(no subject)
More procrastinating, since my Russian teacher is also sick and cancelled tomorrow's lesson. So I finally-and after being spoiled for more or less every single plot twist-watched the last two DW S5 episodes, but (unsurprisingly, I guess) they didn't change my opinion about S5 much. I guess I'm finding myself in the position of all the people who complained about RTD over the last years now, but for reasons that I don't really care about enough to pick apart, SM's writing just doesn't click with my brain, and it's probably best to leave it at that and maybe come back when the production team changes again.
OTOH, there's still more than half a season of Dollhouse that I never got around to watch on my HD since last year. And a couple of unwatched Caprica episodes, I think. *sigh* And a DVD with some kind of Russian soap opera I should maybe return sometimes soonish.
OT3rdH, I at least finally managed to watch the Casanova miniseries yesterday evening. I kept putting it off, because, well, it's Casanova, I'm mostly asexual, is there really a point to watching it? But I'm glad I did, because I ended up enjoying it a lot, especially once I managed to mentally disentangle DT and the Doctor. A longish while ago I wrote about my frustration with rewatching Victor/Victoria and actually noticing that he does know she's a woman before he kisses her, so I really loved the reworking of that story.
It's also rather fascinating how themes both from Casanova as well as The Second Coming turn up again in DW and TW and are developed further. There's the 'running' motif from Casanova in the Doctor's arc ('Still running?' 'And the journey took over in the end. [...] I had this friend, and he died. I never even stopped. Kept going.'), the theme of safety vs. adventure, and the cost of either choice, and the ambiguity that spans a wide gulf between a character's dark and bright side. There's the death/surviving motif in the Doctor and Jack's stories ('All those women... It's a list of the dead now. As I live on. As a punishment from God. I refuse to believe in an afterlife, so he refuses to let me die.' 'Dead. All of them, dead. Executed. Every single person I knew in that city is dead.' 'He just caught a cold. I survived bullets and fevers and curses, he caught a cold and was dead in six days.'), as well as the image/lying/pretending/making it up as he goes along motif. The religious theme as well as the power theme in the Ten's arc and the whole debate about free will and responsibility go back to The Second Coming, and death plays as crucial a part there as it does at the end of Ten's story. Judith convinces the son of God to kill himself to give humanity freedom, and Adelaide kills herself in an attempt to reclaim the freedom the Doctor is in the process of taking away from mankind.
I really do love this kind of stuff. Which is actually why I don't entirely subscribe to the death of the author theory. On some level of course I do, because all art happens at least partly on a subconscious level and it simply makes more sense to prioritise the text, but I'm not ready to completely dismiss the author either.
OTOH, there's still more than half a season of Dollhouse that I never got around to watch on my HD since last year. And a couple of unwatched Caprica episodes, I think. *sigh* And a DVD with some kind of Russian soap opera I should maybe return sometimes soonish.
OT3rdH, I at least finally managed to watch the Casanova miniseries yesterday evening. I kept putting it off, because, well, it's Casanova, I'm mostly asexual, is there really a point to watching it? But I'm glad I did, because I ended up enjoying it a lot, especially once I managed to mentally disentangle DT and the Doctor. A longish while ago I wrote about my frustration with rewatching Victor/Victoria and actually noticing that he does know she's a woman before he kisses her, so I really loved the reworking of that story.
It's also rather fascinating how themes both from Casanova as well as The Second Coming turn up again in DW and TW and are developed further. There's the 'running' motif from Casanova in the Doctor's arc ('Still running?' 'And the journey took over in the end. [...] I had this friend, and he died. I never even stopped. Kept going.'), the theme of safety vs. adventure, and the cost of either choice, and the ambiguity that spans a wide gulf between a character's dark and bright side. There's the death/surviving motif in the Doctor and Jack's stories ('All those women... It's a list of the dead now. As I live on. As a punishment from God. I refuse to believe in an afterlife, so he refuses to let me die.' 'Dead. All of them, dead. Executed. Every single person I knew in that city is dead.' 'He just caught a cold. I survived bullets and fevers and curses, he caught a cold and was dead in six days.'), as well as the image/lying/pretending/making it up as he goes along motif. The religious theme as well as the power theme in the Ten's arc and the whole debate about free will and responsibility go back to The Second Coming, and death plays as crucial a part there as it does at the end of Ten's story. Judith convinces the son of God to kill himself to give humanity freedom, and Adelaide kills herself in an attempt to reclaim the freedom the Doctor is in the process of taking away from mankind.
I really do love this kind of stuff. Which is actually why I don't entirely subscribe to the death of the author theory. On some level of course I do, because all art happens at least partly on a subconscious level and it simply makes more sense to prioritise the text, but I'm not ready to completely dismiss the author either.