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snorkackcatcherPrepare to be horrified, but ...
Well, I liked it, actually. Although even as I was watching it, I just knew a lot of fans were going to hate it. (Actually, I knew that beforehand -- in fact I could have told you that before the season even started. A lot of fans always hate new canon, especially season endings. Maybe I'm just easy to please.)
I suppose it comes down to what your expectations are. I can put up with a number of plot holes in a TV show if it all hangs together reasonably well and is entertaining -- after all, if you can take aliens flying through time and space in a police box without flinching, there's not a lot of point complaining about technobabble solutions. If they have this high tech, they should be using it -- indeed, that was actually one of the weaknesses of Old Who; the Doctor kept doing things that involved magnetic fields or static electricity or mercury feed links or something equally mundane and science-projectish, or used terms in a way that made no sense (the immense wrong-end-of-the-stick-ness of the treatment of 'antimatter' in Planet of Evil being a glaring example that particularly made me wince).
At least if the Doctor mutters something about rift energy, or says the magic words 'timey wimey', it doesn't need an explanation -- ideally it should be set up in a gun-on-the-mantelpiece way, but if the real plot point is 'the Doctor is finally able to get past whatever character issues have been going on and solve the problem' it doesn't matter too much what method he uses (cf the spaceship-disabling in Family of Blood).
The Stolen Earth/Journey's End worked well enough on that approach. They weren't the best episodes of the season -- they focused more on Big Action, bringing all the old and new faces on stage at once, and resolving arcs, but they were OK. The latter aspects tended to dominate -- indeed, there was a sort of Fanwank-the-Musical aspect to the whole thing with Donna and Rose and Martha and UNIT and Torchwood and Sarah Jane alldoing a number contributing to the story, just as in a number of fanfics I've read, and the whole Dalek threat story did get a bit overshadowed.
So, just a few odd thoughts:
Loved the way the TW and SJA stuff was integrated back into the main Who canon -- finally! Little things like Sarah and Donna's reaction to Jack and Ianto sticking his head into the frame at the end worked beautifully, and it's nice to know that TW and Sarah do know of each other and cordially approve of each other's work. Also liked Jack's "there's a time and a place" to Ianto laughing at Paul O'Grady in TSE -- as I did a watch-through of Season 1 after Turn Left, it was nicely reminiscent of Nine saying the same thing to Jack when chatting up some random bloke on the Gamestation while the Daleks were hurtling towards them.
Hooks, hooks everywhere -- little bits of setup to allow the scriptwriters to bring back various elements if they want. That's the reason why Donna's memory-wiping hurt less than it might have -- don't get me wrong, it hurt, but I was worried they had some worse fate in store for her, and it can doubtless be handwaved away if Catherine Tate can be persuaded to make another appearance -- after all, they brought Rose back from an AU, which was supposed to be impossible. So I knew that even as I stepped away from the TV, the fix-it fics were probably already being written. We didn't actually see Harriet Jones killed, nor Davros. And we now know it is possible to go back into the Time War, so the next element to be brought back might well be the Time Lords -- we've had most of the major aliens now. (I'm kind of hoping they're leaving the White/Black Guardians thing alone. I know it brought us Romana, but I never did think that storyline was a very good idea. I'd like to see the Great Intelligence/Yeti, but that's just me.)
Rose herself -- wasn't quite the Rose we saw in S1/2, for presumably actress-related reasons, although I did very much like the way that she didn't get treated as the most important character in the plot. Indeed, after Turn Left she really did very little, and her resolution with Bluesuit!Doctor was bittersweet -- a way to set up a kinda-sorta Ten/Rose ending without the hassle of actually having Ten/Rose.
I was pretty confident that the 'regeneration' at the end of TSE was going to have a catch to it, but otherwise the BBC would have had to film an entire episode with the new Doctor without any word leaking out, which frankly was not likely. The DoctorDonna bit was unexpected but fun -- Tennant did a good job in making bluesuit!Doctor distinct, and Tate was great, especially as she went into total manic mode (and the throwaway old-Donna style 'you're ... naked' line).
