[Doctor Who] 6.01 "The Impossible Astronaut"
I mostly forgot to do these for S4 and S5, so let's see if I can get back in the habit.
I don't really have enough thoughts yet to do an actual review with paragraphs, so let's have some bullet points:
- "In memory of Elisabeth Sladen." Lovely to see and yet broke my heart.
- Bit with Louis XVI: foreshadowing or just Moffat-style wacky hijinks?
- Loved the callback to "The Pandorica Opens": "She's doing it again. Dr. Song, sir. She's packing." Nice lampshade on the fact that for an incarcerated woman River Song sure spends a lot of time out of jail.
- Adele playing in an American diner -- still trying to decide how likely that would be. I can't say I've heard Adele on the Muzak anywhere I've been lately, but maybe the Muzak in the office lobby isn't representative.
- Still not digging the new credit sequence. The last one I really liked was S3 and all of them since then have just made me grumpy.
- Rory as series regular? Well, it makes sense, but can he grow a personality this year please? I get he's supposed to be the grounded, low-key counterweight to the Doctor, who is larger than life, and Amy, who is determined and assertive, but Rory mostly just blends into the wallpaper.
- Casting father and son as old and young versions of the same character must've just made the casting department go "WE ARE SO GEEEEENIUS."
- Killing the Doctor in the first ten minutes? Definitely not in Rusty-land anymore.
- Standing directly under the Doctor and loudly discussing the situation? That strikes me as perhaps not the best way to hide something from him.
- Now it's true I wasn't around during the Nixon era and I'm most familiar with the way he sounds from the Nixon tapes, which are terrible quality, but the guy they've got playing Nixon doesn't strike me as either sounding or looking particularly like Nixon. If anything he sounds like a British actor trying to Hugh Laurie his way through an American accent, but IMDB says the guy's American-born. Of course my ear may just be thrown off by Londoner Mark Sheppard and his equally gravelly American accent. I do have to give them points, though, for apparently learning their lesson from the accent disaster that was "The Daleks Take Manhattan" and finding British actors who can actually do plausible American accents. Maybe not fantastic ones, but definitely not the ear-melting awfulness that was Miranda Raison's attempt at an American accent.
- Another swipe at us Americans and our guns? Is it more funny in the UK? Me, I'm just tired of the cheap shots at how we're all violent and even our pets have guns and stuff.
- Again, chalk this up to me not having been there, but a black man on Richard Nixon's Secret Service detail, possibly even leading the detail? Wasn't Nixon, like, spectacularly racist? I mean, it's true that the civil rights movement may not have been at its most intense in 1969, but the King assassination would have happened only a year earlier, so it's not like America was all WOO HOO INTEGRATED SOCIETY NOW YAY! Maybe I'm just totally uninformed and the Secret Service was integrated, I'm just shooting my mouth off here, it just made me go "Wait. What?"
- River was so much less irritating this episode than she has been. One of my gripes about the character has been that River usually knows more about what's going on than she's willing to tell, and she's always seemed rather smug about having that knowledge -- "Spoilers!" Here, she's just as confused and off-base as everyone else is and is so much more likeable when she can't lord it over everyone that she knows what's going to happen.
- "Is that a Star Trek mask?" Heh.
- In a total surprise, for once we have a creepy creature who's not a) played by Paul Kasey b) voiced by Nick Briggs.
- "Brave heart, Canton!" Heh.
- So River confirms that basically her life is running back to front compared to how we reckon time, and she says she first met the Doctor "a long, long time ago" when she was a "young girl." Interesting. Still very Time-Traveler's Wife, but interesting. It also makes me wonder precisely how long "a long time" is. Does she mean merely that she met the Doctor as a child and has known him for 40 years? Or does she mean that she first met him far, far in the future, a long ways from 1969? Or is River perhaps far, far older than she appears?
- If she turns out to be a Time Lord though I'm throwing a brick through Moffat's window.
- As has been astutely pointed out by others, that's the ship from "The Lodger", or at least it looks a hell of a lot like it.
