9-3-10 List

The greatest album cover ever is still Back in Black by AC/DC. This will never change. The greatest album cover that also makes a good poster is of course Abbey Road, but you knew that already.

I'd do a Who Review for City of Death, but honestly, the summary would be "the title is silly. 10/10."

Do not sing along to any song you hear on the radio if you can't name 3/4ths of the band members, or, y'know, if the song just sucks.

The following things are bad and the sooner we all acknowledge it, the better: Communism, the Holocaust, and rap "music."

New Low

You know what I just realized? Boba Fett has 4 lines in The Empire Strikes Back, and yet, with only those 4 lines to go on, Lucas can't keep his characterization straight.

Fett's first line is a not-at-all-Westly-ish "As you wish," his grudging response to Vader's insistence that he not disintegrate the Millennium Falcon. And yet half an hour later, he's complaining to Vader that "He [Han Solo, you know, the Falcon's captain]'s no good to me dead," and "What if he doesn't survive? He's worth a lot to me." Well, if he wasn't you wouldn't have had that response to Vader's "no disintegrations" order, wouldn't you?

The only possible way to make sense of this is to suggest that Fett didn't know that Han Solo owned the Millennium Falcon. And frankly, undignified-and-subsequently-retconned death notwithstanding, Fett is, in films V and VI at least (and the less said about II, the better), far too badass to be that dumb.

Who Review: The Mysterious Planet

Am I to be surrounded by FOOLS?
-Katryca

I will mercilessly attack the entire The Trial of a Time Lord format when we get to The Ultimate Foe. In the meantime, here is a scathing review of that debacle's first installment.

...Which, actually, doesn't start off all that badly. The Doctor and Peri are being nice to each other for once, and they're on location in a forest as opposed to a BBC Quarry for once, so yay! They've nicely gone and taken the hiatus as read in show-time, so they can get past that boring character development stuff and show Six in a better light.

Peri: Is there any intelligent life here?
Doctor: Apart from me, you mean?

It's a silly joke, but it works. It works mostly because these two have been at each others' throats for so long and have finally loosened up. That, plus the impressive model shot at the beginning, might have actually fooled some people into thinking that this was going to be good.

Then we meet Glitz. His dialogue alternates between this gem from Episode 1:

Whereas yours is a simple case of sociopathy, Dibber, my malaise is much more complex. "A deep-rooted maladjustment," my psychiatrist said. "Brought on by an infantile inability to come to terms with the more pertinent, concrete aspects of life." ...Mind you, I had just attempted to kill him.

and this one from Episode 3:

Philanthropist, you ignorant dink!

The first line would have actually been funny if Glitz hadn't used the same sort of big words as his shrink. The second line had no hope. We know Robert Holmes is capable of better stuff than this. We've seen it.

The problem is, Glitz isn't alone in this. The Valeyard has lines like "I intend to adumbrate two typical instances from separate epistopic interfaces of the spectrum." No, seriously. Why is Robert Freaking Holmes trying to write like Pip'n'Jane Baker?

...oh right, the whole sick and dying thing.

For those of you who don't know, here's what happened. In the spring of 1985 (that's Season 22 for you laymen), Holmes submitted an outline for a Season 23 story entitled Yellow Fever (and How to Cure It). One assumes it wasn't about the Chinese, but then this is the same person who brought us The Talons of Weng-Chiang, so let's just leave it at that. Then Michael "C*nt" Grade put the show on hiatus for 18 months, and the original Season 23 was scrapped. For some asinine reason, Holmes was paid in full for his outline, which now meant that he owed the BBC at least 4 (and possibly as many as 6) episodes. He began work on The Mysterious Planet and worked with the script editor, Eric Saward, on The Ultimate Foe, but he eventually fell ill and died. Some people have commented that Episode 1 actually does sound like Holmes, except it's still got lines like "I do hate it when people get lucky! It offends my sensibilities," and "I hate competition. Especially when it poaches on my territory." Really, bits and pieces of it sound like Holmes - mostly stuff the Doctor and Peri get to do - but the trial scenes and anything pertaining to Glitz (and least, anything not flagrantly recycled from The Ribos Operation) don't. And speaking of that, you could hear Garron, basically the same character, giving those lines and just barely getting away with them. I really don't like condemning actors because I can't see bad acting unless it actually jumps from "bad" to "atrocious," in which case the director's obviously so incompetent that the entire production is already screwed anyway... but having said that, if you imagine Garron saying some of those lines above, you can hear him just about making them sound convincing. In contrast, Tony Selby looks like he's concentrating more on just remembering the damn things (especially in the exchange about his psychiatrist) than delivering them properly. At any rate, you can read these lines and see that they're absurd. That the role may have been miscast is not an excuse.

