up the electric lights.

The Doctor decides he's going to take Jex out in the TARDIS, which is problematic because the TARDIS is outside the boundary. While Rory and Sheriff Crichton distract the Gunslinger, the Doctor rides off on a horse and we learn that Murray Gold can't do Ennio Morricone.

Jex tells Amy he'd rather stay in Mercy and help people.

Meanwhile, the Doctor decides he wants to stop and check something out. He finds a cable buried in the sand and follows it to Jex's spaceship, which appears to be singularly undamaged. It looks like a giant egg. Sonicing it sets off an alarm, drawing the Gunslinger away from Rory and Sheriff Crichton. Digging through Jex's files, he finds that Jex was a war criminal, which might explain his coming-and-going German accent. Then the Gunslinger finds the Doctor and reveals that he's out for "justice," which explains why he hasn't gone and shot up the town yet.

Jex holds Amy at gunpoint, but then Sheriff Crichton reads the script, realizes Jex is a bad guy, and saves her. The Doctor confronts Jex, who says he's a war hero. Jex's people had been at war for nine years, a war that had decimated half his planet. His cyborgs brought peace. Then he decommissioned the cyborgs, and one of them went rogue, because that always happens. Hey guys, don't make cyborgs or AIs, please. If every science-fiction story, ever, is anything to go by, they will go rogue and start killing people.

Jex notes that the Doctor is also a war "hero," although he thinks the Doctor doesn't have the nerve to do what must be done (and, again, having seen Genesis of the Daleks, I'm inclined to agree with him).  The TARDIS crew debates the good, the bad and the ugly of their current situation. Amy wants to forgive Jex, as does Sheriff Crichton, Rory and the Doctor want to chuck him out of town. The Doctor does that and then holds him at gunpoint, waiting for the Gunslinger to show up. Then Amy holds the Doctor at gunpoint. And won't take her frickin finger off the trigger I mean DAMN!

I have to pause the DVD and go into a rant now. I get that Brits are babies when it comes to self-defense and that they're perfectly happy relying on other people to save them when bad guys show up. Fine. Cultural differences. And I guess that explains why Amy doesn't know Gun Safety 101. But it's played for comedy, and that bothers me. Okay, back to the review.

The Doctor admits that he's treating Jax horribly because of his own guilt at not killing the Daleks or the Master or anyone - and I punched the air here - and Amy says he has to be better than him.  The Gunslinger shows up and holds Jex at gunpoint. Jex reveals that he remembers all the cyborgs' names. The Gunslinger shoots, but Sheriff Crichton pushes him out of the way and takes the bullet instead. He dies, telling the Doctor that he and Jex are both good men, they just forget it sometimes. (Okay, his character's name is Marshall Isaac.)

The Doctor sends Jex to his cell, and the Gunslinger says they have until noon tomorrow to hand over Jex or he'll kill everyone. Hey, Doctor, if you'd just gone and gotten the TARDIS like was the plan, Sheriff Crichton would still be alive and the town wouldn't be in jeopardy now.

That night, a gang arrives to take Jex and deliver him to the Gunslinger. There's a standoff that's not at all shot like a standoff. The Doctor gives a speech about how violence doesn't end violence - hey, Doc, tell that to Harry Truman.

The Doctor and Jax have a discussion. Buffy did this sort of thing as an art form - "whose problem are we really talking about here?"  He says "We all carry our prisons with us," and that gives the Doctor an idea.

High noon. The Gunslinger walks into town. There's a kinda-sorta-proper standoff this time, before the Doctor sonics the Gunslinger. Various decoys distract the Gunslinger before he cottons on and goes to the church. The Doctor tells Jex to run for it. The Gunslinger waves his arm cannon around before deciding not to kill anyone. Jex makes it to his ship and uses the tech he's wired up the town with to communicate with the Gunslinger. Jex blows himself up using the ship's auto-destruct, and an appallingly bad effects shot makes it look like his ship was hidden right behind a barn.

The Gunslinger decides to follow him because he's a creature of war with no role to play during peace. The Doctor says he does have a role: to protect it. So the Gunslinger stays as the town's Batman. Or RoboCop.

7 out of 10. Always nice to see the Doctor deal with the whole Time War thing in an episode that doesn't involve the overexposed fascist pepperpots.