Spring Break TV: Doctor Who

[thepresidentrix]

Funny story: during my Spring Break, I killed my dvd player with my mind. It was just a cheap little dvd player from Target, probably about a year and a half to two years old, and one afternoon I made the fatal mistake of looking at it and thinking, 'Huh, it's been a while since I had a dvd player break down on me.' And the very next day, my dvd

Comments

[isilweth]

Your /strike is mistagged. I cannot read this and now I am sad. :(

[thepresidentrix]

Fixed! (Methinks...) Not the first time I've made that particular mistake, either. I usually double-check my entries after posting them, but lj's server has been dropping me again and again for the past hour or more. WHAT IS WRONG WITH LJ RIGHT NOW?

[isilweth]

Thanks!

I don't know what's up with LJ. I can't read my Inbox and it is frustrating...

but now I can read your post! :D Yay!

[isilweth]

Oh, I LOVE Series Three Martha - not so much the Martha after series three, but Companion!Martha was wonderful! She's my favorite companion.

Also, yay for not particularly wanting a romantic relationship between The Doctor and his companions. Sometimes, it feels so lonely to have that opinion.

Also, breaking DVD players with your mind is an awesome super-power to have. :)

[litlover12]

"I am become Death, destroyer of portable DVD players."

(Adapted from "Mystery Science Theater 3000")

Regarding Neal, I can see why the escape wasn't sexy. Wheelbarrows are inherently unsexy, even if Neal Caffrey is in them.

[thepresidentrix]

True! But the sad part was: the wheelbarrow, while unsexy, was still the sexiest part. 'Cause I never got to see Neal at all after that, just sit at home and fret about answering the guy with the trucker hat's questions!

We could've had an adventure, but instead he was too busy being unconscious. What a waste of a perfectly good Neal Caffrey, brain!

[thepresidentrix]

It's actually kind of a pet-peeve of mine that a tv relationship has to have at least the potential to be sexualized in order to be interesting. (Seems that way in fandom, at least). I mean, romance and sexuality are a big part of human relationships, but hardly the only part! I don't object to romance and sexuality in the slightest, I just get bored of seeing all that, only that, all the time. If they made tv just for me, they'd go out of their way to write shows that explore all kinds of different bonds between people, founded on very different criteria in each case.

Sadly, I don't think I can break other people's dvd players with my hubris. Otherwise, I'd make a list of Evil Villains and start working on their dvd players *right now.*

[fadeintodawn]

Season 3 is probably my favorite, too. Martha is awesome and has so much dignity. Blink is possibly my favorite episode ever.

Donna is completely wonderful, too.

[thepresidentrix]

Despite how highly recommended it came, I was really surprised at how much I loved Blink! Everybody said, 'It's this amazing episode, but the Doctor isn't in it much.' And I was kind of like, 'Well, whyyyy would I want to see that?'

But he *is* kind of in it a lot, in a way, and what's there is so perfectly *him.* Plus, Sally Sparrow is totally wonderful. You bond with her so completely in such a very short time. Even her brief flirtation with the cute young cop really seems like the start of something special - and the plot rather hinges on it, too.

The Weeping Angels are the most amazing villains EVAR. Killing you with Time! Assassins who kill you by letting you live out your life - happily, even! Insane genius!

commenting solely to say

[tempestsarekind]

I know! They "zap you into the past and let you live to death." Oh, Moffat. ILU.

Also, "It goes ding when there's stuff." *g*

[tempestsarekind]

(I responded to your other comment before I saw you'd written this! yay!)

Well, you already know how I feel about Martha--and if you didn't, looking at my icons would probably tell you. :) But, yes. Martha thinks first and foremost, she figures things out, and I love, love, love her for that. As for the whole "unrequited" thing: just what you say. I'd never thought to put her in the same category as Elinor Dashwood, but I should have done, because that's exactly what I admire about Elinor, too. I love that Martha loves the Doctor--to bits, as she says--but she can put that aside and do what needs to be done, and then stand up for herself and "get out." There are two major moments when she puts her foot down: "never really just a passenger" (The Lazarus Experiment), and the season's end, and--there's a lot of talk about Martha as a pushover type, because she has to endure so much, and because of her family, but she knows where her boundaries are, and that's as far as she'll go. I think I fell *completely* in love with Martha at the

[thepresidentrix]

The more I saw of Martha, the more I just CAN'T FIGURE OUT the Martha-haters. CAN'T FIGURE OUT! Because she baaarely brings up the fact that she's in love with the Doctor, which is hardly what you'd call *pining.* Not in any outwardly annoying way, anyway. And she's bright and cheerful and pleasant to be around. And she accomplishes all these major heroic acts on the Doctor's behalf. What's not to love??? I ask you

[tempestsarekind]

Martha-haters make no sense to me, either. As you say, not loving her is fine, not every character pings with people in the same way, but... My guess is that a lot of the most rabid Martha-haters were either ardent Rose fans of a sort that were very OTP about Ten/Rose (in which case any mention of Martha "daring" to love the Doctor was greeted with OMG YOU HUSSY GET YOUR HANDS OFF HIM--I remember reading a lot about how selfish Martha was to be imposing her feelings on him instead of helping him to get over Rose, which...what???), or people who were totally burned out about the very idea of the companion having romantic feelings about the Doctor, which amplified the few comments Martha made about the subject into this huge thing she was alllllllways going on about.

I was always astonished that for the latter group, Martha's one sentence in an episode about having feelings for the Doctor somehow invalidated every other thing she did in the episode. I remember reading a lot of posts about how Martha wasn't doing anything in the first

[tempestsarekind]

Also, I really do think S3 coheres better than some of the other seasons, 2 and 4 at least. (It's been a long time since I've seen season 1.) I don't know whether that's because it has fewer random, iffy episodes, or what. I have a hard time *wanting* to watch all the episodes in S2 and S4; there are standouts that I go back to, but... "Love and Monsters"? No thanks. But I can plop down anywhere in S3 except the Dalek episodes and be quite happy watching them.

[thepresidentrix]

I thought the traffic jam episode was pretty annoying, too, though I did enjoy the Doctor cuddling that guy's kittens - kittens! - and found the ending, at least, inspiring.

[tempestsarekind]

Ah, yes, "Gridlock." :) I definitely warmed to it more on a second viewing. I'll always have a soft spot for it because of that 'therapy session' in the alleyway, Martha putting her foot down and demanding that the Doctor 'talk to her properly.' Also, I suspect I like it on a meta level because it's all about the Doctor trying to get Martha back, and because Ten has to admit that he was "too busy showing off" to get to know Martha. And because Martha's clever and buys them time until the Doctor can figure out what to do, and is compassionate even toward her kidnappers. And because of the way Ten drawls, "It's been quite a while since I've seen you, Martha Jones," which, honestly, is such a come-on. Ten, you flirt.

...And I guess I like that episode more than I thought. :)