Doctor Who: Season Three concludes
Got together last night with markbourne, E, ironymaiden, and C to watch the last three episodes of Doctor Who season three, those being "Utopia," "The Sound of Drums," and "Last of the Time Lords." There are things I loved and things I loathed about each episode. Long, and lotsa notes here.
Utopia: I have a multitude of nits to pick with this episode; I'll get to those in a minute. But first I want to wallow in the goodness, to wit:
The return of Captain Jack! And it's the Jack we all know and love, not the weird, dark, tortured, undersexed Jack of Torchwood.
Derek Jacobi as the Master: Can anyone else ever play that role again after Jacobi's masterful (!) turn? It was a terrific, nuanced performance. It was hard for me to focus on anyone else for a while, until...
The Doctor and Captain Jack confront each other: I've been waiting for the Doctor to explain himself and his actions to Jack for two seasons now. That scene between the two of them while Jack's in the reactor room just kills me every time I watch it. With a door between them, the Doctor and Jack deal with emotions that are too deep to cope with face to face (shades of Kirk and Spock in The Wrath of Kahn). Both Tennant and Barrowman give brilliant performances. I love their chemistry together and wish that Jack was staying on Doctor Who rather than returning to Torchwood. The complete fan girl in me knows that this one scene is the stuff that slash is made of.
Use of the watch concept: This season hasn't had much in the way of links between episodes except for Saxon, so I was glad to see some nod to this season's continuity.
John Simm as The Master: These last minutes, as The Master takes control of the TARDIS, and rejoices in his youth and his clear advantage over the Doctor are just terrific.
The Doctor's reaction to the Master: "I'm asking you properly now..." The sound of desperation.
Whogasm: The sound of fans watching a villian return...
Screencap recap here.
What nits have I to pick? Good Lord, where to begin:
Why would the TARDIS end up in the exact place where the Master was hiding?
What exactly are the Futurekind, why are they called that, how did humanity evolve (or rather devolve) to that point?
How did the Master end up corporeal again, hiding at the end of time; wasn't he trapped in the Eye of Harmony? In the Doctor's TARDIS? (Explained in a later episode, sure, but even that logic there was suspect. Was he pulled out of the Eye of Harmony by remote control?)
And what exactly was the point of the Futurekind?
As wonderful as it is having Jack back, why is he important to this story, exactly? I mean, yeah, if the TARDIS was trying to shake him off, then he's the reason for the mess but still...
Gee, the Doctor was a chicken not to wait for Jack back on Game Station, and in fact he was kind of a bastard about it.
And why the urgency around lifting the ship off? The Futurekind obviously don't have a real way to stop the ship from blasting off, not really. And it's not like the last humans were on a timetable to get to Utopia in the first place. And what about the planet being the proper position in order to maximize fuel and engine efficiency on such a long trip?
And how does Jack know how to pull the warp cores or which buttons to push to help get the ship off the ground?
I could go on and on. It has been suggested to me that I shouldn't go looking for perfect sense in Doctor Who but how can I not at least hope for it in a season that included "Human Nature/The Family of Blood" and "Blink"? I don't think they're too high a standard to set for the series. In an ideal world, that's the sort of Doctor Who we should be getting more regularly.
But wait, there's more....
The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords
I'm commenting on these together because I saw them together and they're really two of a piece in my mind. After seeing them last night, I did a sweep of the LJ communities and some friends' journals for their comments, just to see what people thought. Seems like there's a split: some folks loved it, some folks hated it. With a few exceptions of fan-girl character love, and admiration for the actors, these episodes just made me really uncomfortable on behalf of the series and its stars.
On the one hand, there's something great about how the Doctor isn't ever being allowed to heal from the loss of the Time War. (Rule #1: Torture your protagonist. Davies certainly has that one down cold.) This is a guy who desperately needs a hug and lots of therapy. His clear desperation at being the last of his kind makes his willingness to partner up with the Time Lords' most notorious villain just poignant. That phone call between the two of them is great; the complexity in the relationship (with all the history behind them) is clear here, and just terrific. I want to wallow in it like the fan-girl I am.