Now, I'm beating up on a sick and dying man here, which seems unfair. But this is Robert Holmes we're talking about. He doesn't get a pass because he's normally awesome; if anything, the opposite is true. A serial like The Armageddon Factor is going to get a boost because it's an average serial written by a pair of writers I think were hacks. In contrast, a serial like this is going to get a horrible score from me, because it's a piece of crap written by someone who's normally very good. He wrote both of the best two Doctor Who serials ever, and heavily re-wrote the third. Now, yes, The Talons of Weng-Chiang was directed by David Maloney and had the benefit of being the last one produced by Phillip Hinchcliffe (i.e, nobody was too concerned about overspending). But none of that would have amounted to a hill of beans if the script hadn't been decent; just look at Planet of the Daleks for Maloney's effort when he's given a subpar script. The Mysterious Planet should be the epic swansong of a beloved writer who was taken before his time. Instead what we get is a shoddy re-hash of other Holmes scripts, like The Krotons, The Brain of Morbius, and the better parts of The Ribos Operation. It furthers the downward spiral that began with The Two Doctors, proved, unfortunately, that that serial's shoddiness was not a fluke, and it ended his career on a distinctly sour note. It's notable that the man spent five years away from the show between The Power of Kroll and The Caves of Androzani. When he returned, he pumped out Caves, but in doing so evidently emptied his chamber. It's possible that Caves was the result of every good idea he'd had in the intervening five years condensed into about 100 minutes.

Now, let's talk about what doesn't work. Katryca sure as hell doesn't. Here's a frame from the same scene as the page quote:

If you can't see at least three things wrong in this frame, quit now. The set is overlit, the costumes are God-awful, and Katryca is proving that Colin Baker is not nearly as guilty of overacting as people seem to think.

Then there's Sabalom Glitz, a mercenary cut from the same mold as Garron (see The Ribos Operation) but who got saddled with some truly awful dialogue.

Next, there was an entire subplot about Andromedan "sleepers" that was cut from the finished script... except that there are still references to it throughout the plot. Now, I'm more willing than some people to give Eric Saward some slack, but seriously, was the man doing his job?

There's the L1 robot, which trumps the Daleks in both "how did they do that" and impracticality. There's the L3, which we're supposed to be fooled into thinking isn't a man in a suit just because we can't see the zipper. WHY do people think they have a license to overact if we can't see their face? At no point during any of his wild gesticulatons do we ever seriously think that Drathro is believable as a robot.

There's the problem in-context with the trial, in that, not counting Drathro, three people die, and none of those deaths can really be said to be on the Doctor's conscience. And as he says, he saved the entire Universe (maybe) in this story.

And finally there's the entire Trial format, which can't help intruding here and leading to those bloody "censored" clips.

Requiescat in pace.

Number of times the plot is interrupted by the Trial scenes: too many

Number of times the Doctor refers to the Valeyard as "The _____yard": too many

If this story were written by Joe Brown and not given the hideous trial frame, I'd give it a 5 out of 10, The Mind Robber and City of Death being 10. I'm going to take off a point because of the moronic trial interruptions (which is going to happen to every story this season), and another because Robert Holmes' name is on the credits and it sucks. I'm going to add a point back on because the man was ill, for a final score of 4 out of 10. Bear in mind that the highest-rated Colin Baker story, Revelation of the Daleks, got a 6. So relative to the Sixth Doctor's era, this story gets something like 7 out of 10.

Who Review: The Mind Robber

(I debated not having a quote here and instead posting that image. You know which one. Common sense won out.)

Jamie: Come on, back to the TARDIS.
Zoe: Is that the right way?
Jamie: Of course it's the right way. No it could be... erm...
Zoe: We're lost, aren't we.
Jamie: No, I wouldn't say that. We're just er... well...um... [beat] You want to know something?
Zoe: What?
Jamie: I think we're lost.

Way way back in my Tomb of the Cybermen review, I mentioned that Patrick Troughton was magical. I'm going to expound on that just a little bit here, since this is the most fantasy-oriented story ever, so this may come off as a bit of a love letter to the Second Doctor.

First, though, let me set the stage. Way back in 1964, they had to fill out a few weeks of schedule-time with some nonsense set inside the TARDIS and featuring only the regulars. The result was The Edge of Destruction, arguably the worst and most boring 50 minutes the program spat out until the 1980s. 42 serials later, they find themselves in the same situation: The Dominators, arguably the second-worst thing the program spat out until the 1980s, needed to be curtailed from 6 to 5 episodes. In order to keep the schecule intact, the next serial needed an extra episode of padding, and it needed a budget of practically nothing.

