Well, that was different
Doctor Who 29.13 - "The Last of the Time Lords"
I just--WHAT?!? I mean, really????
That was wierd, man. Lots of bits and pieces, some interesting, some abjectly awful, all of it sort of whirling around in the blender but never really mixing with any kind of coherence.
So, piece by piece:
* I mostly liked the Martha pieces and the fact that she'd had only herself to rely on for an entire year in a very changed world, and was smart and effective and more ruthless than she'd like, and that the whole plan hinged on her being capable. And while I like her fiercely and would like to see more of her, the one thing about her I didn't like was the pining after the Doctor, so her manner of departure--getting out, returning to a family that needs her now in a way they never did before, and returning to her vocation after a little side trip (I would never buy her giving up medicine, as opposed to taking a couple of days off for some adventure; it really is her vocation)--was pretty satisfying.
* On a related note, I like that while the planet got a magical do-over, Martha and her family didn't.
* On another related note, there are no words to describe the depth and power of my full-body cringe when the Doctor got his floaty glow on and channeled the power of the human spirit to defeat the bad guys. I had to watch it through my hands while moaning incoherently. It was so awful, so far beyond cheesy, and so completely undercut Martha's previous awesomeness, because it was all in the service of creating this terrible "resolution" that second graders would sneer at for its cheap sentimentality and unbelievability. BLECH. It was the worst kind of emotional manipulation, poorly set up, ineffective, transparent, and nonsensical. YOU GET AN F, RUSSELL T. DAVIES.
* It was rather interesting to see Lucy Saxon, a year later, behaving like a broken doll, having looked into a void herself--the future, the end--and been driven mad by it. But there wasn't much done to connect the dots between what her relationship with the Master had been like before and what it had become, what about her led her to throw in with him and why it ended up destroying her in this particular way, and since that goes directly to her motivation for shooting the Master, that part didn't really work; it already had the cliche factor to overcome even without the confused motivation.
* I don't even know what to say about the fact that the thingies in the spheres were the end of the human race. I guess it makes about as much sense as Jack being the Face of Bo. (WHAT?!?) It feels like the two things should be connected, but I have no idea how. Humans are indominatable and also monstrous? You shouldn't try to prolong your life, even if you didn't mean to and had no control over it? Unnatural things are bad, except when they end up hanging out in a giant jar and delivering useful warnings? I don't know.
* The decision to turn the Doctor into a CGI creature for the bulk of the episode was mystifying, and a criminal waste of Tennant and Simm's chemistry.
* There were some continuing interesting contrasts between the Master and the Doctor, though--the Master erecting statues of himself everywhere, demanding recognition and reverence, the Doctor making himself known only as a last resort, preferring to work from the sidelines, and happy to be forgotten in the end; the Master ending himself in a final act of vengeance, the Doctor talking Martha and her mother down from vengeance, forgiving the Master (and Martha carrying on that value, forgiving the scientist who'd betrayed her). Unfortunately, though, the big death scene was so many toothmarks in the scenery at that point, after the glowing and the floating.
Yeah, that was really wierd.
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I had an awesome but very busy weekend. Saturday there was brunch with M. and Mrs. M. at the Petit Cafe in the Hotel Monaco, and then a trip to Japantown, where I bought a small-capacity rice cooker with a timer and something called fuzzy logic (my previous rice cooker cooks 11 cups, and no less than 3, and was a relic of a time when I lived with and cooked for far more people), and shiso and chirimenjyaku and nori and takuan, because my My Neighbor Totoro bento box with the chopstick holder in the lid arrived from Japan, and I needed to fill it with things from this cookbook, because I am basically going straight down the rabbit hole when it comes to obsessive lunch preparations. (My alternative, since I don't have a car at work, is the expensive and unhealthy fare of the on-site cafeteria; this is my flimsy but important justification.) Sunday was brunch at the hole-in-the-wall neighborhood crepe place with D. and the baby and the puppydog, and then a long walk in the canyon, where the puppydog did lots of fetch-playing and gamboling and frolicking with other dogs and was gratifyingly happy. And then there was assorted life crap, as there always is.
I'm not sure how widespread this is, but I have only been getting sporadic comment notifications from LJ; I think I've found most of the ones I missed on my own journal, since when I log in at work I see the My Journal page, but it's kind of disconcerting to know they've been going astray.
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy:
At the very beginning, I found McCarthy's use of sentence fragments distracting, but they soon became part of the novel's landscape, one more set of broken pieces. His ability to create a whole world from spare, telling details, to hone in on the practicalities that drive the larger emotional and thematic picture, made this novel a particularly upsetting read for me, because he does not concern himself with the why or the how of the situation these characters find themselves in, or even with their names; there is only their journey, and their interactions with each other, the things the man has to do to keep the boy safe, the way the world has narrowed down to the two of them. It is a book written in incredibly powerful and spare language, each word weighed out and used to full measure. The man makes an important distinction: they don't steal from or attack others, they forage and mind their own business, and that separates them from so much of the rest of the remnants; but it's a distinction the boy isn't satisfied with and picks at the edges of, because he's young and has seen less and still feels the impulse to help others, something the man has come to feel is a ruinous luxury. The divisions you erect between good and bad in such a world are incredibly flimsy. And hope is fragile; it becomes increasingly clear that the man doesn't have a plan once they hit the coast, that the journey has been its own goal, something for them to do, something for them to work for, and an unknown end was better than knowing what would have happened to them if they hadn't moved. Because the physical reality of the landscape is inexorable: everything is dead except for the people who are scraping up the last of the edible material, in whatever form, and slowly starving and eating each other. The journey keeps hope alive in the boy, and in the end, the boy and his hope were the only things the man had, and keeping those two things alive were his ultimate goal.
Which brings me to the end, which I didn't understand. Perhaps I'm just dense, or perhaps there is an elaborate religious parable at work that I don't have the background to grok, but once the man died and the boy made his peace with continuing on alone, where did the other man come from and what made him different from everyone else they'd encountered along the way (i.e. not trying to at minimum steal their food or more likely kill and eat them)? If he was a living manifestation of the boy's hope and what the man wanted for him, why did he only show up once the man had died? And why were the final few paragraphs suffused with such a note of optimism, when from what I can tell, there is no better place in this land, only an ongoing struggle to survive in the twilight of a dying world. There was something so wrenching about the physical description of the destruction; it didn't seem like there could possibly be a better place just down the road. It felt like, in the last few paragraphs, I had stepped abruptly into a different story.
