Doctor Who eps, considerably late

[petronia]

Doctor Who S05E07 "Amy's Choice": I won't lie, I'd been dragging my feet. Because lord only knows after all those grumblings about the het agenda, what I needed was an ep of Karen Gillan in a fake belly. And omnipotent space-beings dicking with the team for lulz. Did I mention how old that got while I was watching Star Trek TOS. Did I.

It was pretty good, though! Amy gave a damn about other people! I could predict her reaction (i.e. internally coherent characterization has been achieved)! And then the ep redeemed itself further with the reveal that the whole good boy future, bad boy future thing (srsly: in a Doctor Who ep - I thought we turned geek to escape chick-lit stereotype) was a FALSE DICHOTOMY thrown up by THE DOCTOR'S SUBCONSCIOUS. Which is apparently full of delicious chick-lit stereotype. ...Ten's entire existence, I know. Joeks aside the Tenth didn't go in a state of acceptance and Eleven (presumably) metaphorically tossed his issues into a trunk and sat on them. Coincidence, I think not, et al.

(Tangential to this - the 12/13+ years are going to be interesting, Doyleist-speaking, because of the amassed continuity bits: the Valeyard, the regeneration limit. They could be handwaved, given the Time War, but they could always be handwaved. To sorta-quote motorbike, this shit ain't chess, it's hungry hungry hippos. Thing is, though, whoever has the reins at that point will want to close the time loop, cos them's the inmates as run the asylum. Boo to impenetrable referentialism, but the plot possibilities are too good not to run with.)

Doctor Who S05E08 "The Hungry Hungry Hippo Earth": omg show do not kill off Nasreen I will have a real bone to pick with you if you do (haaa no the grandfather will be the one to bite it I suppose).

There is a Silurian-shaped gap in my Classic Who watching so if there be Continuity in this episode it has sailed over my head. XD; I guess the key point of differentiation is that they were here first? ...Directly before I watched this episode I read this, and because I actually CANNOT STOP MY BRAIN FROM GOING THERE I'll photoshop Hilary Clinton's head on Matt Smith pick discretion as the better part of valour lol

Feeling the characters a lot more now. (Wow, that took ages.) I'd claim it was because Amy and Rory seem to be settling into a sort of TARDIS Resident Screwball Couple + Doctor doing his Doctor thing dynamic (which I think is theoretically great[1]) but... they're split up for nearly the entire ep. XD; And Rory weeeeirdly has more chemistry with the Doctor than Amy does. But Amy, I have noticed, holds interest best when followed on her own tangent, even if positioned as damsel in distress. Speaking of which the scary bits this ep were stuff that I actually find scary (stuff disappearing from a locked room, or a closed grave; being buried alive; being dissected alive), which always helps.

Bullet points: the Doctor really does not stay on top of shiz this ep, but then it took the mom like, ten minutes to ping that her son was outside? The Silurian warrior's lovely lady lumps. Daer Doctor SpaceFailwhale they are not genus Homo. The lack of Beeb budget for more than three people working on this tech-miracle drilling project. Sucked back to Wales! Actually, for reals, I misread "New South Wales" and spent the rest of the ep going, these ppl don't sound Australian. Because I is smrt.



[1]: TARDIS team configurations are under-explored even in this day and age, if only because the possibilities are endless. The AU thing with the Tenth Doctor imprisoning the Master in the TARDIS? Watsonian-speaking, as I've noted, worst idea ever - but from a purely narrative/character dynamic POV it's amazing. I've actually been thinking about it, like: how would you generalize this setup to original fiction (or other fandoms)? You have a prisoner, who's also something like a patient, or a friend, and - you're on a road trip, there's no backup for whatever reason, you have to transport him somewhere - but that's where it breaks down: in the terrible, terrible TV movie they're headed for Gallifrey, but Gallifrey is gone. The point the AU throws into sharp relief is that the Doctor doesn't have destinations, he makes them. And then he intervenes. The sum of his interventions over time is positive, which makes it morally acceptable. Substract companions from the script, add the Master and the odds get significantly gnarlier. (Actually, it's the confidence interval that gets gnarly, isn't it?) But don't make destinations, don't intervene, and the story goes directly to Sartre.[2]

Alternately it could be (reasonably) anodyne, like owning a really evil cat. Or in the event Ten picks up Donna and it turns into a crack-heightened variant of Tegan + Turlough. As per the Rose/Ten II situ one can't simply call it, hence the confidence interval gets shot to hell. The point is I literally can't think of anything else with this trope; the lone instantiation of its class... thanks a bunch, Rusty. Methodically arrived at I'm sure. XD

[2]: Speaking of Hell being a series of rooms and passages: TARDIS/Yume Nikki fusion. Think about it.