The result is The Mind Robber, episode one, which puts the TARDIS crew in a big white set with some stock robots and a few stock backdrops to represent Scotland and Zoe's city (note how we don't get Gallifrey for the Doctor; we instead get inverted images of his companions). This is more important than most people really want to think about; going straight to the Land of Fiction would have made things jar a great deal worse.

Now after the Doctor makes a great deal of fuss about NOT! LEAVINK! ZER TARDIS! (sorry, but with Zer Karkus coming up later, I couldn't resist), his companions think they'll be just fine wandering off anyway. And then they do just that, even when the Doctor's yelling at Jamie, who really, really should know better by now.

Do me a favor. Read the rest of this paragraph and then watch about two minutes of the clip from The Evil of the Daleks, episode 2. By this point, Waterfield and Maxtible have spent about five minutes talking about "...them" until finally a Dalek bursts through the door. Watch Troughton. Watch the way he acts throughout this scene, and especially watch the way he turns around as the Dalek enters.

All of the other Doctors can do concern, and most of them can do worry. Troughton was the only one of the bunch who could actually do fear, and he does it again here in episode one of The Mind Robber. And why not? The TARDIS is being invaded by a malevolent force "about which we know nothing!" This happens a lot more in the 70s, but in 1968, The Web Planet notwithstanding, this sort of thing doesn't really happen. So he's afraid, and he sells it perfectly.

Nevertheless, his companions do a very silly thing and get themselves into trouble, which leads to a genuinely creepy moment at the 13:50 mark. We get negative images of Jamie and Zoe, grinning and beckoning... and over this, we hear the real Zoe scream. When Troughton begs them to "go in[to the TARDIS] before it's too late," again, we have real fear. Again, companions got hypnotized all the time in the 70s, but not nearly so much in the 60s.

Episode One is genuinely creepy and surreal. It doesn't rely on grotesque monsters jumping out and going "boo!" at you, and there aren't any "how did they do that?" moments (cf. The Deadly Assassin and The Daleks respectively). And then to top it all off, in the episode's closing moments, the Doctor apparently succumbs to a psychic assault and the TARIS explodes.

...and then we get that shot. You know the one.

This one.

But anyway, it's an exercise in disaster management, and it works. It sets the tone for the next four weeks and ensures that we'll stay interested. If, of course, we weren't used to regular TARDIS-abuse and hypnosis from later stories.

And the exercise in disaster-management continues in the next episode. If this story isn't famous for that shot, then it's famous for being the one where someone else has a go at playing Jamie for a week because Frazer Hines got chicken pox. Their solution - Jamie loses his face and the Doctor gives him the wrong one - is brilliant. Rarely does the Doctor make a mistake this drastic when the safety of his companions is at risk.

We're introduced to the villian, who appears to be supremely evil (and 70s viewers would be forgiven for thinking he was the Master), and we also meet Gulliver, a man who can only quote Gulliver's Travels and yet the Doctor is eager to keep talking to him.

And lo! The use of the word "companions" to describe the Doctor's, er, companions.

The Doctor and his companions reunite, and here he learns that the TARDIS broke up. Just imagine Tom Baker trying to say "The TARDIS broke up?!"

So they're in a land of fiction, and they can defeat monsters by acknowledging that the monsters don't exist. We get a unicorn, a minotaur, Medusa, and... Zer Karkus, a 21st-Century superhero. Later on, Star Trek is going to make a living out of the "Godel, Escher, T'pran of the Ninth Vulcan Dynasty" approach, but let the record show that this is different. Zer Karkus is another piece of Earth fiction, he's just one that we haven't heard of yet (and still haven't even though he's from 2000... just keep walking). And this is important, because the Doctor's not the all-powerful boggly-eyed scarf-wearing jelly-baby-eating lunatic he'll be in a decade, which means that, like his companions, he needs to face something he can't not believe in. The upshot of this is a girl in a skintight jumpsuit gets to grapple with a man in a body-stocking. Or to put it another way, Zoe gets to beat up her childhood hero.

