tardis_stowaway (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tardis_stowaway) wrote2011-09-25 12:27 am
tardis_stowaway) wrote2011-09-25 12:27 am
Entry tags:
I know who I want to take me home (and it isn't this episode)
I am somewhat baffled by the almost universally positive reviews I'm seeing for "Closing Time" so far, because I wasn't a fan.
Possibly the sound of crying baby for so much of the episode put me in a bad mood (reason #137 why I never intend to reproduce), because I found this episode somewhat dull and irritating. Part of it is that I wasn't wild about seeing Craig again. I liked "The Lodger" okay, but that was more in spite of Craig than because of him. I love the concept of the Doctor going on a farewell tour of people he cares about, but there were so many others I would rather have seen. Even just picking people from the Eleven era, visits to Liz Ten or Vastra and Jenny would have allowed for much more interesting adventures. A visit to Jack would have been timely given Jack's recent brush with mortality, but that clearly wasn't going to happen.
So you can avoid being converted into a Cyberman by the power of love and really, really not wanting to be converted? That makes NO FUCKING SENSE. Continuity of monster powers and logic in general have never been strengths of Doctor Who, and I'm resigned to that, but this was just ridiculous. Are they saying that all the other people who have been cyberconverted just didn't have enough love in their hearts? What the hell? That's just insulting. The cyber-rat (or whatever that little scooty thing was called) was okay as excuses to make new Doctor Who toys go until it displayed a mouthful of teeth. That doesn't really fit into the cyberman aesthetic.
There were surprise Ponds! The Doctor having to hide from them broke my heart a bit, but I'm not sure how I feel about the rest of it. When the little girl asked Amy for an autograph, my first thought was that maybe she had written a book about her experiences with the Doctor. Then the camera pointed up and we find out that she's...a model with a perfume line? Huh. I'm glad that she has a successful career rather than, say, pining away or immediately getting pregnant with a more linear baby. The Petrichor name and the tagline make it clear that she has a role in the marketing concept of the perfume rather than just being the face of the ad. I'm not wild about model/perfume entrepeneur/however she defines herself as a career choice as opposed to other possibilities (like going to university or becoming a non-kissogram policewoman or something else where her mind is more important than her looks), but I guess I can see it for her.
All the Doctor Who fans with babies have now nicknamed their offspring Stormaggedon. All of them. Also, I suspect that the majority of Doctor Who fans who listened to radio in the late nineties now have Semisonic's "Closing Time" stuck in their heads. I certainly do.
I thought it was odd to have such a small story for the next to last episode of the series. Judging by all the unanswered questions we've got and all the stuff in the preview, there will be a lot of shit happening in the finale. If the previous arc episodes of this series are any indication, it might have been better to do a two-part finale to actually allow the story to breathe. We'll see how it turns out next week. CT did address some of the Doctor's melancholy about going to his death, and that provided some of the episode's better moments.
Other good things included Alex Kingston's acting when Madame Kovarian came for her. Eek! Having apparently shaken off her youthful brainwashing and getting her doctorate only to immediately be kidnapped and forced to kill the Doctor just adds to the list of reasons why River has the most tragic life ever. I'm a bit disappointed that we're going the obvious route of having River in the spaceuit, but whatever.
The Doctor has a time machine. He knows the date in linear time when he's at Lake Silencio, but why exactly does that have to be his tomorrow? Also, what happened to all the years between the ages of the younger Doctor who showed up in TIA and has been traveling with Amy and Rory all series and the age of the older Doctor who died in TIA? Was there a massive gap between The God Complex and Closing Time? I'm confused.
There were some funny moments and some touching moments, but overall I thought this was a weak episode. Sorry for being the rain on the parade!
On the subject of Doctor Who and things that don't quite work,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
netgirl_y2k wrote some excellent commentary (written prior to Closing Time) about the problems of Moffat's DW, especially S6.
Possibly the sound of crying baby for so much of the episode put me in a bad mood (reason #137 why I never intend to reproduce), because I found this episode somewhat dull and irritating. Part of it is that I wasn't wild about seeing Craig again. I liked "The Lodger" okay, but that was more in spite of Craig than because of him. I love the concept of the Doctor going on a farewell tour of people he cares about, but there were so many others I would rather have seen. Even just picking people from the Eleven era, visits to Liz Ten or Vastra and Jenny would have allowed for much more interesting adventures. A visit to Jack would have been timely given Jack's recent brush with mortality, but that clearly wasn't going to happen.
So you can avoid being converted into a Cyberman by the power of love and really, really not wanting to be converted? That makes NO FUCKING SENSE. Continuity of monster powers and logic in general have never been strengths of Doctor Who, and I'm resigned to that, but this was just ridiculous. Are they saying that all the other people who have been cyberconverted just didn't have enough love in their hearts? What the hell? That's just insulting. The cyber-rat (or whatever that little scooty thing was called) was okay as excuses to make new Doctor Who toys go until it displayed a mouthful of teeth. That doesn't really fit into the cyberman aesthetic.