But then we have The Aging of the Doctor and our heroes being made impotent. Jack's presence is irrelevant (except for the eye candy factor). The way "Last of the Time Lords" begins, with the Master rolling the Doctor around in a wheel chair, dancing: I was just embarrassed by it. It felt like Russel T Davies was almost making fun of Doctor Who; it felt juvenile rather than evil to me. The Master was suddenly a cartoon character. I hated it. And I hated the Doctor being shrunk into a CGI character with big, sad eyes. And I hated Martha Jones Walking the World and emerging from the water with model-perfect make-up, looking as though the last year hadn't aged or touched her in the least. (I liked her leaving the Doctor because she wasn't being noticed, but I would have been more satisfied if it had also been a matter of her having seen too much, having been too traumatized by some of it to be willing to continue.) I disliked how Davies turned the Doctor into Tinkerbell: if we all think hard enough, the Doctor will live! I hated hated hated his being turned into a Christ figure, from resurrection to forgiveness. I'm okay with Davies' "lonely god" theme, but I hated it being so ham-handedly managed here.
And I'm still on the fence about the Doctor's weeping over the Master's death. Yes, he's weeping (finally and, my God, it's been a long time coming) over the true extinction of the Time Lords. It's a needed catharsis. And certainly there's a tradition of a perverse sort of kinship and affection between mortal adversaries. But he's also inconsolable over (once again) the death of the most notorious criminal of his people. Tennant's performance just about crushed me in its honesty and intensity and I'll watch that scene again and again for his performance alone (he's too good for some of the material he's being given), but I'm really conflicted about the situation in which he was asked to expend it.
The toughest thing about all this is that I wanted to love these two episodes. The potential is obvious. But Russell T Davies just rushes his stories so much that the holes in the plots can't help but become visible. I feel as though if another hour or two had been given to this story to flesh out histories, to allow more subtlety and story building, it would have been a story I could have adored. All the emotion would have been better justified.
My overall reaction to "The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords" is that if I check my brain at the door, I love it. If I start thinking about it, it's crazymaking and disappointing. I think I may wallow in the moments I loved (the Doctor and Jack in their radiation room scene, the Doctor and the Master on the phone, and even the Doctor weeping over the Master just because, well, look at him!) and just sort of let the rest of it play in the background. Rumor has it that Davies may be leaving the show. I can't say I'll be sorry to see him go.
And so Martha Jones departs. Honestly, I'm not sorry to see her go. She was something of a cipher, frankly, and I don't think she was ever given a fair shake as a character, laboring in the shadow of Rose and being given this manufactured crush on the Doctor. She had so much potential because she was so different from Rose and she had her moments, but her potential was never allowed to fully manifest. I'm told we'll see her in several episodes of Torchwood next season. Could be ... interesting if the scripts improve.
As for Jack, well, I guess he's stuck in the 21 century on Earth, trapped in Torchwood. I don't know what to say about that except to express my disappointment that he apparently won't be returning to Doctor Who. I can only hope that if the Doctor stops in Cardiff for another pit stop, he'll make time for lunch with his favorite time agent and that we'll get to see it.
Utopia: I have a multitude of nits to pick with this episode; I'll get to those in a minute. But first I want to wallow in the goodness, to wit:
What nits have I to pick? Good Lord, where to begin:
I could go on and on. It has been suggested to me that I shouldn't go looking for perfect sense in Doctor Who but how can I not at least hope for it in a season that included "Human Nature/The Family of Blood" and "Blink"? I don't think they're too high a standard to set for the series. In an ideal world, that's the sort of Doctor Who we should be getting more regularly.
But wait, there's more....
