![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
You could take bottle tops off with these
Last night's dreams, including but not limited to: something about the ruins of high bridges and making love with the male-bodied version of someone I know as biologically female. Also they had small fanlike fins in the hollows of their hips, but that sort of thing is not uncommon in my dreams. I hope they don't mind.
I passed out before making any notes to myself on "Deep Breath," which![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel and I finally got the chance to watch last night, long after my friendlist had exploded about it. Short course: I expected to like Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor and I did. His erratic scenes post-regeneration worked much better for me than Eleven's manic madcap antics and his later shyness felt genuine rather than sympathy-rigged, especially now that he has some sense of himself and his recent actions rather than hands he doesn't recognize and difficulty not flirting with tyrannosaurs. I'm not sure I'm a hugging person now . . . He's the first Doctor in a very long time who looks as though human is not his default setting; he has some birdlike movements, a springy, wary fierceness which every now and then becomes something as bizarrely normal and diffident as an offer of coffee and chips. I find myself thinking tiercel when I look at him. (Of course he's dangerous; when was the Doctor ever not?) I am just hoping that the question of why this face is not really being set up as a series mystery; it answers itself pretty quickly. Capaldi ranting about his eyebrows is delightful. They probably want to secede from my face and set up their own independent state of eyebrows!
I was less endeared by the meta-plot of the episode, which seemed to feel the audience needed to be talked into accepting Capaldi's Doctor as strongly as Clara with her imprinting on youthful Eleven, stressing continuity with his predecessor rather than offering the latest iteration on his own terms. I believe it's a valid issue for Clara, but personally I was looking forward to Twelve; I don't need to be argued out of my bias against wiry grey hair and cantankerous brows. (I did like the Doctor being puzzled by his own reflection, lined with experiences he didn't live through; hearing the words out of his own mouth a beat too late to look away. You probably can't even remember where you got that face from.) The phone call was really pushing it. I am also decidedly unsure about the random jags of slapstick and not just one, but three characters casually condemning Clara's personality flaws. I don't like her much as a character, but that has to do with how thinly she's written, not because I think she's an emotionally needy passive-aggressive egomaniac or any of the other labels the script suddenly felt the need to hang on her. It was like reverse fan service. "Nothing is more important than my egomania!" is a great line, but a cheap shot. If it was meant to build up to her moment of bravery among the clockworks—which was well done—I think it backfired.
All through the episode I thought the clockwork leader looked familiar; I should have recognized him as the deserter Jacob from A Field in England (2013). To be fair, he had a beard there. And part of his face wasn't a naked metal frame.
I am all for seeing more of Jenny and Vastra as a marriage. It feels a little like cheating that their first kiss onscreen (that I've seen, anyway) is a life-saving sharing of breath rather than a moment of passion or everyday affection, but maybe people don't ever just kiss on Doctor Who. Anyway, lesbian ninja lizard-human couples: rock on.
I'm not sure what it is with Moffat and theatrically flirtatious female antagonists. I hope Rob is right that she's the Rani, who has not yet appeared in New Who. Maybe the umbrella's because she watched a lot of The Prisoner the last time she was on Earth.
I was really sad about the dinosaur.
