(no subject)
Finally watched it.
I liked the beginning. The Doctor exploring Mars instead of Earth; the classic monstrous-peril-in-sealed-environment plot, spiced by the station's frontier-in-space feel, where personal conflicts take a distant backseat to everyday issues of survival; the interesting makeup for the water zombies (I'd expected people to splash into dissolution, but that didn't happen); and especially Adelaide Brooks: fantastic acting and a truly memorable character. For an episode with water spraying everywhere, there was none of the frat-house squick humor or body-image issues that I'd come to expect from RTD, and the Doctor's PAAAAAAAAAIN and how he's SO TERRIBLY SORRY about knowing what's going to happen and being helpless to prevent it was so predictable, given his previous record, that I kind of tuned most of that out. Right up to the shuttle explosion, it was a Pretty Good If Standard-Issue Episode.
And then the Doctor's PTSD manifested and he went haywire.
Shouty!Tennant... well, it happens. I ignore it and pretend his dialog was less corny and his acting less manic (I'm a Sixth Doctor fan, so when I say a character's gone over the top, I really mean it). Most of the rest of the episode consisted of "oh hay I read that fanfic before, only it had Rose in it*".
But I'm less upset about it than I thought I'd be. Why? Because at the end, he finally DOES get a clue.
It took the Master eleven regenerations (if you buy the theory that he was also the War Chief) to get where the Doctor is now. Even their vocabularies -- being victorious, being careless of the "little people", forcing Time to "obey" him -- are synchronizing. This would bother me more if it was being presented as a valid direction for the Doctor to go. But we guessed this could come since all the talk about each regeneration getting more and more unstable. And he was wrong, and he knows it, and there's the prospect of more Master interaction to hammer it home, so there's hope.
Mind, the speed-of-plot in this story was awful. WHY didn't the Doctor think of evacuating everyone to a South Sea island in the 1500s? *goes off to cry about Adelaide*
*I like Rose, really, especially intrepid first-season still-has-her-own-personality Rose, but the thousands of OOC "an den she fixes teh poor broken Doktor bekus she's teh only wun dat he can luuuv an dey neeeeeeed each uvver 4evaaaa" stories make me headdesk.
I liked the beginning. The Doctor exploring Mars instead of Earth; the classic monstrous-peril-in-sealed-environment plot, spiced by the station's frontier-in-space feel, where personal conflicts take a distant backseat to everyday issues of survival; the interesting makeup for the water zombies (I'd expected people to splash into dissolution, but that didn't happen); and especially Adelaide Brooks: fantastic acting and a truly memorable character. For an episode with water spraying everywhere, there was none of the frat-house squick humor or body-image issues that I'd come to expect from RTD, and the Doctor's PAAAAAAAAAIN and how he's SO TERRIBLY SORRY about knowing what's going to happen and being helpless to prevent it was so predictable, given his previous record, that I kind of tuned most of that out. Right up to the shuttle explosion, it was a Pretty Good If Standard-Issue Episode.
And then the Doctor's PTSD manifested and he went haywire.
Shouty!Tennant... well, it happens. I ignore it and pretend his dialog was less corny and his acting less manic (I'm a Sixth Doctor fan, so when I say a character's gone over the top, I really mean it). Most of the rest of the episode consisted of "oh hay I read that fanfic before, only it had Rose in it*".
But I'm less upset about it than I thought I'd be. Why? Because at the end, he finally DOES get a clue.
It took the Master eleven regenerations (if you buy the theory that he was also the War Chief) to get where the Doctor is now. Even their vocabularies -- being victorious, being careless of the "little people", forcing Time to "obey" him -- are synchronizing. This would bother me more if it was being presented as a valid direction for the Doctor to go. But we guessed this could come since all the talk about each regeneration getting more and more unstable. And he was wrong, and he knows it, and there's the prospect of more Master interaction to hammer it home, so there's hope.
Mind, the speed-of-plot in this story was awful. WHY didn't the Doctor think of evacuating everyone to a South Sea island in the 1500s? *goes off to cry about Adelaide*
*I like Rose, really, especially intrepid first-season still-has-her-own-personality Rose, but the thousands of OOC "an den she fixes teh poor broken Doktor bekus she's teh only wun dat he can luuuv an dey neeeeeeed each uvver 4evaaaa" stories make me headdesk.