07/06

07/06/30 Doctor Who: The sound of drums / Last of the Time Lords
07/06/23 Links
07/06/21 Doctor Who: Utopia
07/06/16 Doctor Who:The family of blood
07/06/15 Doctor Who: Blink

07/06/30

Catching up after a pretty busy week. (I decided to put a non-fiction article on-line on my business web site, and re-doing a couple of fairly complicated diagrams in a vector-based graphics program turned out to be considerably more work than I had expected. Oh well, on to the fun and games.)

Doctor Who: The sound of drums

This episode was first broadcast on June 23, 2007. As it turns out it's the second part of a three-parter, though there are some references to earlier episodes. A brief and spoiler-ish summary of the plot: the Master is back, and he's got balls.

The good news:

• I thoroughly enjoyed the episode, up until the Big Moment where the British and the Americans made first contact with the aliens.

The not so good news:

• When the Big Moment arrived we all knew that the Master was heading for either world dominion or defeat, and that with him being the Master it would probably be the latter. I found that disappointing, since he is such a great villain and there were still so many things that could be done with him as Prime Minister.
• More isn't better when it comes to to alien menaces, not even in end-of-season episodes. The four ball creatures that we encounter early in the episode are actually far scarier than the zillions that appear later.
• The Doctor's plan to use one of this episode's many 'deus ex machina' gadgets to reveal the Master for what he really was made no sense, since the Master was already busy revealing his Evil Master Plan to the world.
• The ageing of the Doctor may have pleased fans of the 'classic' serial 'The leisure hive', but the Master had no good reason to do it and again it's unclear why the whole thing didn't leave the Doctor regenerated rather than old. Also, Tom Baker's make-up and 'old' acting were more convincing than what we see here.
• Come to think of it, nothing that anyone does from the Big Moment onwards seems to make any sense.

My verdict:

With a 'Brilliant!' for the first half and an 'Oh dear...' for the second, this is what we end up with.

Doctor Who: Last of the Time Lords

This is the last episode of the season, and it was broadcast tonight. A brief and spoiler-ish summary of the plot: life goes on, as if the previous episode never happened.

My thoughts, in chronological order:

1. Ooh, this isn't bad at all.
2. Oh no, not another flashback.
3. What? What?!! They can't be serious.
4. Oh dear. They are serious.

(Repeating steps 3 and 4 several times.)

On the plus side, it looks like the Master (and possibly the Mistress, who did become a far more interesting character in this episode) will be back, which is good news. And the Titanic thing might be cool, and I'm not too unhappy about seeing Martha leave.

My verdict, nevertheless:

This episode gives entire new meaning to 'wasted potential'.

Reviews of 'classic' Doctor Who:
Doctor Who reviews

07/06/23

Catching up on some Metafilter links.

Unrelated linkage

In the arms race between content producers and copyists, manufacturers of high-definition DVDs came up with the idea of encrypting their content and providing makers of HD-DVD players with a super-secret encryption key so their players could decrypt the content of the DVDs and play it. As inevitably happens, the super-secret encryption key soon became a widely-known encryption key and lots of people - most of whom had no use for it whatsoever since hardly anyone owns a HD-DVD player yet - started posting the key everywhere on the Internet just for the sheer hell of it. The content producers then went after some high-profile community sites in an effort to suppress the key, customer protests ensued, with the site owners caught in the middle.
Metafilter: User revolt at Digg

Another example community site owners getting caught in the middle, this time between a somewhat questionable pedophilia "watchdog" group and a large and vocal user base.
Metafilter: Livejournal suspends hundreds of accounts

A third-year law student loses a job offer due to his association with his law school's message board. It then turns out that around the message board a substantial community had developed that revolved around stalking, harassing and disclosing personal information of women, and that the site administrators had done little or nothing to stop it. The whole thing raises some interesting questions about free speech.
Metafilter: Autoadmit

A thread where the young winner of a spelling contest gets mocked because of his odd demeanour on TV turns into a thoughtful and interesting discussion about what it's like to be autistic.
Metafilter: I HAVE TO KNOW THE LANGUAGE IT IS IN!

I never really got into chess, and I occasionally feel I'm missing out on something I might learn to love.
Metafilter: Chess tactics explained in plain English

07/06/21

The Doctor was not alone after all.

Doctor Who: Utopia

This episode was first broadcast on June 17 2007. A brief and somewhat spoiler-ish summary of the plot: the Doctor and Martha travel to the end of time, where they meet an old friend and discover that the Doctor isn't alone...