Really, this is a fantastic setup, truly out of left field for the show, and it's only the ending that trips up at all. But then, the entire series format pretty much lends itself to that. It's time for the obligatory nod to Buffy: In the 90s, Joss Whedon turned "cramming the season finale full of stuff" into an art form, but here the end just comes too quickly. Then again, how often is a Doctor Who serial let down by its ending? Let's take a look at the usual fan-favorites:

The Talons of Weng-Chiang: has pretty much everything in its setup you could ever ask for. Maloney directing a Holmes script in Victorian London while the Doctor plays at being Sherlock Holmes and the companion wins a wet t-shirt contest? Sign me up! That doesn't change the fact that the ending is a mess.

The Caves of Androzani: doesn't count. Holmes' entire brief was "kill the Doctor," so everything in that story builds up to the end. Besides, (almost) everybody dies.

Pyramids of Mars: if it weren't for Star Trek Voyager, the merciless technobabble employed here would probably be forgiven.

Genesis of the Daleks: wherein the Doctor changes his mind more times than Two-Face.

City of Death: "Duggan! That might have been the most important punch in all of history!" It only works because it's funny.

So what we see is that, more often than not, the ending of a Doctor Who story basically consists of "put the toys back in the box as quickly and cleanly as possible," and even then that's not what we get here. The villain is in fact a tired old writer wired up to a machine that demands entertainment from him, and who doesn't want the Doctor to die, but rather to take over so he can finally get some rest. Yes, the Master Brain eventually has other plans, but that's because we can't have a story without somebody who's actually bad. The Mind Robber surely has to be one of the best Doctor Who serials ever. Unique, surprisingly well-paced, and of course, because the Doctor's Patrick Troughton and the director's David Maloney, you can't fault the acting.

10 out of 10.

Who Review: Revelation of the Daleks

"Did you ever tell them that they were eating their own relatives?"
"Certainly not! That would create what I believe is called 'consumer resistance!'"

If there's one thing more polarizing about Classic Who than the entire reign of JN-T, it's Colin Baker's Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. Thankfully, it spends half of this particular serial under a cape that's slightly less of a sartorial disaster.

The plot is never more complex (well, see Trial of a Timelord if you must, but at least this one makes sense) than it is here. At the Galaxy's greatest funeral parlor, one massively socially awkward student has the hots for Teacher. Meanwhile Laurel & Hardy manage security for the establishment, which also provides foodstuff for several nearby starving planets, thanks to the ministrations of the Great Healer. Unfortunately, his business partner, Kara, doesn't like him and hires a disgraced Knight Templar to kill him. Besides, it turns out that Soylent Green is people, and the Great Healer is... Davros. Or rather, Davros' head in a jar. Or rather a robotic mockup of Davros' head in a jar. Also a pair of young people (one of whom is "a doctor, not a magician") are trying to find one of the pair's father's corpse. They find some brains in tanks, and later some murderous pepperpots, but in between they stumble across possibly the most grisly thing the show ever did; they find the corpse all right, partially mutated and stuck inside a transparent Dalek shell. And, oh yes, begging them to kill him.

Oh and it's got the Doctor in it. He spends an entire episode walking into the trap (and remember that in this season, the episodes are 45 minutes long and there are only two of them per serial) that Davros set for him. Because in addition to turning bodies into food, Davros is also turning them into Daleks and wants to gloat at the Doctor a bit.

The bounty hunter gets the drop on the mech-head, but then the real Davros shows up. He can hover, sort of, and blast lightning out of his hand. Well, before it gets shot off, that is. "No 'arm in trying," indeed. The bounty hunter loses a leg as well, Kara shows up and gets killed, as does a DJ who spent his life playing rock and roll at the dead. In case you couldn't tell, the script was written by someone who clearly loves Robert Holmes but can't quite write like him. The double-acts are Holmesian enough, but the violence really isn't.

Frankly, there's so much wrong with this entire premise that you wonder what right it has to call itself Doctor Who. When I discuss Trial more next week, I'll come back to this, but it's a point that deserves to be made here: Colin Baker's tenure might as well have been a different show. If you didn't hold it to the same standards as That Thing That Patrick Troughton Used To Be On, and if it weren't full of continuity references to the same, then it might actually have been well-remembered. Revelation's greatest strengths - the black humor and the prevalence of violence, mutations and bounty hunters - are frankly not right for Doctor Who.

However, my all-time favorite Pertwee serial is Doctor Who and the Silurians, which, with its overt political subtext and no mention of the TARDIS, is hardly That Thing That Patrick Troughton Used To Be On either. So the fact that Revelation of the Daleks misses the mark by a considerable margin isn't actually as bad as you might think. It's unfortunate, and coincidence most certainly does not imply causation, but Colin Baker's best ever serial is the one that he has the smallest role in. Writer Eric Saward apparently under-wrote Orcini (the bounty hunter) and Davros (for once) to show Baker how it should be done. This officially is the smartest thing Saward ever did, and that includes killing Adric.

