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netgirl_y2kTwo things to say first of all,
1) Between An Adventure in Time and Space and The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot I already felt like I'd watched the love letter to Doctor Who that I wanted, so there was less pressure on the special to be all things, you know?
2) I wasn't actually in the Saturday evening it was on. I was in Edinburgh watching Scotland play rugby, badly, against Australia, and I watched Doctor Who when I got in at gone-midnight, having had a beer or two, so.
The two things I really want to talk about are both casting related.
John Hurt was absolutely spectacular, a proper acting tour de force. And he really, really felt like the Doctor, you know? I would have watched three series of him as the Doctor, plus Christmas specials! And with someone as strong as John Hurt playing the War Doctor, Nine's absence was less palpable than it otherwise would have been.
Because that was the thing about Ten and Eleven having an episode together, you realise that they are basically the same character, and not in a the Doctor is always the same man deep down way, but in a we realised we were on to a good thing with Tennant, and were afraid of changing things way. I mean, there's an attempt to engineer differences between them, the man who remembers and the man who forgets; but standing together they are two skinny guys in brown suits with over-styled hair and similar tics and quirks of speech, bowties | sandshoes, geronimo | allons-y. The upshot of that, is that with the War Doctor having come off well, Peter Capaldi being an older fellow, and the end of the Last of the Time Lords storyline, I really do have great hopes that they're going to do something a bit different with Twelve.
The other casting thing I wanted to talk about was Elizabeth I. Look, if you're going to do a send up of Queen Elizabeth's historical persona in the vein of Queenie from Blackadder II (which I'm sort of assuming this was intended as...) then you really need someone of the calibre of Miranda Richardson to make the joke work, and Joanna Page just wasn't up to the job. In her defense, the script wasn't doing much of the heavy lifting either. In fact the only bit that really did work was "I may have the body of weak and feeble woman, but at the time so did the Zygon", and only because it was a play on a real historical speech, and because Blackadder had done that joke first.
Billie Piper was excellent. I thought the idea of a weapon of mass destruction with a conscience which would judge for you using it was inspired. And Billie was always a good actress, but she's either improved over the last couple of years, or she upped her game when working with John Hurt. I also thought the decision to have Billie playing the Bad Wolf | the Moment rather than Rose, and to keep her and Ten separated was a good one. I may be letting my memories of fandom colour my perceptions here, but I thought that with them together the 50th anniversary special could quite easily have become the Ten & Rose anniversary special.
The Time War was never going to be as good onscreen as it was in my head; and I'm going to assume that only in the desperate last weeks of the war did the Time Lords and the Daleks resort to trench warfare and shooting at each other, and before that it was all screwing with the timelines, and temporal assassinations, and planets suddenly falling out of existence.
I thought all thirteen (Capaldi!) Doctors working together to save Gallifrey was brilliant, and a really excellent use of archive footage; this is opposed to its use in The Name of the Doctor where I thought Moffat was stomping his size elevens all over fifty years of continuity with no consideration for anything beyond his own slightly-forced impossible girl plot.
I don't think the Gallifrey was never really destroyed, it was only hidden! retcon cheapens anything, necessarily. And frankly I thought that the idea that the Doctor sacrificed the Time Lords to destroy the Daleks was cheapened as soon as you couldn't go three episodes without tripping over one of the homicidal little pepper-pots. So while I hope the Doctor doesn't find Gallifrey at once, I do look forward to seeing the Time Lords again (Romana, pls, alternatively the Rani) and to the Doctor realising that while it is, of course, nice that Gallifrey exists, he doesn't want to live there, in fact even lengthy visits are pushing it a bit.
1) Between An Adventure in Time and Space and The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot I already felt like I'd watched the love letter to Doctor Who that I wanted, so there was less pressure on the special to be all things, you know?
2) I wasn't actually in the Saturday evening it was on. I was in Edinburgh watching Scotland play rugby, badly, against Australia, and I watched Doctor Who when I got in at gone-midnight, having had a beer or two, so.
The two things I really want to talk about are both casting related.
