"What is WRONG with you people?!"
--While I was pleasantly suprised to find out that the whole deal with Amy attacking the Doctor in the last episode WAS, in fact, actually mentioned again and followed up on, it...could've been done a little more delicately. The Doctor popping out of a cake, announcing that she kisssed him in the middle of the stag party, "You kissed her back?" "No, I kissed her mouth."...
I dunno, it's all a bit juvenille, isn't it? A bit obvious, Internet, highschooler, low-hanging-fruit, kind of jokes. This together with "Erase your Internet history" in "The Eleventh Hour", it's all a bit...childish, easy. Common. While I would much prefer that Who be more towards the side of light-hearted than "I'M THE GOD!" Dark Doctor...I didn't quite mean like this.
And I don't know...the expression Eleven had on his face, the way he looks so YOUNG as he was popping out of the cake saying this...it didn't feel very Doctorly. It made this feel uncomfortably far more like an actual normal, mundane battle over a girl, from some sitcom. He didn't seem like a wise old Time Lord who didn't want Amy at all, he seemed...like a rival. Like an active rival.
He ISN'T, but his youth and the far too flippant way he talked to Rory about the whole thing and that look on his face, didn't help.
Anyway, "It was only me because I was there. It should've been you" is nice 'n' all, and I do understand how being really stressed out can make people lose self control to a point (after that, they're...just not that good of a person, really) but...I still can't get over the fact that she was inviting him to jump on her while her WEDDING DRESS was hanging RIGHT THERE in THE SAME ROOM.
(And for those of you who think I'm mental about my swearing overreaction to that...remember it's not that I think it was "pornographic" and I'm not a total prude. I am very very subjective (as I think everybody is), and how I will react to a thing in any fictional story of any kind depends, at the core, on two things: Context and delivery. I am mad at THIS scene but not mad at many other way, way more sexual ones because it was happening in WHO and it was CANON and not FANFIC. Those are the problem factors. Change the characters and/or slap this on Fanfic.net and I'd be fine. Well, perhaps not fine; the female attacking the guy would still be engaged, so I'd still be SOMEWHAT mad. But not as mad.)
At any rate, I'm starting to see what people mean by the phrase "Scooby Who"...
--"Yours is bigger than mine" REALLY. You actually went there, Moffat? REALLY? Talk about low-hanging fruit and NO that is not another innuendo! (In your endo, indeed.)
THIS is what I mean by the "juvenille", folks.
--Speaking of juvenilles, is it just me or...I'm sorry, but so far, for me, Matt Smith is kinda not working whenever he tries to be seriously angry and dangerous. He...he kind of just doesn't have the maturity to pull it off, visually speaking. Of course, it would also help if the writing was better...
To give you an idea of what can be done with a young, naive Doctor when the writing IS good, intense, and proper Who instead of all teenyboppery trendy, only a day after seeing this, I listened to the Big Finish audio drama, "Spare Parts". And OH MY GOD what a freaking difference. It stars Five and Nyssa--and yes, Peter Davison is no longer the fresh-faced 29-year-old he was back then, but he was written and played the part UTTERLY as if it was still 1982--to the point where it was a little freaky at times, actually--so we'll count it. Anyway, it was the formerly-youngest Doctor's personality in this story, and because he was written as properly Doctorly, that's a big reason why it FREAKING KICKED ASS.
Also because it was wonderfully dark, creepy, tragic, full of oddball characters and generally one of the best-written Who things I've run into in years and needs to be made into a two-parter like, right now, but a big part of that was a young Doctor...being treated like the DOCTOR, not like a young smartass flirty guy. If Matt Smith was given a script even half as good as this and THREW himself into it with all his heart and soul...even if he fell on his face, I'd totally give him props. So much.
Yeah...I'm sorry to say, so far, it seems all my worst fears about having the youngest actor ever to play the Doctor are being realised, in Season 5. From what I've heard he gets better, but right now? Fear 1: Young Doctor will = more hormones and fanficness. YES. (Dear GOD, yes. To the point where I thought I was hallucinating at first...then I WISHED I was.)
Fear 2: Young Doctor will = more trendiness and less distance, uncle-y-ness, Doctorlyness. YES. Right on both counts. I'm just...not buying it yet. He needs to act different and more importantly, the SCRIPTS need to treat him more like an old man in a young body, before I'll start actually seeing that.
--Rory is all kinds of awesome, though. I liked the way he set the Doctor back a bit--in that lecturing, really philosophically Explaining the Character kind of thing they do too much of on the new show in general, but a huge step up from blind worship!, fighting the guy off with a broomstick (a bit TOO obvious "dur hur, look, he's our comic relief!" but still awesome), and I loved his ordinary-Mundane reaction to the way the Doctor and Amy were so excited about everything. "The vampires are really aliens." "I KNOW, isn't it awesome?!" "WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?!" :P
I'm a leeeetle leery about that same Rose/Doctor/Mickey situation developing again, but as long as Eleven remembers that "It'd never work! You're not my type!" thing good and hard, it might be okay.