There were surprise Ponds! The Doctor having to hide from them broke my heart a bit, but I'm not sure how I feel about the rest of it. When the little girl asked Amy for an autograph, my first thought was that maybe she had written a book about her experiences with the Doctor. Then the camera pointed up and we find out that she's...a model with a perfume line? Huh. I'm glad that she has a successful career rather than, say, pining away or immediately getting pregnant with a more linear baby. The Petrichor name and the tagline make it clear that she has a role in the marketing concept of the perfume rather than just being the face of the ad. I'm not wild about model/perfume entrepeneur/however she defines herself as a career choice as opposed to other possibilities (like going to university or becoming a non-kissogram policewoman or something else where her mind is more important than her looks), but I guess I can see it for her.
All the Doctor Who fans with babies have now nicknamed their offspring Stormaggedon. All of them. Also, I suspect that the majority of Doctor Who fans who listened to radio in the late nineties now have Semisonic's "Closing Time" stuck in their heads. I certainly do.
I thought it was odd to have such a small story for the next to last episode of the series. Judging by all the unanswered questions we've got and all the stuff in the preview, there will be a lot of shit happening in the finale. If the previous arc episodes of this series are any indication, it might have been better to do a two-part finale to actually allow the story to breathe. We'll see how it turns out next week. CT did address some of the Doctor's melancholy about going to his death, and that provided some of the episode's better moments.
Other good things included Alex Kingston's acting when Madame Kovarian came for her. Eek! Having apparently shaken off her youthful brainwashing and getting her doctorate only to immediately be kidnapped and forced to kill the Doctor just adds to the list of reasons why River has the most tragic life ever. I'm a bit disappointed that we're going the obvious route of having River in the spaceuit, but whatever.
The Doctor has a time machine. He knows the date in linear time when he's at Lake Silencio, but why exactly does that have to be his tomorrow? Also, what happened to all the years between the ages of the younger Doctor who showed up in TIA and has been traveling with Amy and Rory all series and the age of the older Doctor who died in TIA? Was there a massive gap between The God Complex and Closing Time? I'm confused.
There were some funny moments and some touching moments, but overall I thought this was a weak episode. Sorry for being the rain on the parade!
On the subject of Doctor Who and things that don't quite work,
netgirl_y2k wrote some excellent commentary (written prior to Closing Time) about the problems of Moffat's DW, especially S6.
no subject
I agree that Amy being a perfume entrepreneur/model was a little ... off. It's not that it doesn't fit the character or that it's demeaning or anything, but at this point I can't not notice and be unsettled by the show drawing attention to Amy's looks because I'm far too aware of Moffat's rather creepy comments about both Amy and Karen Gillan's attractiveness. On the other hand, the parallels between Amy/Rory and Peter/MJ become ever more amusing, so there is that.
The Cybermat is a classic Cyber-subsidiary dating from Tomb of the Cybermen, actually! I was pleased to see it. I assume the organic mouth was a hint to the "spare parts" nature of this Cyberinvasion -- they didn't have the parts so they used leftover bits of the people they assimilated (wait, that's the Borg ... whatever).
Closing Time is definitely supposed to be 200 years on the Doctor's timeline after The God Complex, though I'm not really sure why the Doctor needs to go die right that moment. Maybe he can feel the timelines closing in on him or something.
no subject
I've never watched any of the classic Who Cyberman episodes (they're not my favorite villains), so I had no idea that the Cybermat had precedent. Huh. That's nice to have an old-school shoutout, though I still feel the big toothy mouth looked dumb.
Last time the Doctor went a while without a companion, he started declaring that the laws of time were his and would obey him. I find it really weird that the show let so much time pass unremarked and with almost no change in the Doctor's emotional state from the last time we saw him. Feeling the timelines closing in on him is a reasonable explanation for why he has to go die now, though I wish the show would bother to give us this explanation for its arbitrary deadline.
Ramblings, Pt 1
After the cybermat attacked Craig, the Doctor said, "That thing should have had you." That made me wonder if Craig, like Amy during the first half of the season, wasn't an avatar of himself who has been planted there as part of a deeply-spun trap for the Doctor that will be sprung in the next episode. If Craig was not human after all, he would not be compatible with the cyber conversion process and therefore may have busted their machine with or without Alfie's crying.
Two other things:
1) The presence of cybermen buried deep underground from thousands or millions of years ago was not adequately explained. Cybermen were created in a parallel universe's 20th -century Earth and first reached our Earth in the 1980's in "The Tenth Planet." It's true that cybermen were shown as having rudimentary time travel technology in one of the Six episodes, but I thought they stole that and couldn't build their own cyberships to go back in time.
2) The episode was, more than usual, about coincidences--running into Craig with aliens twice, and then randomly running into Amy and Rory in the store. Normally we explain the Doctor showing up just when trouble starts as the TARDIS bringing him to where he will want to be, which was overtly brought forward in "The Doctor's Wife." But these coincidences existed outside the TARDIS's control and are therefore suspect.
