Xmas Who... and raunchy hoky-cokies!
Well, they certainly came up with the pretties this year... The Next Doctor was absolutely gorgeous (the episode, not David Morrisey, who quite frankly wound me up so much in Sense & Sensibility that I pretty much couldn't stand him after that). It had the usual RTD complete lack of regard for anything like logic or plot, but somebody had seriously been at the steampunk before they wrote this...
There was every steampunk convention you could think of chucked in, dripping in Victoriana and clockwork gears (although not quite as much as The Girl in the Fireplace) and Dervla Kirwan's villainess - Fabulousness.
Doing the usual RTD thing though, it was a case of rushing through all the boring plot building bits to get to the good stuff. And the good stuff was seriously meaty - the visuals were amazing, and the grand plot reveals were pretty damn good - but I couldn't shake the feeling that it was slightly.. I don't know - all style and no substance, maybe.
Certainly the most beautiful and visually impressive Christmas episode they've ever done - not up there with The Christmas Invasion in terms of script, or character or plotting (this script was never really going to come up with anything on the level of the Lion King one-liner from Invasion) and maybe not quite as satisfying as last year's - but with just enough pathos to ground it. But a plot this convoluted needed a two-parter to really play it out properly, and this ran by with blink-and-you-missed-it haste (in the hope that you don't see the cracks, and a cute shout-out to Blink. And Human Nature!).
But, did I mention the gorgeous already? And even though slashfic does absolutely nothing for me, this was playing up to the doctor/'doctor' pairing to the point where even I noticed it... Gawd, it was like watching that last ep of Merlin again.
On to Strictly's xmas ep now, complete with predictably ridiculous scoring and Brucie's introduction of, er, Rachel and Vincent's theoretical raunchy Hoky-Coky, complete with demonstration. Eek!
And, yay, today has been better than expected... wonders wil never cease. For which I'm grateful.