Doctor Who is a program that thrives on change. Not all change is good. This is the paradox at the heart of the JN-T era, and especially Colin Baker's tumultuous stint. Revelation of the Daleks is a bit like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in that it's darker and edgier than the franchise's usual fare, and non-fans might like it more for the exact same reason that diehard fans tend to hate it. Still, this is hands-down the best Colin Baker serial. On a scale of 0 to The Mind Robber, it probably rates no higher than a (generous) 6, but on a scale of 0 to Revelation of the Daleks, no other story from Season 22 ranks even that high. It's decently-paced, the dialogue is unusually good, the Daleks can (sort of) hover, and Colin Baker gets what is as far as I'm concerned his best moment early in episode 1; when a mutant grabs Peri's abandoned sandwich, she screams and asks what that was. "Would you like me to find out?" Colin asks. He's wearing his wizard cape to underline the effect; he's just as much a stranger to this environment as his companion, but he's willing and able to investigate. Any other Doctor ever would have said either "It's probably nothing" or "trouble," followed by a silly grin. Not so with Colin: "I've got the power to discover what this thing is," he's saying, "but I'll only use it if you want me to." More of this, earlier, might have made all the difference.


This week's word I'm surprised the spellcheck recognized: "Technicolour."

Back in The Villiage Again

Ah, the return to college from a summer break. When you see your old friends, and the terrible decisions they've made regarding facial hair. When you see the moronic neighbor you had to deal with last year and pretend those were "good times." When you shake your head in wonder at the administration's latest inane construction job (they ripped out the front steps to the library!) You get the picture.

Oh, and the alcohol. And the sex. Dear God, I know you two are happy to see each other, but the loud-but-not-loud-enough techno music blasting over the moans are not fooling anyone. Neither, incidentally, are the moans.

Also, since this is the start of my senior year, I realized that 75% of the students here are young upstart posers who will be here long after I'm gone (and come to think of it, about half my class will probably have to take an extra semester too). I wonder how I made the transition from wide-eyed youngster to grouchy old man in such little time. Things that helped this summer: the Blago trial, which once again made me ashamed to have grown up in Illinois, and me finally listening to Abbey Road and thus realizing, finally, how awesome the Beatles were. This has only reinforced my contempt for all my classmates who wear Nirvana shirts.

Oh, and the food. Because it just wouldn't be college without eating rejects from the nearest one-star restaurant.

Merry Senior Year, everyone.

Super Mario Galaxy 2

So I beat SMG2 yesterday, by which I mean, I saw the credits. Not only is the ending cutscene less impressive than the epic mindscrew that was the first game's ending, but the boss fight was horribly anticlimactic. The level to get to Bowser was satisfyingly frustrating, but Bowser himself was easy. The Bowser Jr. boss fights were more varied and difficult... in fact, SMG2 generally had better boss fights except for the Bowser ones. Beating SMG1 left me with a sense of accomplishment. SMG2 was more a case of "that's it?"

Crossing Guards: A Rant

It's time for a random post about crossing guards. Or more accurately, the people in the neon jackets who hang out in intersections to direct traffic because apparently the same people too dumb to realize what a red light means will figure out what a person gesticulating in a neon jacket means.

What kind of insane faithlessness in humanity coupled with a power trip is necessary to don the neon jacket of power, get out in the middle of a busy intersection filled with angry motorists, and boss them around?

How many of these deluded souls get run over every year?

And, and this is a question I ask myself every time I get tailgated while already going more than 10 miles over the speed limit, how badly do we need more of them? Or would we be better served if they urged the motorists to run over the idiot who starts across the crosswalk with two seconds left on the clock?

Because, man, those people should get everything that's coming to them.

What I'd like is a world without rules. I believe there's some superhighway somewhere in Europe which is dangerous as hell, and they've removed all the safety signs - or was it an intersection? All the stoplights at a dangerous intersection, maybe that was it. The accident rate dramatically declined. I propose we do something similar. Rip out all the stoplights and fire all the crossing-guards - oh wait, it's a depression, we can't be seen to fire anyone.

But I think it would still send the right message. In real life, that crossing-guard is at most 200 pounds of flesh and bone, and that car could mutilate them beyond recognition if it so chose to ignore the feeble authority of a raised hand.

I am not advocating violence. I do not advocate violence as a general rule. But I want you to step back and think about the illusion of safety that these crossing-guards and stoplights generate.

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.