Hat-tips to previous episodes! Yet another mention of Hartnell-era stuff when the Doctor muses on what the Daleks were doing trying to move the planet in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (I wonder what New-only fans make of all this?), and since (as I mentioned above) I've just watched Season 1 complete I greatly enjoyed the Doctor asking Gwen if she came from a local family, because when I saw The Unquiet Dead, not having seen it before, my thought was more "what's Gwen doing in 1869?".
Crowd scene in the TARDIS! Nine of them if I counted correctly, plus Luke, K9, Mr Smith, Gwen and Ianto patched in via videoconferencing. As I said above, this sort of thing is pure fanwank made canon.
Martha and/or Mickey on Torchwood? Logical, given the end of TW S2 -- easier than integrating two entirely new characters, and with Martha at least it was kind of implied as possible by her TW episodes.
I'm sure there was more, but whatever, this post is getting too long. All right, the things I liked were perhaps the more superficial, and my fanwankery was confined to those -- because I think that's what the basic theme of the episode was, and I'm generally willing to cut writers a break on that. Yes, there were some issues that weren't dealt with as they might be, and yes, it was perhaps only a 7/10 finale, but that's not bad. Another good season overall.
Well, I liked it, actually. Although even as I was watching it, I just knew a lot of fans were going to hate it. (Actually, I knew that beforehand -- in fact I could have told you that before the season even started. A lot of fans always hate new canon, especially season endings. Maybe I'm just easy to please.)
I suppose it comes down to what your expectations are. I can put up with a number of plot holes in a TV show if it all hangs together reasonably well and is entertaining -- after all, if you can take aliens flying through time and space in a police box without flinching, there's not a lot of point complaining about technobabble solutions. If they have this high tech, they should be using it -- indeed, that was actually one of the weaknesses of Old Who; the Doctor kept doing things that involved magnetic fields or static electricity or mercury feed links or something equally mundane and science-projectish, or used terms in a way that made no sense (the immense wrong-end-of-the-stick-ness of the treatment of 'antimatter' in Planet of Evil being a glaring example that particularly made me wince).
At least if the Doctor mutters something about rift energy, or says the magic words 'timey wimey', it doesn't need an explanation -- ideally it should be set up in a gun-on-the-mantelpiece way, but if the real plot point is 'the Doctor is finally able to get past whatever character issues have been going on and solve the problem' it doesn't matter too much what method he uses (cf the spaceship-disabling in Family of Blood).
The Stolen Earth/Journey's End worked well enough on that approach. They weren't the best episodes of the season -- they focused more on Big Action, bringing all the old and new faces on stage at once, and resolving arcs, but they were OK. The latter aspects tended to dominate -- indeed, there was a sort of Fanwank-the-Musical aspect to the whole thing with Donna and Rose and Martha and UNIT and Torchwood and Sarah Jane all
So, just a few odd thoughts:
Loved the way the TW and SJA stuff was integrated back into the main Who canon -- finally! Little things like Sarah and Donna's reaction to Jack and Ianto sticking his head into the frame at the end worked beautifully, and it's nice to know that TW and Sarah do know of each other and cordially approve of each other's work. Also liked Jack's "there's a time and a place" to Ianto laughing at Paul O'Grady in TSE -- as I did a watch-through of Season 1 after Turn Left, it was nicely reminiscent of Nine saying the same thing to Jack when chatting up some random bloke on the Gamestation while the Daleks were hurtling towards them.
Hooks, hooks everywhere -- little bits of setup to allow the scriptwriters to bring back various elements if they want. That's the reason why Donna's memory-wiping hurt less than it might have -- don't get me wrong, it hurt, but I was worried they had some worse fate in store for her, and it can doubtless be handwaved away if Catherine Tate can be persuaded to make another appearance -- after all, they brought Rose back from an AU, which was supposed to be impossible. So I knew that even as I stepped away from the TV, the fix-it fics were probably already being written. We didn't actually see Harriet Jones killed, nor Davros. And we now know it is possible to go back into the Time War, so the next element to be brought back might well be the Time Lords -- we've had most of the major aliens now. (I'm kind of hoping they're leaving the White/Black Guardians thing alone. I know it brought us Romana, but I never did think that storyline was a very good idea. I'd like to see the Great Intelligence/Yeti, but that's just me.)
