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petroniaAt least I finished watching it. XD; It's sad, but I have to put TV into my "productivity" time block - it takes too much brain power. Obviously I'm doing something wrong.
I just gotta expound, man, cos srsly:
1) River is not the Doctor's wife omg, why do ppl still think this after the episode danced around the campfire with a lampshade on its head for like five minutes. There may be a romance element there, and I'm not discounting that at some intersection along their timelines they get Vegas-marriedfor the lulz to stop an alien invasion of Earth idek, but that's clearly not what the Plot is about.
There's an obvious risk to the long game of information withholding - we're going to get to the end of the season and look back admiringly on the cleverness of its construction, I suspect, but in the meantime it's harder to care about characters when 1) you're kept in the dark about them, and 2) you have strong reason to expect that they're plot devices first and characters second. It's a running battle between losing audience interest and hooking it in a different way (the X-Files/Lost speculative mode). But Moffat is at least delivering on what he is good at. XD
(The best way I have of putting it is that the usual Who mode of "time travel" - dropping in at X point in history, experiencing a chunk of events sequentially from X to Y, then dropping out at Y - is analogous to the old-school space battles in Star Trek, where ships face each other head-on at sub-light speed like Earth battle cruisers sailing on a planar surface. What River does at the beginning of the two-parter with the box is the 4D equivalent of shooting a grapple hook into the ceiling when surrounded by gunmen. But if it's hard to remember to look up, boy is it hard to grok eg. that the timing of the Doctor - or indeed which Doctor - getting the message is irrelevant. And sorting out the emotional implications for character development is, well... see previous paragraph. It just-just now occurred to me that if River is/was at the Pandorigummy opening, then she cares about Amy in this episode because she knows Amy already.)
2) Moffat is not retconning everything in the RTD era. He's just formulated a one-sentence answer to annoying continuity-related fan questions that's more polite than "Because Rusty didn't give a damn and neither do I." How come no one remembers a giant cyberman mecha stomping on Victorian London? OH LOOK A CRACK. Actually, the Time War does this for the older series, but only as an unemphasized side effect.
Not gonna lie, worrying about the continuity of a TV series whose premise is the main character travelling through time and space and changing history is also pretty low on my list of priorities. XD; Let's say somewhere below Greece's election results, but above the ability of JoJo characters to ride horses after being shot multiple times in the head. Even "retcon" implies the wrong paradigm, really - that there's a singular chain of events that has to be officially wiped out of existence to be changed. After all, I-the-writer can say it's been wiped out of existence, but it hasn't been, has it? You-the-viewer/reader remember it.
3) For some reason I feel like a giant nerd about this (1000 words into an LJ post about Doctor Who -- inorite), but I'm excited about Jo guest-starring in SJA, and I don't even watch SJA. XD;; I think because watching those Pertwee stories I actually got quite a clear idea in my head of what Jo would be like in the present day. The reversal is as neat as if they'd planned it from the start - one of Matt Smith's salient qualities for me is that my mental image of his Doctor is way older than he actually is, and my mental image of the Pertwee Doctor is way younger than he was. And, yanno, I just like Jo. It was all very WAFFy. There's a very good story on Teaspoon re: what Tegan did during the Year That Never Was, but none about Jo that I know of.
Anyway the setup is there for Davies' writing to shine: talky, relationship-centric fanfiction with no opportunity to epically rend multiverse continuity. XDD I hope.
4) Other various stuff: I'm madly LOLing right now that the Doctor's response to Amy's attempt to jump his bones is - apparently - to bring her fiance onboard as a buffer while he deals with Plot. The anti-Mickey! (I think Mickey ought to have been his own TV Trope.) And oh, the horror movie character logic of going to check out something that the Weeping Angels are running away from. Sadako!Angel was pretty uncalled for but I actually sold G** on this show based on how grebt the Angels would be in a D&D game, so.
** It turned out, get this, that dude had previously watched all of Queer As Folk AND Coupling. I'm sure this is a mockable offense.
I just gotta expound, man, cos srsly:
1) River is not the Doctor's wife omg, why do ppl still think this after the episode danced around the campfire with a lampshade on its head for like five minutes. There may be a romance element there, and I'm not discounting that at some intersection along their timelines they get Vegas-married
There's an obvious risk to the long game of information withholding - we're going to get to the end of the season and look back admiringly on the cleverness of its construction, I suspect, but in the meantime it's harder to care about characters when 1) you're kept in the dark about them, and 2) you have strong reason to expect that they're plot devices first and characters second. It's a running battle between losing audience interest and hooking it in a different way (the X-Files/Lost speculative mode). But Moffat is at least delivering on what he is good at. XD
(The best way I have of putting it is that the usual Who mode of "time travel" - dropping in at X point in history, experiencing a chunk of events sequentially from X to Y, then dropping out at Y - is analogous to the old-school space battles in Star Trek, where ships face each other head-on at sub-light speed like Earth battle cruisers sailing on a planar surface. What River does at the beginning of the two-parter with the box is the 4D equivalent of shooting a grapple hook into the ceiling when surrounded by gunmen. But if it's hard to remember to look up, boy is it hard to grok eg. that the timing of the Doctor - or indeed which Doctor - getting the message is irrelevant. And sorting out the emotional implications for character development is, well... see previous paragraph. It just-just now occurred to me that if River is/was at the Pandorigummy opening, then she cares about Amy in this episode because she knows Amy already.)