- Wanting to get married but having it be a crime -- if this were Rusty I'd say for sure it's because he wanted to marry a man but with this being the Moff, 50/50 split with it being that he wanted to marry a black woman, which yes, would have been a crime in some places.
- Odds on Amy actually being pregnant? It's been, in the Who timeline, two months since we've seen Amy and Rory last so there's definitely time for her to have gotten knocked up and to have realized she's knocked up. And the Doctor quipped she'd gained some weight. On the other hand, River had the same "gotta hurl" reaction to the Silent and unless this is turning into Father of the Bride, she's probably not preggo. Personally, I think it's just Amy putting the feeling that she has to tell the Doctor something together with the fact that she's constantly nauseated and coming up pregnant and we'll find out next episode that there isn't actually a droplet in the Pond. Would it be ballsy actually giving her a wee time tot? Sure it would. It's also ground Torchwood covered with Gwen and for cripes' sake I hope Moffat has better things to do than rip off freakin' Torchwood. [edit: Apparently the Confidential confirmed she's actually up the duff, so, uh, that ought to be interesting. I haven't seen it yet so I'm going by the Wikipedia cite.]
Overall, it was a solid episode, even if it had to necessarily spend more time on setup than answers. Definitely a big change from the softball first episodes of the Rusty era. It's probably not my favorite of the season openers (that tends to vacillate between "Partners in Time", mostly because of the Adipose, and "Smith and Jones") but that's okay, it kept me hooked and now I don't know how I'm going to last the week until "Day of the Moon."
Next week: Well, the trailer blows a couple of the cliffhangers (Creepy Astronaut Girl lives and so does Rory) but damn, next week has a lot of questions to answer. Why'd the future Doctor let Creepy Astronaut kill him? How the hell did Creepy Astronaut get to Utah? What's with the creepy hash marks all over everyone? How long has the Doctor been in government custody? Is Amy actually pregnant? What's with the Silence? ARGH I MAY EXPLODE WITH ANTICIPATION.
Specs count: Different Doctor now :-(
Hat count: 1
Things that are cool: Bow ties, fezzes, Stetsons
I don't really have enough thoughts yet to do an actual review with paragraphs, so let's have some bullet points:
- "In memory of Elisabeth Sladen." Lovely to see and yet broke my heart.
- Bit with Louis XVI: foreshadowing or just Moffat-style wacky hijinks?
- Loved the callback to "The Pandorica Opens": "She's doing it again. Dr. Song, sir. She's packing." Nice lampshade on the fact that for an incarcerated woman River Song sure spends a lot of time out of jail.
- Adele playing in an American diner -- still trying to decide how likely that would be. I can't say I've heard Adele on the Muzak anywhere I've been lately, but maybe the Muzak in the office lobby isn't representative.
- Still not digging the new credit sequence. The last one I really liked was S3 and all of them since then have just made me grumpy.
- Rory as series regular? Well, it makes sense, but can he grow a personality this year please? I get he's supposed to be the grounded, low-key counterweight to the Doctor, who is larger than life, and Amy, who is determined and assertive, but Rory mostly just blends into the wallpaper.
- Casting father and son as old and young versions of the same character must've just made the casting department go "WE ARE SO GEEEEENIUS."
- Killing the Doctor in the first ten minutes? Definitely not in Rusty-land anymore.
- Standing directly under the Doctor and loudly discussing the situation? That strikes me as perhaps not the best way to hide something from him.
- Now it's true I wasn't around during the Nixon era and I'm most familiar with the way he sounds from the Nixon tapes, which are terrible quality, but the guy they've got playing Nixon doesn't strike me as either sounding or looking particularly like Nixon. If anything he sounds like a British actor trying to Hugh Laurie his way through an American accent, but IMDB says the guy's American-born. Of course my ear may just be thrown off by Londoner Mark Sheppard and his equally gravelly American accent. I do have to give them points, though, for apparently learning their lesson from the accent disaster that was "The Daleks Take Manhattan" and finding British actors who can actually do plausible American accents. Maybe not fantastic ones, but definitely not the ear-melting awfulness that was Miranda Raison's attempt at an American accent.