Comments

[xparrot.livejournal.com]

but then it took the mom like, ten minutes to ping that her son was outside?

ahahah was yelling at the scream for that whole bit.

Heh, and what annoyed me more than the lizard lady having decidedly mammalian lady lumps was that she was calling them all "apes" - considering mammals had not yet evolved when her people went to ground, I'm flummoxed as to how "ape" would mean anything to her.

...I may get slightly overly fixated on tiny details.

But I gotta say, I'm loving the whole Doctor + Couple thing - even if they haven't done that much with the dynamic, having multiple guests on the TARDIS is one thing from Old Who that I really missed in the New, so that Rory seems to have attained official Companion status makes up for almost all the other problems (I still have).

Also, well, lizard people. Can't go wrong with '50s B-movie plots.

[cis.livejournal.com]

being dissected alive

vivisected!! though tbf who'd expect a dude who's just been vivisected to remember the word. I do think that reveal fell flat, the whole ep seemed to swallow its punchlines rather (like the earth!) .

re: chick-lit stereotypes - it's funny cos it's the episode by the guy who did 'men behaving badly', long-running rom-sit-com of my youth that was basically chick-lit for men (part of the development of 'lad culture' iirc). Dudes displaying the Nick Hornby kind of geekiness - having a nerdy interest is just your won't-grow-up side, just makes you more conventional in everything else.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

V. true. I couldn't remember the word myself. XD

Ooh, any background on the Venice one? The pre-credits struck me rather as if the director was aiming for a discomfiting situational comedy effect - the avant-garde kind sans laugh track. That's new, I thought; and here was something like that again (when Nasreen was inspired to clapping by Doctor's speech and it was awkward because no one else did. So it's meant to be inspiring but the corniness is lampshaded in this slightly cynical way).

[cis.livejournal.com]

Toby Whithouse (V of V writer) was apparently behind No Angels, which I never watched but was according all the press I can remember a kind of vaguely ladette-ish comedy-drama, of the type that UK TV basically defaults to, about nurses in a northern town. Also Being Human, which was that 'a ghost a vampire and a werewolf share a house' show that people got all excited about though i wish it could have been a little less derivative.

basically practically EVERYONE who writes for Dr Who these days has a sound background in vaguely sexy comedy-drama, it is the bread and butter of UK telly. So I guess maybe it's unfair to get annoyed when Dr Who ends up being similarly normative...

NB i totally watched the end of an episode of Men Behaving Badly the other day (it wasn't even my idea!): the nineties, there, magical.

[incandescens]

The Silurians showed up the first time during the 3rd Doctor period (Jon Pertwee). They'd existed and had a Cool Civilisation back when humanity was still little apes in the trees, but then their scientists told them that a rogue planetoid was heading towards the earth and would do bad things to the atmosphere. Being Scientifically Literate, they built big underground shelters and put themselves into suspended hibernation (via Science), figuring that their alarm bells would go off once the planetoid had passed, and they'd all wake up and go back to things as normal. Unfortunately said planetoid was captured by Earth's gravity and became the moon (I have no idea how scientifically plausible this is) and they never had their alarm clocks go off. Meanwhile, apes evolved into humanity and took over the earth.

The Silurian (and related races, such as the Sea Devils) attitude towards humanity is of a proud householder getting back from holiday to find out that the cockroaches have evolved and taken over the house.

