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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.