To start with some bad news:

• the story that unfolds in the first twenty, thirty minutes or so isn't that great

But, then again:

• you gradually discover that the episode really isn't about that story. The plot twist is very nicely done, and the episode ends in an excellent cliff-hanger

A couple of interesting things about this episode:

• a great deal in this episode only makes sense to people who are familiar with the 'classic' series (the Master), who have either seen the first new Doctor Who series or Torchwood (captain Jack Harkness) and who have seen several of this year's episodes (the Face of Boe, the watch). This is an interesting choice, rewarding the fans at the risk of alienating some first-time viewers
• there are also some interesting discontinuities with Torchwood. Captain Jack is a completely different character here than he is in Torchwood, and Doctor Who is definitely getting the better end of the bargain. There's also a great deal of exposition about Jack in this episode, and it will be interesting to see what, if anything, the writers will do with this at the Torchwood end. The circumstances under which Jack seemed to disappear in the Tardis at the season ending of Torchwood didn't quite seem to match the events in this episode, and that's something else that will be interesting to see resolved

My verdict:

Tough call. As a long-time fan, I wanted to be more excited about this than I actually was.

Reviews of 'classic' Doctor Who:
Doctor Who reviews

07/06/16

A disappointing conclusion after a promising first episode.

Doctor Who: The family of blood

This episode was first broadcast on June 2 2007, and it is the second episode in a two-parter that started with 'Human nature'. A brief and somewhat spoiler-ish summary of the plot: the Doctor becomes his old self again, and the Family of Blood get to live forever.

Like its predecessor, 'The family of blood' has excellent production values, good pacing and direction, and fine performances by regulars and guests. Nevertheless, it did come as a bit of a disappointment.

At its heart, this two-parter is a character study of the Doctor. It's about who he is, what he is, and the impact that what he is has on who he is. The writer shows this to us by putting his protagonist through a life-changing crisis, which is a well-used literary device although the 'life-changing' might be taken a bit more literal here than in most cases. So far, so good.

Problem number one is that the Family of Blood, whose pursuit of the Doctor brings on the crisis, just aren't significant enough. Seeing the Doctor vanquish them by some 'olfactory misdirection' and a couple of flipped switches makes them look like push-overs, and nothing that they do during their brief reign on earth seems to merit either the lengths that the Doctor goes to in order to escape them, or the exotic punishments that he metes out in the end.

Problem number two - and beware, there are spoilers ahead - is that John Smith's choice to become the Doctor again is never an actual choice. Having been told that without the Doctor's intervention the Family of Blood will take over the earth and exterminate humanity, Smith knows that he'll never have the life that he sees in his vision. Giving the Doctor an actual chance to lead a normal, human life would have made the story a great deal stronger.

There's also some clunky storytelling. For one thing, Martha's declarations of love for the Doctor seemed to come out of nowhere, and compared to how they were handled the relationship between Rose and the Doctor was a marvel of subtlety. (And please, could we have a companion who doesn't fall in love with the Doctor? Or, at least, who only does so after allowing an actual relationship to develop and giving us a chance to get some idea of who he or she is?) Also, watching this I got that I was supposed to see the parallels between the sense of duty compelling the 1913 British going to war and the Doctor's choice, but somehow the whole thing never quite worked for me. And, finally, Baines' voice-over at the end felt tacked-on, coming across as the writer wanting to make a point rather than as something that the character would actually say or think.

My verdict:

Not bad, but a bit disappointing.

Reviews of 'classic' Doctor Who:
Doctor Who reviews

07/06/15

Catching up after being busy with other things for a bit. Tomorrow I'll post the review of the previous episode, 'Family of blood'.

Doctor Who: Blink

This episode was first broadcast on June 9 2007. A brief and somewhat spoiler-ish summary of the plot: once upon a time a girl visited a haunted house, and found that the Doctor would be there before her...

This is excellent stuff. It's written by Stephen Moffat, who also gave us 'The empty child / The Doctor dances' and 'The girl in the fireplace', and that says it all, really. It's well-written, you don't have a clue where the story is going before the very end, and there are likeable characters and excellent dialogue. There are also great performances and good directing.

A couple of puzzling bits (and beware, spoilers ahead):

• what was the connection of the Angels to the haunted house?
• the "duck... no, really, duck..." bit is clever, but it isn't explained by anything that happens in the remainder of the episode
• how did the ex-cop manage to put extras on all seventeen DVDs that Sally would own? Did all seventeen come from the same factory? Did he own the factory?

My verdict:

Stephen Moffat strikes again.

Reviews of 'classic' Doctor Who:
Doctor Who reviews

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