The usual Silurian story is "group/shelter of them gets woken up by human interference and then both sides have to cope with the situation". In the first story, there were at least some Silurians prepared to try to come to terms with humanity, and the Doctor was trying to get both sides to make peace. Unfortunately some younger, more warlike Silurians killed their elders and tried launching a plague and setting off a bomb, and then the Brigadier bombed their caves. The Doctor was not happy. In the later _Sea Devils_ story (also involving the Master), involving an aquatic-adapted group of the Silurians (called "sea devils" by a traumatised sailor who saw them, hence the name) the Master's interference didn't help matters, and it all ended in bombs and the Sea Devils vanishing.

There was a Fifth Doctor story involving some openly hostile Sea Devils and Silurians working together (Warriors of the Deep), which had some of the worst special effects ever, but otherwise wasn't too bad.

Sorry. I'm just an enthusiast. ;)

But this is why it would be very cool if the Doctor could finally Make It Work, after having failed three times before -- to be fair, because of faults on both sides.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the overview! Yeah, if the Doctor worked the diplomacy that would take it somewhere unpredictable too, I guess? Usherin' in a new era in Earth inter-species relations etc. XDD

[incandescens]

Still, that's part of why he feels so very strongly about it, after watching both humans and Silurians/Sea Devils fail to make peace three times now. At least. :)

[canis-m.livejournal.com]

I could predict her reaction

Me too, but then somebody pointed out that if the Doctor not Rory had been the one to get dusted, Amy could've just as well had the same reaction w/r/t him. I suppose the characterization point stands but it's more like the writing setup is such that there's only one option, because if she fails to react like that to the death (regardless of who died) then she's a heartless monster and the audience will despise the character forever.

I did enjoy "Hungry Earth" but more on the strength of the side charas (for once)--including warrior Bangaa woman, boobs and all--than anything Team TARDIS did or didn't do, including tell small dyslexic children to go play in traffic, lol.

A thousand dittos re: Nasreen.

RE: vivisection, this is at least instance #3 of bondage!Amy (where is the action figure) but who's counting. Not that RTD didn't do his part for the agenda, but he spread it out much more generously among the cast.

And Rory weeeeirdly has more chemistry with the Doctor than Amy does

Ahaha yes, the shrieks of fangirls through the ether. Does eleven_rory exist yet, I haven't checked.

Never took stats so I had to look up "confidence interval," only to find that the wiki page was apparently written for people who have taken stats.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

It's the range within which you predict, based on the cases you have observed, that [insert chosen value, generally between 90 and 99]% of all cases will fall. More uncertainty in individual cases will result in a wider "range" or Confidence Interval. Once the Confidence Interval includes both positive and negative values, you can no longer say for sure that the net effect is positive.

So in other words having the Master around makes the whole enterprise more dicey. XD

There's gotta be another example of "good" guy hauling "bad" guy with whom he has a personal history around. But the only one I can think of is Dilbert. XD;

[petronia.livejournal.com]

It's not just that she was devastated, though, but the details of her grief reaction - mumbliness and numb anger followed by implusive big-gesture suicide (which the Doctor goes along with because he already knows both sides of the coin are dream?). And... while Amy would be devastated as well if the Doctor had died I don't think she'd have reacted in the same way. More disbelief/denial, probably.

I feel like I should think harder about what it actually is with the Doctor and Rory. Maybe just that you have to go back a while, don't you, to find a dude companion the Doctor seems to like as a person enough to try and check his territorial impulses. XD; Mickey - he was a dick, Jack - high awkwardism, going back, Turlough - was just sort of there... Adric? LOL.

Math pages on Wiki are all terribly obtuse, I find. ^^; If the confidence interval is too wide, it's not so much that forex the chance of "everyone living" goes from 75% to 30%, but that it's harder to predict the odds at all in any given case.

[incandescens]

There was Harry Sullivan (who hung around with the Fourth Doctor) but that was partly because they'd originally planned the Fourth Doctor to be less physical, and therefore felt they had to write in someone young and strong. But when Tom Baker proved perfectly capable of physical stuff, Harry became a bit of a fifth wheel.

I always had the impression the Doctor enjoyed his wide-eyed surprise at all the alien stuff, and liked having him around in the way that one tolerates a big fluffy warm dog who occasionally does something useful, but waved him goodbye without a moment's hesitation. Sarah was far more intelligent and useful. (Harry wasn't actually stupid, but ... well, if the script needed someone to make a blunder, Harry usually drew the short straw.)