- Another swipe at us Americans and our guns? Is it more funny in the UK? Me, I'm just tired of the cheap shots at how we're all violent and even our pets have guns and stuff.
- Again, chalk this up to me not having been there, but a black man on Richard Nixon's Secret Service detail, possibly even leading the detail? Wasn't Nixon, like, spectacularly racist? I mean, it's true that the civil rights movement may not have been at its most intense in 1969, but the King assassination would have happened only a year earlier, so it's not like America was all WOO HOO INTEGRATED SOCIETY NOW YAY! Maybe I'm just totally uninformed and the Secret Service was integrated, I'm just shooting my mouth off here, it just made me go "Wait. What?"
- River was so much less irritating this episode than she has been. One of my gripes about the character has been that River usually knows more about what's going on than she's willing to tell, and she's always seemed rather smug about having that knowledge -- "Spoilers!" Here, she's just as confused and off-base as everyone else is and is so much more likeable when she can't lord it over everyone that she knows what's going to happen.
- "Is that a Star Trek mask?" Heh.
- In a total surprise, for once we have a creepy creature who's not a) played by Paul Kasey b) voiced by Nick Briggs.
- "Brave heart, Canton!" Heh.
- So River confirms that basically her life is running back to front compared to how we reckon time, and she says she first met the Doctor "a long, long time ago" when she was a "young girl." Interesting. Still very Time-Traveler's Wife, but interesting. It also makes me wonder precisely how long "a long time" is. Does she mean merely that she met the Doctor as a child and has known him for 40 years? Or does she mean that she first met him far, far in the future, a long ways from 1969? Or is River perhaps far, far older than she appears?
- If she turns out to be a Time Lord though I'm throwing a brick through Moffat's window.
- As has been astutely pointed out by others, that's the ship from "The Lodger", or at least it looks a hell of a lot like it.
- Wanting to get married but having it be a crime -- if this were Rusty I'd say for sure it's because he wanted to marry a man but with this being the Moff, 50/50 split with it being that he wanted to marry a black woman, which yes, would have been a crime in some places.
- Odds on Amy actually being pregnant? It's been, in the Who timeline, two months since we've seen Amy and Rory last so there's definitely time for her to have gotten knocked up and to have realized she's knocked up. And the Doctor quipped she'd gained some weight. On the other hand, River had the same "gotta hurl" reaction to the Silent and unless this is turning into Father of the Bride, she's probably not preggo. Personally, I think it's just Amy putting the feeling that she has to tell the Doctor something together with the fact that she's constantly nauseated and coming up pregnant and we'll find out next episode that there isn't actually a droplet in the Pond. Would it be ballsy actually giving her a wee time tot? Sure it would. It's also ground Torchwood covered with Gwen and for cripes' sake I hope Moffat has better things to do than rip off freakin' Torchwood. [edit: Apparently the Confidential confirmed she's actually up the duff, so, uh, that ought to be interesting. I haven't seen it yet so I'm going by the Wikipedia cite.]
Overall, it was a solid episode, even if it had to necessarily spend more time on setup than answers. Definitely a big change from the softball first episodes of the Rusty era. It's probably not my favorite of the season openers (that tends to vacillate between "Partners in Time", mostly because of the Adipose, and "Smith and Jones") but that's okay, it kept me hooked and now I don't know how I'm going to last the week until "Day of the Moon."
Next week: Well, the trailer blows a couple of the cliffhangers (Creepy Astronaut Girl lives and so does Rory) but damn, next week has a lot of questions to answer. Why'd the future Doctor let Creepy Astronaut kill him? How the hell did Creepy Astronaut get to Utah? What's with the creepy hash marks all over everyone? How long has the Doctor been in government custody? Is Amy actually pregnant? What's with the Silence? ARGH I MAY EXPLODE WITH ANTICIPATION.
Specs count: Different Doctor now :-(
Hat count: 1
Things that are cool: Bow ties, fezzes, Stetsons