And YAY FULL-TIME MALE COMPANION!! (does the happy dance) Oh, man. We haven't had one of those since Turlough and like everybody else who's ever encountered him, I do so miss Jamie.
--Speaking of the broomstick fight though...was anybody else reminded of like, Indiana Jones, or many other humourous swordfights from popular movies? Between this and the Star Warsy dogfight in space, ummm...guys, I like these things too, but do you think you could go a LITTLE longer between obvious pop-culture references? Not that Classic Who was entirely without them ("I am him and he is me." "And we are all together, goo-goo-ga-joob?"), but they were spaced way farther apart.
I was also vaguely reminded of Turlough wielding a DEADLY HATRACK, for some reason. (laugh)
--Was anybody else kinda disappointed that the vampires turned out to not be vampires? I mean, I dunno, I was kinda wondering if they were those vampires that tried to convert Adric and sacrifice Romana, and against whom the Time Lords had had a MEGA war. This would've made the episode a LOT more emotional for the Doctor and been a nice little bit of not-already-used-to-death continuity. Ah well.
--In the end I actually felt kinda sorry for fish-lady. She was one of the more understandable villians, and well-played and interesting.
All in all, not horrible, but nothing to write home about. A pleasant enough bit of fluff, I guess. Standard-issue episode.
But it seems my subconscious isn't hostile against Eleven because, I kid you not, after having seen only two or three episodes with him (this happened weeks ago, but I didn't bother to write it at the time)
There's not much to tell, but what I can remember seemed interesting. We start with a sort of quirky, offbeat middle-class family in the suburbs somewhere in the Midwestern US--you know the movie "A Christmas Story"? Yeah, like them, only in modern day--on a boring winter Saturday in probably February. The camera cuts in to the attached garage, full of boxes of old junk and stuff...
...and the TARDIS appears. Eleven (?!) pops his head out cheerfully, followed by...Donna?* Okay...
There's...some kind of a problem of course, no idea what, and the Doctor starts delightedly looking through the junk in the garage, assuming he'll find something useful there that he can MacGyver together into a universe-saving contraption. Among other things, I remember seeing a thing of cartoony dragon stickers, still on the card they come in--puffy ones, like from the '80s!--the muffler from an old '57 Chevy that the dad of this family always meant to fix up but never got around to, and a bunch of oddly-shaped light fixtures, that were on the walls at odd places in one room, and didn't give off much light. What this was going to do with fighting off evil aliens I have no idea, but the Doctor was happy with them. The dad of this oddball quirky family, being a tinkerer himself, was quite enthusiastic to help out, too.
And Donna? Poor dear didn't get much to do, as the Doctor said that she has the most important job of all:
...distract the kids so they don't bug him while he's working. Yes, he said this, Eleven did, to DONNA. Right to her face. Ohhhh, boy.
As you can imagine this did NOT go down well, but she eventually manages to enjoy the job somewhat by making up her own new board game out of the pieces of a whole bunch of old ones that aren't quite playable by themselves anymore but which the family hasn't thrown away. (Was this dream actually trying to tell me something about being a packrat? 'Cos I'm not THAT bad.) The main scene I can remember really clearly is, the camera (yes, my brain has a camera, apparently) is zoomed in a shot of Donna's hand hopping one of the green houses from "Monopoly" down the trail of the board from "Candyland". She slams it down triumphantly and announces--in exactly Catherine Tate's voice, "I just sunk your battleship, mate!"
(camera pans up from the floor to Eleven's face, as he stands there with his hands on his hips and one eyebrow cocked sardonically)
DONNA: Wot?!
And I SAW her say this. I swear, totally, I SAW Catherine Tate's face get that expression it gets when she says stuff like "Wot?".
Then I assume the Doctor told her he was done with Phase 1 and needed her help now (Donna wouldn't be sent off to babysit for an entire episode) and that now something was going to go forward in the fighting-the-mysteriously-unnamed-evil-threat plan, but what I don't know 'cos this is when I woke up.
*This wasn't hostility against Amy or even just mixing up the redheads, but rather, I think my brain was just like "I wonder what would happen if we put THESE two personalities together?" And before you mention the "But she can't remember the Doctor or else..." bit, four words for you: "Wibbly", "wobbly", "timey" and "wimey". He picked her up at a different point in her personal timeline and this adventure also gets erased from her memory later on somehow. Done.
Also--this was a dream. It doesn't HAVE to make sense! :P
...my brain is weird. Awesome, but weird. (laugh)
...Notorious