Spoiler warning: End of Days
Well, I still think it's all pish-tosh, but then, I'm still trying to get my head past the horror of Ep 12.
RTD copying Cowlip is just so, so wrong. And this isn't even good copying, because it doesn't have any resonance like the 'original'. (Horrifying thought: do you think RanDon could be writing for him as Chris and Christina?)
Anyway, trying to move past that...
This episode appears to establish that it's the Doctor who (hee!) Jack truly yearns after ("take my hand/I'm a stranger in Paradise" - sorry), whereas I thought RTD had him evenly positioned between DW and Rose, or even in love with the pair of them, as a pair, if you know what I mean. It was Rose who saved Jack, after all. I know we've lost Rose, but I'd have thought he could be a help to the Doctor in the richly satisfying crying-into-our-beer-over-her department.
Still scratching my head over poor old Estelle, around whom Jack's life revolved in 1941, but apparently only for five minutes. Did someone hit RTD on the head the week "Small Worlds" was produced, or was he just knocked out by its pong?
I thought the idea of the splinters in the rift, with the people and diseases wandering through from across time, was a fantastic one and should have been explored over a double-episode, at least. I'd have loved to see RTD himself deal with it. Instead, as usual with this stupid show, it just became all about the not-very-interesting characters and their inability to see beyond their boring lives. It's completely missing the political level in Dr Who, wherein the context and future of humanity is always a paramount concern. (BTW, this episode had the same impetus as the start of "Army of Ghosts" - the forward energy was coming from people wanting to reclaim people they'd lost.)
There were fifty million individual things that annoyed me, among them Jack saying "blah blah blah you people and your superstition" and then the earth being stalked by the Devil (oh, have people noted that Bilis is Sibil [sic] backwards?), and Owen, in the opening scene, saying, "Well, are we going to sit crying into our lattes or do something?" and then, almost immediately, "This is a rift in time! You can't fix that!" And John Barrowman wasn't even any good at saying the line about the exuberant Roman soldier. Has he forgotten how to be gay???
In the end, I felt it wasn't so much that the Doctor snatched Jack back as that RTD thought OMG you poor dear I've got to get you out of there and back into a proper show.
RTD copying Cowlip is just so, so wrong. And this isn't even good copying, because it doesn't have any resonance like the 'original'. (Horrifying thought: do you think RanDon could be writing for him as Chris and Christina?)
Anyway, trying to move past that...
This episode appears to establish that it's the Doctor who (hee!) Jack truly yearns after ("take my hand/I'm a stranger in Paradise" - sorry), whereas I thought RTD had him evenly positioned between DW and Rose, or even in love with the pair of them, as a pair, if you know what I mean. It was Rose who saved Jack, after all. I know we've lost Rose, but I'd have thought he could be a help to the Doctor in the richly satisfying crying-into-our-beer-over-her department.
Still scratching my head over poor old Estelle, around whom Jack's life revolved in 1941, but apparently only for five minutes. Did someone hit RTD on the head the week "Small Worlds" was produced, or was he just knocked out by its pong?
I thought the idea of the splinters in the rift, with the people and diseases wandering through from across time, was a fantastic one and should have been explored over a double-episode, at least. I'd have loved to see RTD himself deal with it. Instead, as usual with this stupid show, it just became all about the not-very-interesting characters and their inability to see beyond their boring lives. It's completely missing the political level in Dr Who, wherein the context and future of humanity is always a paramount concern. (BTW, this episode had the same impetus as the start of "Army of Ghosts" - the forward energy was coming from people wanting to reclaim people they'd lost.)
There were fifty million individual things that annoyed me, among them Jack saying "blah blah blah you people and your superstition" and then the earth being stalked by the Devil (oh, have people noted that Bilis is Sibil [sic] backwards?), and Owen, in the opening scene, saying, "Well, are we going to sit crying into our lattes or do something?" and then, almost immediately, "This is a rift in time! You can't fix that!" And John Barrowman wasn't even any good at saying the line about the exuberant Roman soldier. Has he forgotten how to be gay???
In the end, I felt it wasn't so much that the Doctor snatched Jack back as that RTD thought OMG you poor dear I've got to get you out of there and back into a proper show.