2) Moffat is not retconning everything in the RTD era. He's just formulated a one-sentence answer to annoying continuity-related fan questions that's more polite than "Because Rusty didn't give a damn and neither do I." How come no one remembers a giant cyberman mecha stomping on Victorian London? OH LOOK A CRACK. Actually, the Time War does this for the older series, but only as an unemphasized side effect.
Not gonna lie, worrying about the continuity of a TV series whose premise is the main character travelling through time and space and changing history is also pretty low on my list of priorities. XD; Let's say somewhere below Greece's election results, but above the ability of JoJo characters to ride horses after being shot multiple times in the head. Even "retcon" implies the wrong paradigm, really - that there's a singular chain of events that has to be officially wiped out of existence to be changed. After all, I-the-writer can say it's been wiped out of existence, but it hasn't been, has it? You-the-viewer/reader remember it.
3) For some reason I feel like a giant nerd about this (1000 words into an LJ post about Doctor Who -- inorite), but I'm excited about Jo guest-starring in SJA, and I don't even watch SJA. XD;; I think because watching those Pertwee stories I actually got quite a clear idea in my head of what Jo would be like in the present day. The reversal is as neat as if they'd planned it from the start - one of Matt Smith's salient qualities for me is that my mental image of his Doctor is way older than he actually is, and my mental image of the Pertwee Doctor is way younger than he was. And, yanno, I just like Jo. It was all very WAFFy. There's a very good story on Teaspoon re: what Tegan did during the Year That Never Was, but none about Jo that I know of.
Anyway the setup is there for Davies' writing to shine: talky, relationship-centric fanfiction with no opportunity to epically rend multiverse continuity. XDD I hope.
4) Other various stuff: I'm madly LOLing right now that the Doctor's response to Amy's attempt to jump his bones is - apparently - to bring her fiance onboard as a buffer while he deals with Plot. The anti-Mickey! (I think Mickey ought to have been his own TV Trope.) And oh, the horror movie character logic of going to check out something that the Weeping Angels are running away from. Sadako!Angel was pretty uncalled for but I actually sold G** on this show based on how grebt the Angels would be in a D&D game, so.
** It turned out, get this, that dude had previously watched all of Queer As Folk AND Coupling. I'm sure this is a mockable offense.
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-05 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-05 08:45 pm (UTC)Yessss, this is the problem I've been having - I get why these chars are intellectually intriguing; the idea of River Song is fascinating (especially if she plays out as I'm thinking, that she was - like most Companions - entirely an ordinary person to begin with, and is primarily amazing now because she accidentally got tangled up with the Doctor's timeline, even though from our reversed perspective it looks like she got tangled up with the Doctor because of her awesome) (also did she actually kill the Doctor or were they just implying that for funnsies?) but the char herself I find difficult to care about.
But that's perhaps personal taste more than anything; I struggle to watch TV centered more around plot because for longer stories, chars are what engages me. Movies I can watch entirely for their clever plots/themes but when it comes to TV, well, there's a reason I dropped Lost seasons back.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-05 09:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-05 10:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-05 10:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-05 10:51 pm (UTC)In any case it's not like there's a gun to Moffat's head otherwise, that he has to link back to RTD's continuity - he's already completely free never to mention that stuff again. XD;; It's hard to remember once one putters around in a hard-to-please fandom for a while, but the goal of TV writers is to keep viewers watching, not to piss them off gratuitously.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-05 10:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-05 11:25 pm (UTC)I quite enjoy River now that she is morally ambiguous, or rather has always been - one of her earliest dialogue lines was "I always lie". The implication that she killed the Doctor is definitely there, but it may well be a red herring (also not discounting that the writers themselves don't know at this point XD).
no subject
Date: 2010-05-06 02:28 am (UTC)http://horusporus.dreamwidth.org/33984.html
no subject
Date: 2010-05-06 03:14 am (UTC)I liked Sadako!Angel (and Angel Bob) but not the bit where we saw them move! Way to wreck the mystique.
p.s. Spammed you with a million bits and bobs in FVille since it was letting me, but am not sure how many of those you'll actually be able to receive.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-06 05:03 am (UTC)At that point I was thinking, "This is BS, it's not like the Angel decides whether a person's looking at them!" But I have seen horror movies, I know the Villain Decay drill (it's inevitable, tbh).
I'll let you know w/r/t FV. XD; I tried sending botanical garden stuff but couldn't tell if it had gotten through or not.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-06 08:03 pm (UTC)...In that case I wish they'd changed more of the look of the series than just redoing the opening and the TARDIS's wallpaper. A change in filming styles might've clued me in better...
no subject
Date: 2010-05-09 06:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-09 09:17 am (UTC)...Which is to say, yes, I'd like to see more.
(also Who-as-enacted-by-Eroica, LOLOL forever!)
no subject
Date: 2010-05-10 04:44 am (UTC)The soundtrack continues wacktastic and I love it. I'm watching this one (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpzu8NBhPtk) right now and, like. The doomsday machine acronym is TOMTIT. Jo is wearing platform go-go boots. And the Doctor's timey-wimey detector has a really rude shape.