I passed out before making any notes to myself on "Deep Breath," which
derspatchel and I finally got the chance to watch last night, long after my friendlist had exploded about it. Short course: I expected to like Capaldi's Twelfth Doctor and I did. His erratic scenes post-regeneration worked much better for me than Eleven's manic madcap antics and his later shyness felt genuine rather than sympathy-rigged, especially now that he has some sense of himself and his recent actions rather than hands he doesn't recognize and difficulty not flirting with tyrannosaurs. I'm not sure I'm a hugging person now . . . He's the first Doctor in a very long time who looks as though human is not his default setting; he has some birdlike movements, a springy, wary fierceness which every now and then becomes something as bizarrely normal and diffident as an offer of coffee and chips. I find myself thinking tiercel when I look at him. (Of course he's dangerous; when was the Doctor ever not?) I am just hoping that the question of why this face is not really being set up as a series mystery; it answers itself pretty quickly. Capaldi ranting about his eyebrows is delightful. They probably want to secede from my face and set up their own independent state of eyebrows!I was less endeared by the meta-plot of the episode, which seemed to feel the audience needed to be talked into accepting Capaldi's Doctor as strongly as Clara with her imprinting on youthful Eleven, stressing continuity with his predecessor rather than offering the latest iteration on his own terms. I believe it's a valid issue for Clara, but personally I was looking forward to Twelve; I don't need to be argued out of my bias against wiry grey hair and cantankerous brows. (I did like the Doctor being puzzled by his own reflection, lined with experiences he didn't live through; hearing the words out of his own mouth a beat too late to look away. You probably can't even remember where you got that face from.) The phone call was really pushing it. I am also decidedly unsure about the random jags of slapstick and not just one, but three characters casually condemning Clara's personality flaws. I don't like her much as a character, but that has to do with how thinly she's written, not because I think she's an emotionally needy passive-aggressive egomaniac or any of the other labels the script suddenly felt the need to hang on her. It was like reverse fan service. "Nothing is more important than my egomania!" is a great line, but a cheap shot. If it was meant to build up to her moment of bravery among the clockworks—which was well done—I think it backfired.
All through the episode I thought the clockwork leader looked familiar; I should have recognized him as the deserter Jacob from A Field in England (2013). To be fair, he had a beard there. And part of his face wasn't a naked metal frame.
I am all for seeing more of Jenny and Vastra as a marriage. It feels a little like cheating that their first kiss onscreen (that I've seen, anyway) is a life-saving sharing of breath rather than a moment of passion or everyday affection, but maybe people don't ever just kiss on Doctor Who. Anyway, lesbian ninja lizard-human couples: rock on.
I'm not sure what it is with Moffat and theatrically flirtatious female antagonists. I hope Rob is right that she's the Rani, who has not yet appeared in New Who. Maybe the umbrella's because she watched a lot of The Prisoner the last time she was on Earth.
I was really sad about the dinosaur.
no subject
In fairness, I should note that part of the reason the Rose approached worked well was because they were starting the series up again. For people like me, who had never watched Classic Who and had only the vaguest acquired-by-osmosis understanding of the story world, it helped a lot to have a clueless lens character (I like that term, thanks) we could follow in making those initial discoveries. Possibly Moffat thinks that got old after a while, and now audiences know enough that the Doctor can be our lens character. While that might be true in a strictly pragmatic sense (I don't really need the TARDIS and all the rest of it explained again), I think it fails in a character sense, because the Doctor is an alien. A thousand-year-old shapechanging alien who frequently pulls the solution to a plot problem out of his ear. He makes a bad lens character because his perspective is not and cannot be mine. I'm reminded of how Jack Sparrow was better as a loose cannon rolling around in the vicinity of some more straightforward characters, rather than the central agent they tried to make him into for the fourth movie; I'm also reminded of Dorothy Dunnett never once giving you Lymond's point of view in The Game of Kings. Certain characters work better when they're slightly off-center.
She's a collection of plot necessities. I am hoping Moffat lets her evolve into a person this season. He seems to be starting.
That's good. I think I even liked her as a collection of plot necessities better than what Amy and Rory turned into by the end of their bit, which was a pair of Doctor groupies who really only seemed to exist to marvel at his coolness.
I put up with all the handwaving for that.
I don't mind handwaving so long as it's entertaining, and is headed somewhere interesting. That sounds like it qualifies.
I don't mean that he needed to embody the same philosophical questions: I mean I'm not sure he had any philosophical questions until his run was nearly over. (If desired, some discussion here in comments to my post about "The Day of the Doctor.")
Ah, gotcha. I will avoid the link for now, because I suspect therein lie spoilers, but I agree with you for the most part. The closest they came to asking any interesting questions with Eleven before that ep was probably the part around Demon's Run, which may be in the stuff you missed; that's the bit that made me realize, whoa, this Doctor is a lot harder and colder than the previous two. Because really, when you get a character saying "the Doctor has a message for you" and then spaceships start exploding in the background, followed by the character saying "would you like me to repeat that?" . . . they tried at least a little to explore that, the notion of the Doctor losing his sense of compassion, but it never quite paid off for me.