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[sebastienne]

Tomorrow I knuckle down and Get Some Work Done, but today I've a few reflections on the stuff I've been chilling out & watching since the end of term:

Doctor Who

It's not Matt Smith's fault. He's a great actor who's done some stellar work on the show; but because of the scripts he's been given, he'll be remembered most for being a creep. For

Comments

[parrot_knight]

I hope Capaldi marks a break with all this. Whatever Moffat intends, too many people are being offended. I missed some of the offending physical actions, but the nudity joke was cheap and unnecessarily protracted.

[sebastienne]

I hope the same. Maybe Capaldi's long history as a fan will mean that - even if he can't stop Moffat writing the OOC lines - he'll bring something to the delivery that will make this character feel like the Doctor again.

[parrot_knight]

Moffat has indicated that he wants to change the tone and content of the programme again, so there will be a relaunch to some degree anyway; but Peter Capaldi is bound to have a different relationship with the role of the Doctor to Matt Smith, given his longer professional and antique fan backgrounds, so I have hopes of positive developments.

I'm quite torn by The Time of the Doctor - a lot of people whose views I respect love it, but an equal number loathe it for good reasons. I think the underlying idea was very strong, but I think it was defeated by the execution. I lean towards the belief that River was to be in charge of the papal mainframe, as Alex Kingston provides the voice for it in A Good Man Goes to War, but Kingston was committed elsewhere; and goodness knows what nonsense Moffat has to deal with from the various forces at the BBC with an interest in the show. I don't know if you have seen the deleted scene which BBC America released, but given it involved another badly handled physicality/nakedness gag I'm glad it went.

[sebastienne]

Ah, that River should have been in charge of the mainframe does make a lot of sense; as it was, Tasha Lem was so River-like that at first I wondered if she was a regeneration of the character (Lem being Mel backwards, after all), and later on just rolled my eyes at the homogeneity of Moffat's women, feisty and flirty and immediately interested in seducing the Doctor.

I felt that all the good ideas in The Time of the Doctor were thrown away - Time Lords granting regenerations, the truth field, the loose ends of the 2010 plot - while huge swathes of the episode were wasted on nothing-much (nudity gags and "the man who stayed for Christmas

[sharaz_jek]

Whatever happened to Space Gandalf?

[sebastienne]

I wish I knew.

(That's a really good description, actually, because at first glance Gandalf is kindly and benevolent but then there are all these undercurrents of manipulation and being Not Quite Human that, say, Seventh always gave off.)

[marrog]

I read the book of TtV before I saw the show and I think that in retrospect it might have been better the other way 'round (though then I'd've had Nan's voice in my head, eek), but yeah, it was bawdy and silly and ridiculous and panto-ish and I found the book to be not that at all, and it never quite sat with me as an adaptation, even though I think (a) it's really quite good and (b) they probably couldn't have filmed it any other way at the time (and (c) Anna-fucking-Chancellor - literally, who at the time was Caroline Bingley to me so OMG the sudden head-canon with Lizzy...). I gelled much more with Fingersmith when that was made. It was bleak and Dickensian and I felt like the director had read the book looking through MY eyes, and also in spite of being so much less graphic than TtV I found it a helluvalot sexier, like x10, because ANGST and FACES and DESPERATION

[sebastienne]

Fingersmith is by far my favourite of the books, but the adaptation isn't as special to me as TtV - probably because it came just that little bit later and so wasn't as formative.

And, yes, I saw TtV before reading it, and I do think it's the right way round. (If only because I generally don't have a very strong visual imagination, and that's a book that *definitely* benefits from strong mental images...)

The only major mis-step I think the adaptation makes is to have Florence be clueless about the existence of queer women's subculture, while Nan knows all about it; it really really should be the other way around.