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No one move a muscle when the dead come home
The ironic aftereffect of viewing The Night of the Doctor (2013) last thing before bed is that I woke up wanting a time machine. The Doctor who sold his soul, sacrificed his name, gave away everything he stood for and became a monster to fight monsters? Of course I want him played by John Hurt. And then I want a series of that nameless Warrior seen for just one stinger moment in that fire-polished ripple of metal: Doctor no more . . . I have always thought John Hurt was beautiful, especially in his dark, watchful younger years. He always looked a little bruised around the eyes, even when the rest of him was boyish; he's a good face for someone I suspect of deploying the Gallifreyan equivalent of the Deplorable Word to end the Time War. I imagine we'll find out the full story in "The Day of the Doctor," but it will still be just a flicker, like this glimpse of Paul McGann. Thirty-year-old John Hurt is not happening without serious technology. (Neither is more onscreen McGann, I am afraid, although at least in his case there's years of radio drama to catch up on.) It's still probably most I've enjoyed a script by Steven Moffat since "Blink." And I can write wistfully about the rest.
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I felt that way about Russell T. Davies, the few episodes I saw of the Tenth Doctor; I think of it as less of a problem with the Eleventh, but that may be partly because the Companion dynamic in the last couple of seasons has been really weird. The Doctor's Companions are now enigmas, mysteries for him to solve. He's obsessing about them, instead of jaunting around the universe fixing (or breaking) whatever. I didn't watch the whole arc with Amy Pond, but
I was not, btw, able to read the link to ashlyme's post; it appears to be friends-locked.
Sorry about that!
"Agreed. It's the first episode since the very beginning of his run I've really liked [Matt Smith] in. I watched about the second half of this season, from 'Hide' onwards, and most of the episodes (a) had serious pacing problems, badly compressed, should really have been two-parters (b) suffered almost as badly from mad-man-with-a-box syndrome, in which the Doctor's mercurial quirkiness and the mystery of Clara were somehow supposed to carry the day. 'The Name of the Doctor' still moved too fast and Clara still doesn't seem to have any character of her own beyond her plot function, but at least I could feel the age in him, the strangeness, the way he is not at all human when he's not putting up a mask.
(If the Doctor recognized him, if the Doctor has been keeping him secret, then even with all the wibbly-wobbly timey-whateverness, he's not a future regeneration; he's past. Which raises the stakes somewhat for Matt Smith. The Eleventh Doctor may be the eleventh Doctor, but he's the twelfth regeneration of the Time Lord who calls himself—mostly—by that name. That could be genuinely interesting.)"
And then I agreed that the secret of Hurt's not-Doctor shouldn't be that he fought in the Time War, because that's too obvious, but I'm taking that back now.
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I think it verged on that sometimes, but it felt like less of a problem to me. Though admittedly I can't say how much of the less-problem-ness is due to me liking Tennant's performance better than Smith's. But I think most of it is because Ten's run addressed a number of questions of the sort that I really dig -- like the bit where he says "I'm going to die" and somebody else says "but you'll do your regenerating thing, right?," and Ten points out that even so, he still dies. Whoever goes walking away after that has his memories, but it isn't him. I also liked the fact that the end of Tennant's run made you see how easily a Time Lord could go from being awesome to being one of the people who nearly destroyed the universe.
I see what you mean about Amy Pond being an enigma for the Doctor, and I can imagine how making that the entire premise for a character results in a very thin character. (I mean, either the audience understands her and thinks the Doctor's an idiot, or the audience has to sit there and be baffled, too.)
I haven't seen "The Name of the Doctor" yet, so I can't speak to what happened there. But I think the strength of the seasons for Eleven -- the ones I've seen, anyway -- has been in the puzzle nature of the metaplot. Moffat, I'm told, is the first showrunner for Who that's embraced making time travel part of the plot, rather than just the device that gets you to where the plot is. But enjoying the intellectual puzzle does not always cover for shortcomings in character development.
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That's fair: a show actually exploring its own philosophical ramifications is cool.
I also liked the fact that the end of Tennant's run made you see how easily a Time Lord could go from being awesome to being one of the people who nearly destroyed the universe.