Rose herself -- wasn't quite the Rose we saw in S1/2, for presumably actress-related reasons, although I did very much like the way that she didn't get treated as the most important character in the plot. Indeed, after Turn Left she really did very little, and her resolution with Bluesuit!Doctor was bittersweet -- a way to set up a kinda-sorta Ten/Rose ending without the hassle of actually having Ten/Rose.
I was pretty confident that the 'regeneration' at the end of TSE was going to have a catch to it, but otherwise the BBC would have had to film an entire episode with the new Doctor without any word leaking out, which frankly was not likely. The DoctorDonna bit was unexpected but fun -- Tennant did a good job in making bluesuit!Doctor distinct, and Tate was great, especially as she went into total manic mode (and the throwaway old-Donna style 'you're ... naked' line).
Hat-tips to previous episodes! Yet another mention of Hartnell-era stuff when the Doctor muses on what the Daleks were doing trying to move the planet in The Dalek Invasion of Earth (I wonder what New-only fans make of all this?), and since (as I mentioned above) I've just watched Season 1 complete I greatly enjoyed the Doctor asking Gwen if she came from a local family, because when I saw The Unquiet Dead, not having seen it before, my thought was more "what's Gwen doing in 1869?".
Crowd scene in the TARDIS! Nine of them if I counted correctly, plus Luke, K9, Mr Smith, Gwen and Ianto patched in via videoconferencing. As I said above, this sort of thing is pure fanwank made canon.
Martha and/or Mickey on Torchwood? Logical, given the end of TW S2 -- easier than integrating two entirely new characters, and with Martha at least it was kind of implied as possible by her TW episodes.
I'm sure there was more, but whatever, this post is getting too long. All right, the things I liked were perhaps the more superficial, and my fanwankery was confined to those -- because I think that's what the basic theme of the episode was, and I'm generally willing to cut writers a break on that. Yes, there were some issues that weren't dealt with as they might be, and yes, it was perhaps only a 7/10 finale, but that's not bad. Another good season overall.
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-08 06:58 am (UTC)And I can't believe I used the word realistically in a sentance discussing leaving a half-human half-alien clone to live in a parallel universe with a shop girl from London....;p
no subject
Date: 2008-07-08 10:19 pm (UTC)I took the DoctorDonna thing as meaning that bluesuit!Doctor would be Time Lord with a human mix, as he grew from the hand, and Donna human with a Time Lord mix, as she just absorbed some Time Lord characteristics. So Donna didn't have the freaky Time Lord brain structure to handle the 'time sense', but the 'new' Doctor did.
I think the Doctor/Rose thing is a textbook case of the maxim that if your enjoyment of a show/story in which the basic story is non-shippy is solely based on shipping, prepare to be disappointed. That's why it's not a good idea.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-08 09:18 am (UTC)The one person I'm really going to miss is Wilfred. I hope they find some way to see him and Donna again.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-08 10:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-08 10:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-08 10:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-08 12:31 pm (UTC)I haven't managed to see the Sarah Jane Adventures yet, though, which I obviously must. I had no idea when they were on.
There were lots of things I loved about these episodes, and they more or less outweighed the things I did like. It probably helps that I wasn't particularly invested in Ten/Rose since that seems to be the source of a lot of the wank.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-08 10:23 pm (UTC)The SJA are a lot of fun, actually -- and Whatever Happened To Sarah Jane in particular sets up Turn Left.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-08 08:40 pm (UTC)Watch it, Earth Girl!
no subject
Date: 2008-07-08 10:27 pm (UTC)