John Hurt was absolutely spectacular, a proper acting tour de force. And he really, really felt like the Doctor, you know? I would have watched three series of him as the Doctor, plus Christmas specials! And with someone as strong as John Hurt playing the War Doctor, Nine's absence was less palpable than it otherwise would have been.
Because that was the thing about Ten and Eleven having an episode together, you realise that they are basically the same character, and not in a the Doctor is always the same man deep down way, but in a we realised we were on to a good thing with Tennant, and were afraid of changing things way. I mean, there's an attempt to engineer differences between them, the man who remembers and the man who forgets; but standing together they are two skinny guys in brown suits with over-styled hair and similar tics and quirks of speech, bowties | sandshoes, geronimo | allons-y. The upshot of that, is that with the War Doctor having come off well, Peter Capaldi being an older fellow, and the end of the Last of the Time Lords storyline, I really do have great hopes that they're going to do something a bit different with Twelve.
The other casting thing I wanted to talk about was Elizabeth I. Look, if you're going to do a send up of Queen Elizabeth's historical persona in the vein of Queenie from Blackadder II (which I'm sort of assuming this was intended as...) then you really need someone of the calibre of Miranda Richardson to make the joke work, and Joanna Page just wasn't up to the job. In her defense, the script wasn't doing much of the heavy lifting either. In fact the only bit that really did work was "I may have the body of weak and feeble woman, but at the time so did the Zygon", and only because it was a play on a real historical speech, and because Blackadder had done that joke first.
Billie Piper was excellent. I thought the idea of a weapon of mass destruction with a conscience which would judge for you using it was inspired. And Billie was always a good actress, but she's either improved over the last couple of years, or she upped her game when working with John Hurt. I also thought the decision to have Billie playing the Bad Wolf | the Moment rather than Rose, and to keep her and Ten separated was a good one. I may be letting my memories of fandom colour my perceptions here, but I thought that with them together the 50th anniversary special could quite easily have become the Ten & Rose anniversary special.
The Time War was never going to be as good onscreen as it was in my head; and I'm going to assume that only in the desperate last weeks of the war did the Time Lords and the Daleks resort to trench warfare and shooting at each other, and before that it was all screwing with the timelines, and temporal assassinations, and planets suddenly falling out of existence.
I thought all thirteen (Capaldi!) Doctors working together to save Gallifrey was brilliant, and a really excellent use of archive footage; this is opposed to its use in The Name of the Doctor where I thought Moffat was stomping his size elevens all over fifty years of continuity with no consideration for anything beyond his own slightly-forced impossible girl plot.
I don't think the Gallifrey was never really destroyed, it was only hidden! retcon cheapens anything, necessarily. And frankly I thought that the idea that the Doctor sacrificed the Time Lords to destroy the Daleks was cheapened as soon as you couldn't go three episodes without tripping over one of the homicidal little pepper-pots. So while I hope the Doctor doesn't find Gallifrey at once, I do look forward to seeing the Time Lords again (Romana, pls, alternatively the Rani) and to the Doctor realising that while it is, of course, nice that Gallifrey exists, he doesn't want to live there, in fact even lengthy visits are pushing it a bit.
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Date: 2013-12-08 10:22 pm (UTC)so SO excited for the return of the Time Lords and Gallifrey- I think it's going to be an interesting direction for the show. also my first reaction was "can I haz Romana now plz?"
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Date: 2013-12-08 11:34 pm (UTC)Yeah, I think the Doctor being the last Time Lord was a super interesting thing to do when they were rebooting the show, but they've basically done everything that can be done with it, and it was hobbling the show somewhat because as the Doctor himself said, how can you ever move on from that?
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Date: 2013-12-09 10:19 am (UTC)But I was a sucker for Elizabeth not only rescuing herself, but bluffing the Zygons into showing the Doctors their entire plot, freezing themselves into stasis with the only thing remaining being to ask the Doctor the best method of disposal.
Likewise I did like Osgood, after panicking and wanting the Doctor to save her, managing to also rescue herself and bluff the Zygons etc.