The Sound of Drums and Last of the Time Lords
I'm commenting on these together because I saw them together and they're really two of a piece in my mind. After seeing them last night, I did a sweep of the LJ communities and some friends' journals for their comments, just to see what people thought. Seems like there's a split: some folks loved it, some folks hated it. With a few exceptions of fan-girl character love, and admiration for the actors, these episodes just made me really uncomfortable on behalf of the series and its stars.
On the one hand, there's something great about how the Doctor isn't ever being allowed to heal from the loss of the Time War. (Rule #1: Torture your protagonist. Davies certainly has that one down cold.) This is a guy who desperately needs a hug and lots of therapy. His clear desperation at being the last of his kind makes his willingness to partner up with the Time Lords' most notorious villain just poignant. That phone call between the two of them is great; the complexity in the relationship (with all the history behind them) is clear here, and just terrific. I want to wallow in it like the fan-girl I am.
But then we have The Aging of the Doctor and our heroes being made impotent. Jack's presence is irrelevant (except for the eye candy factor). The way "Last of the Time Lords" begins, with the Master rolling the Doctor around in a wheel chair, dancing: I was just embarrassed by it. It felt like Russel T Davies was almost making fun of Doctor Who; it felt juvenile rather than evil to me. The Master was suddenly a cartoon character. I hated it. And I hated the Doctor being shrunk into a CGI character with big, sad eyes. And I hated Martha Jones Walking the World and emerging from the water with model-perfect make-up, looking as though the last year hadn't aged or touched her in the least. (I liked her leaving the Doctor because she wasn't being noticed, but I would have been more satisfied if it had also been a matter of her having seen too much, having been too traumatized by some of it to be willing to continue.) I disliked how Davies turned the Doctor into Tinkerbell: if we all think hard enough, the Doctor will live! I hated hated hated his being turned into a Christ figure, from resurrection to forgiveness. I'm okay with Davies' "lonely god" theme, but I hated it being so ham-handedly managed here.
And I'm still on the fence about the Doctor's weeping over the Master's death. Yes, he's weeping (finally and, my God, it's been a long time coming) over the true extinction of the Time Lords. It's a needed catharsis. And certainly there's a tradition of a perverse sort of kinship and affection between mortal adversaries. But he's also inconsolable over (once again) the death of the most notorious criminal of his people. Tennant's performance just about crushed me in its honesty and intensity and I'll watch that scene again and again for his performance alone (he's too good for some of the material he's being given), but I'm really conflicted about the situation in which he was asked to expend it.
The toughest thing about all this is that I wanted to love these two episodes. The potential is obvious. But Russell T Davies just rushes his stories so much that the holes in the plots can't help but become visible. I feel as though if another hour or two had been given to this story to flesh out histories, to allow more subtlety and story building, it would have been a story I could have adored. All the emotion would have been better justified.
My overall reaction to "The Sound of Drums/Last of the Time Lords" is that if I check my brain at the door, I love it. If I start thinking about it, it's crazymaking and disappointing. I think I may wallow in the moments I loved (the Doctor and Jack in their radiation room scene, the Doctor and the Master on the phone, and even the Doctor weeping over the Master just because, well, look at him!) and just sort of let the rest of it play in the background. Rumor has it that Davies may be leaving the show. I can't say I'll be sorry to see him go.
And so Martha Jones departs. Honestly, I'm not sorry to see her go. She was something of a cipher, frankly, and I don't think she was ever given a fair shake as a character, laboring in the shadow of Rose and being given this manufactured crush on the Doctor. She had so much potential because she was so different from Rose and she had her moments, but her potential was never allowed to fully manifest. I'm told we'll see her in several episodes of Torchwood next season. Could be ... interesting if the scripts improve.
As for Jack, well, I guess he's stuck in the 21 century on Earth, trapped in Torchwood. I don't know what to say about that except to express my disappointment that he apparently won't be returning to Doctor Who. I can only hope that if the Doctor stops in Cardiff for another pit stop, he'll make time for lunch with his favorite time agent and that we'll get to see it.