Picked up here in Cass' reaction to the Eighth Doctor: "Go back to your battlefield. You haven't finished yet. Some of the universe is still standing." (And it hurts so much. He wouldn't have cared if she hated him so long as she let him save her. And it makes sense of his choice: "I don't suppose there's any need for a doctor anymore." Because that person couldn't have helped Cass: didn't. The more I think about it, the more strongly I feel there was more in this one-shot flashback than in the entire last season.)
(I mean, either the audience understands her and thinks the Doctor's an idiot, or the audience has to sit there and be baffled, too.)
I am waiting to see if there is some greater explanation for Clara than the one we were given in "The Name of the Doctor," because for spoiler-specific reasons it did not satisfy me and I do not think this was Moffat's intent.
Blew out comments limit; continued below.
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It's why Season 5 of Highlander is by far the best one. I don't know if you've seen it, but they circle around the question of what, for lack of a better term, I think of as the moral statute of limitations: with people who live forever, how long do you get to hold them accountable for what they did before? At what point are they allowed to reasonably claim that they have repented and changed? Who gets to judge them for what they've done, and for how long? There's a whole sequence of episodes scattered through there that keep hitting that question from different angles, and it's so infinitely better than the early-seasons stuff of "now we're going to have an episode that's basically Die Hard! But with an immortal, so they think they've killed him and then he shows up and defeats them!"
Also, there is one fourth-season episode whose plot is utter Macguffin stupidity, but I forgive it because it contains an amazing speech that takes all the "ooooh I'm an immortal and people want to chop my head off" angst and says, bullshit. Try being mortal.
And it hurts so much. He wouldn't have cared if she hated him so long as she let him save her. And it makes sense of his choice: "I don't suppose there's any need for a doctor anymore." Because that person couldn't have helped Cass: didn't.
Yes. And it's the same excellent button some of the Tennant plots hit with me: the limitations of the Doctor's ability to save people, and the effect those limitations have on him. Sort of akin to why I can tolerate Lymond, in Dunnett's books; he's brilliant and amazing and all the rest of it, and sometimes, it still isn't enough. When it isn't . . . the Doctor doesn't always make good choices.
If you find you only want to watch a little bit of Tennant, I recommend the last two specials, "The Waters of Mars" and "The End of Time." Some of what goes on in them will mean less if you haven't seen what goes before, and the penultimate scenes of the latter bog down a bit in "Russell T. Davies says goodbye to everyone and everything from his time on the show," but they're what I think of when I talk about why I loved Tennant's run.
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I've seen the first Highlander movie, nothing else. I've never had a serious recommendation for the series and I've been actively warned against the movie sequels. Do you consider the previous seasons worth watching to get to the fifth?
Who gets to judge them for what they've done, and for how long?
That's nice. It shouldn't be an easily answerable question.
Some of what goes on in them will mean less if you haven't seen what goes before, and the penultimate scenes of the latter bog down a bit in "Russell T. Davies says goodbye to everyone and everything from his time on the show," but they're what I think of when I talk about why I loved Tennant's run.
Thanks; I haven't seen either, except for maybe the last five minutes of "The End of Time" unless they were reprised at the beginning of "The Eleventh Hour."
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What sequels? They only ever made the one movie. <nods vigorously>
Do you consider the previous seasons worth watching to get to the fifth?
Selected episodes, yes, and maybe a bit of background summary to explain stuff that's nowhere in the movie/things you'll see Duncan angsting about. You need at a minimum to see the stuff with Methos before season five, so you can properly appreciate how he's the best thing that ever happened to the show. :-P
If you're genuinely interested in this, shoot me an e-mail (marie{dot}brennan{at}gmail), and I'll try to write up a recommendation.
Thanks; I haven't seen either, except for maybe the last five minutes of "The End of Time" unless they were reprised at the beginning of "The Eleventh Hour."
I can't remember how much got reprised there, but it can't have been much more than the last half-centimeter of the spear point, so to speak. Some things need momentum to work.
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I have seen a lot of icons with him.
If you're genuinely interested in this, shoot me an e-mail (marie{dot}brennan{at}gmail), and I'll try to write up a recommendation.
I am genuinely interested in that no one has ever before made a case to me for watching the series; I am unlikely to start any time soon because a series of any greater length than Slings & Arrows is a major viewing commitment and I'm barely watching movies at this point. I don't want to put you to the trouble of writing me an exhaustive guide to the series right now when it may take me years to get around to making use of it.
