season wrap-up
Cut just in case of very mild spoilers:
I cannot seem to stop flailing internally. Oh, show. My beautiful, brilliant, mad, ridiculous show. Doctor Who and I don't have a long history; I didn't watch it growing up, and even now I've still only seen one classic serial (though I'm working on that. just very slowly). So in some abstract way, I am grateful to Russell T. Davies for rebooting the show, because I wouldn't have had it otherwise, and I wouldn't have had all the bits that I loved about it under his tenure.
But the show this season has just felt like my show again: what I wanted it to be, free from a Doctor who is casually callous even toward the people he travels with; from the idea that the Doctor is the center of the universe and that he believes it, too; and from the idea that the only story worth telling is one that is tragic, regardless of how much you have to disregard or deform to get it to that point. It's felt like life and magic again, this season, not just noise. The Big Bang, not The Sound of Drums.
I love love love it: brave little Amelia in her red boots, first ready for the stars and then always knowing they were real; Amy Pond, far less grownup than she thinks she is, learning how to hope and trust; steady, patient Rory, who has always been a hero in his heart, even if he didn't know it. I love Karen Gillan's face and Matt Smith's strangely elegant gestures and Arthur Darvill's deadpan. And the Doctor--mad and distracted and sometimes very scary, short-tempered and oblivious and tender, who no longer wears his loneliness like armor but lets it, instead, soften his heart. So much quicker to cry than to rage, this Doctor; so much easier for him to connect to humans despite how much worse he is at playing one.
And the show itself makes me laugh out loud and want to cry, sometimes in the same scene; it goes from being utterly absurd to being utterly true in a way that's a little bit breathtaking (and envy-making, as well). Every episode hasn't been amazing ("Victory of the Daleks" is probably my personal low point). But oh, I have loved the ride.
I cannot seem to stop flailing internally. Oh, show. My beautiful, brilliant, mad, ridiculous show. Doctor Who and I don't have a long history; I didn't watch it growing up, and even now I've still only seen one classic serial (though I'm working on that. just very slowly). So in some abstract way, I am grateful to Russell T. Davies for rebooting the show, because I wouldn't have had it otherwise, and I wouldn't have had all the bits that I loved about it under his tenure.
But the show this season has just felt like my show again: what I wanted it to be, free from a Doctor who is casually callous even toward the people he travels with; from the idea that the Doctor is the center of the universe and that he believes it, too; and from the idea that the only story worth telling is one that is tragic, regardless of how much you have to disregard or deform to get it to that point. It's felt like life and magic again, this season, not just noise. The Big Bang, not The Sound of Drums.
I love love love it: brave little Amelia in her red boots, first ready for the stars and then always knowing they were real; Amy Pond, far less grownup than she thinks she is, learning how to hope and trust; steady, patient Rory, who has always been a hero in his heart, even if he didn't know it. I love Karen Gillan's face and Matt Smith's strangely elegant gestures and Arthur Darvill's deadpan. And the Doctor--mad and distracted and sometimes very scary, short-tempered and oblivious and tender, who no longer wears his loneliness like armor but lets it, instead, soften his heart. So much quicker to cry than to rage, this Doctor; so much easier for him to connect to humans despite how much worse he is at playing one.
And the show itself makes me laugh out loud and want to cry, sometimes in the same scene; it goes from being utterly absurd to being utterly true in a way that's a little bit breathtaking (and envy-making, as well). Every episode hasn't been amazing ("Victory of the Daleks" is probably my personal low point). But oh, I have loved the ride.