I actually disagree about the Zygon plot - I'm not sure what else needed to be said after we see the Kates negotiating in the background, and the Osgoods clearly figuring out which one of them is the Zygon, but keeping quiet about it and the human helping the Zygon anyway.
I can't help thinking that it'd be kind of cool if there Zygons aprt of UNIT officially in a later episode. (And now I'm wondering if anyone is going to write a fic about a Zygon acclimating to both life in London and life in UNIT, helping fend off alien invasions.)
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Date: 2013-12-09 12:53 pm (UTC)I'd love to see UNIT and the zygons back, partly to find out how those negotiations panned out, but mostly because you can never have too much Kate Stewart, I think.
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Date: 2013-12-13 06:23 pm (UTC)I don't know, I guess I kind of assume that's underneath any portrayal of Queen Elizabeth I.
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Date: 2013-12-13 07:46 pm (UTC)I have fallen into the bad habit of assuming the worst possible interpretation of everything Steven Moffat writes for a female character. And, really, I must snap out of it, for the sake of enjoying Clara if nothing else.
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Date: 2013-12-13 10:09 pm (UTC)The thing is, Moffat can be pretty shitty in his writing for women. I know this. But just because he can be that way doesn't mean he always is. I have to admit, sometimes it's frustrating seeing wholesale condemnation of Moffat's writing when he's not always terrible. I have my problems with portions of Amy Pond's arc, for example, but I don't think it's as flat-out just plain sexist as sometimes I have seen said.
Honestly, I think Moffat almost invariably starts out well, but I think he's stuck in certain tropes and can't get out of them. (Which I get, because you should have seen how many times I played a necromancer in roleplaying games until I could finally play through with a story that ended the way I thought was right.) I just think someone who works with him needs to give Moffat a wake-up call that he's got to stop writing his way into the same thing over and over, because people are noticing and aren't happy.
I love Clara. I think she's still a bit unformed as a companion and as a character, though I also hope that will be corrected with Capaldi's Doctor. I think she may well be coming into her own even without him, because she certainly held up well interacting with everyone and being clever on her own in the specials. Hopefully that will all stay consistent, because I think that, during the regeneration crisis, we'll need Clara to be the steady focus while the Doctor finds his feet.
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Date: 2013-12-13 10:55 pm (UTC)All that aside, I loved her in the special. I thought she really came into her own, and her becoming a teacher after being a nanny, and a governess in one of her other lives was a nice bit of continuity. And I really look forward to seeing where she'll go from here, because as you say, she's going to be the fixed point when Smith regenerates into Capaldi.
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Date: 2013-12-09 04:20 am (UTC)It may have been a cheap trick, but having the saving of Gallifrey done so that no one realized it'd been saved was a good move. It didn't erase years of stories and it still let the Doctor think he had used the Moment. Which lets him have his pain and self-hate, but also lets us move past it now.
I can't wait for the Time Lords to come back. I want a scene where they try to make him President again and he runs away. Or a reunion with Romana. Or maybe a weekend on Gallifrey that has him eventually running away three hours in because Gallifrey is actually kind of boring.
John Hurt should get a webseries or something. He was awesome.
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Date: 2013-12-09 12:45 pm (UTC)Yep, as far as I can tell what everyone wants from the return of Gallifrey is Romana, and the Doctor running off after three hours. Take heed, showrunners!
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Date: 2013-12-09 03:19 pm (UTC)I literally screamed when Capaldi did the unexpected eyes and the eyebrows.
A++ fanwank on the Time War. I can only hope that it wasn't always that simple.
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Date: 2013-12-09 06:05 pm (UTC)Still, Capaldi!
If they could somehow convince John Hurt to take part - or even without him, really - then the Time Wat might actually translate better to an audio format.
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Date: 2013-12-09 06:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-12-10 11:00 am (UTC)But Bad Wolf/The Moment was so great - Billie Piper did an amazing job.
And they can't have named a character called Rani if they weren't already hedging their bets on bringing the Rani back, could they? /my crack theories; let me show you them.
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Date: 2013-12-10 05:26 pm (UTC)I accept your crack theory about the Rani; now, give me my amoral Time Lady!