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And it's really shortchanged the individual episodes. Of the half-season I saw, I liked "Hide" best: it slingshots the ending, but until then it's a very classic '70's BBC ghost story with a fragile romance that actually convinces me. As long as Caliburn House has existed, it's been haunted by the "Witch of the Well," a whitely screaming apparition with one hand outstretched, always appearing in the same pose—and from the same angle—no matter where in the house it's sighted. The place has become one of those daunting ruins approached only by ghost hunters or debunkers or exorcists, of which the latest pair are Alec Palmer and Emma Grayling: she's the mental medium and he handles the technical end of things and they are visibly, painfully in love with each other, but she's so skinlessly sensitive to emotions (and understandably withdrawn because of it) that she's convinced herself that all she's picking up from him are her own hopeless feelings, bouncing endlessly in a cage of mirrors, while he has an entire history with the SOE that he doesn't let anyone know because it sounds tricky and glamorous when recited out rapid-fire like a magician's patter (thanks, Doctor), but to him it just recalls all the young men and women he ran as agents until they died. He'd love to be proven wrong, to know there are ghosts after all; then he'd have someone to apologize to. And halfway through this plot that would make an entirely reasonable story all by itself (ghost of Nigel Kneale on the line, please hold), Clara and the Doctor drop in from the cold rainy night and it isn't that I object to the resolution of the mystery, I just didn't like how suddenly we hurtled into it. "The Crimson Horror" was even more frustrating, because it would have been brilliant as a two-parter. As presented, the mystery of Mrs. Gillyflower's Sweetville and its millenarian model community is half penny dreadful and half real horror, but none of it is allowed to breathe—the horror is flicked out of the way in the first fifteen minutes so as to get to the rest of the plot, meaning none of the genuinely chilling implications register as anything more than momentary shocks. The relationship between a scarred blind woman and a mute monster is a staple of the genre and reframing it between the daughter of a mad scientist and the half-paralyzed Doctor she has to hide from her mother is very clever, but it's over as soon as it's onscreen. (Points for casting Diana Rigg and Rachel Stirling as mother and daughter, but they don't get enough time to themselves, either.) The late-breaking revelation raises more questions than it answers, because it wasn't at all clear there was a question there to begin with. And I like Madam Vastra, Jenny, and Strax as an irregular gang of crime-fighters, observing just enough of Victorian custom to set off their casual queer alien comfort all the more, but they too vanish into the need to tie everything up by the forty-five-minute mark. It was a crowded sketch of something that should have been a classic. Yes, every episode we got little hints and whispers about Clara and the universe and Trenzalore and the Doctor's destiny, but that didn't excuse for me how insubstantial everything else around them appeared to be. It made for a very strange viewing experience. "Nightmare in Silver" was a great showcase for Matt Smith persona-switching at the slap of a face, but otherwise? Something? I couldn't find it.
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And it's really shortchanged the individual episodes.
[...]
none of it is allowed to breathe—the horror is flicked out of the way in the first fifteen minutes so as to get to the rest of the plot, meaning none of the genuinely chilling implications register as anything more than momentary shocks.
Which is all the more disappointing because we know, from the episodes Moffat did when Davies was running the show, that he's really good at building that kind of mood, when he's only writing a one-shot or a two-parter. The man is a walking font of Nightmare Fuel. But it seems that when he got put in charge, his focus shifted to the bigger picture, and he doesn't seem to have the knack for building that bigger picture out of smaller, self-contained blocks.
I mean, he does some excellent larger-scale metaplot. The Pandorica business looped around to an earlier episode in a way that made my jaw drop, because at the time nothing about that earlier episode seemed odd, but the later bit slotted into place seamlessly and recontextualized the whole thing. The tangled knot of the River Song storyline is really impressive, and led up to the closing lines of series 6, which I thought were just brilliant. But he's so busy juggling the pieces of those things, he drops other stuff.
I had heard that the BBC smacked him for being too metaplot-focused, and told him to go back to things being more monster-of-the-week. Either that wasn't true, or it didn't take?
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Y HALO THAR WEEPING ANGELS.
I had heard that the BBC smacked him for being too metaplot-focused, and told him to go back to things being more monster-of-the-week. Either that wasn't true, or it didn't take?
I don't know. If so, I feel kind of like the second half of the latest season got the worst of both worlds.