Conclusion: Who do we know who carries a deep grudge against the Doctor, so deep as to want to wage war against him--to consider a war against him as already in progress--and may have the ability to manipulate people's timelines into bizarre coincidences? RASSILON.
Rassilon was somehow resurrected from the dead (we know that timelords can sometimes do this if they really, really feel like it--see "The Five Doctors" and "Arc of Infinity" and every fricking episode where the Master comes back after dying) to, we assume, lead the Time Lords in their desperate war. It's like bringing back Zombie George Washington to be our supreme overlord with executive laser powers, if by George Washington you mean an unholy mix of Grigori Rasputin and Benjamin Franklin. And the Doctor trapped him in a time bubble he is not only desperate to escape, but also capable of escaping, as we learned in "End of Time."
Now, TARDISes can obviously warp coincidence around the universe (e.g. "Bad Wolf"). What if Rassilon had been able to use Time Lord magicks to reach out from beyond the timeless void, and influence the timelines of the universe?
Such an escape attempt would be best effected, according to the physics of the show, through the principle of wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey, in which it might be most entertaining for Rassilon to make contact with a younger version of himself.
More exciting ramblings in Pt 2!
Ramblings, Pt 2
In fact, we know Time Lords evolved by being exposed to the "untempered schism"--kind of the way River was made. We know that Rassilon was one of the first Time Lords--kind of like River is. The only obstacle to this idea that I can see is that River has given up her ability to regenerate. But we have seen how this doesn't bother Time Lords if they really don't want it to.
Therefore, according to my idea, River = Rassilon, and Rassilon is reaching out from the time bubble to get his younger self to kill the Doctor. But wait, why would Rassilon try to kill the Doctor after the Doctor imprisons him? That wouldn't make any sense. But, since we do know that the Doctor is to die in his 11th, not 8th, regeneration, we look at what else we can squeeze to make the theory fit. Well, we can--and passionately want to--squeeze the idea that the Doctor actually dies. What if the attack by the lake is not supposed to kill him, but rather to transport him to inside the time bubble, where Rassilon intends to use him as a tool for escape?
This whole idea that the Doctor's "death" is somehow wrapped up with something as powerful as a time bubble yields a link to yet another hanging thread--the unresolved ending of season 5. We know that the TARDIS was drawn to a very powerful point in spacetime, Amy's house when she was a child, and that it explodes there at every point in the universe. We also know that the explosion allows the silence to leak through, and that the silence eats Amy's life, and that Amy is somehow immune to the silence. I can't tie things together quite as neatly here, but imagine: Rassilon succeeds in bringing the Doctor to imprisoned Gallifrey by "killing" him, the escape attempt succeeds or at least partially succeeds, the awesome energy of dissolving the time bubble explodes through the TARDIS at Amy's house, and Amy herself, being at the center of everything, is somehow instrumental in reimprisoning Rassilon.
Though the arguments above are pretty specious, there is one incontrovertible piece of evidence that cannot be denied: Rassilon is JUST TOO COOL of a villain to let sit.
So, that's what all is going to happen in the next episode.
Re: Ramblings, Pt 2
Re: Ramblings, Pt 2
no subject
I'd guess it's less that they don't have enough love and more that their love is not put in front of them in the same concrete way. Even Craig couldn't hold on until he actually heard Alfie crying. But yeah, it was a bit stupid. I'm all for defeating evil with the power of love, but only if it's done well and used sparingly. This was a bit of a cheap use of it. But I suppose it must give some comfort to the Doctor. He seemed quite worried about leaving the Earth with no protector, but now he's seen that something as simple as a man's love for his baby is enough to defeat the monsters. Which, in a sense, we've been seeing all season. Wait, is Rory going to save River with love, or something? Is that where this is leading?
but why exactly does that have to be his tomorrow? Also, what happened to all the years between the ages of the younger Doctor who showed up in TIA and has been traveling with Amy and Rory all series and the age of the older Doctor who died in TIA? Was there a massive gap between The God Complex and Closing Time?
I think there was, yes. I think he'd been on his own for some time.
no subject
Saving River with love? Seems as likely as anything at this point.
[copying part of my comment to
Eh. I'm still looking forward to next week.
no subject
Oh, and I'm guessing the reason he knows he has to die is he has perhaps worked out how old he is when he's killed? Although I don't know how he'd know that, as it was the date rather than his age that he saw.
no subject
The Doctor has a time machine. He knows the date in linear time when he's at Lake Silencio, but why exactly does that have to be his tomorrow? Also, what happened to all the years between the ages of the younger Doctor who showed up in TIA and has been traveling with Amy and Rory all series and the age of the older Doctor who died in TIA? Was there a massive gap between The God Complex and Closing Time? I'm confused.
Oh, this, THIS forever. I've pretty much given up on viewing DW timelines as a real thing and not something that can be summed up by "wibbly wobbly timey wimey".