Somewhere Different Now

I have a lot of thoughts about Doctor Who, y'all.  I'd let myself fall very behind this season, but I watched Sleep No More and Face the Raven a few nights ago, then Heaven Sent, Hell Bent, and The Husbands of River Song all in a Christmas binge with my family.  Here are some very general spoiler-free thoughts outside a cut first, then episode-specific thoughts.  These are largely without reading anyone else's reactions, since I couldn't read them at the time without spoilers and I no longer remember which of y'all have been posting about Doctor Who.

Overall, I think this season has been tremendously good, easily the best since series 5 and perhaps the best since Moffat took over as showrunner.  Not every episode has been perfect, but there have been more really strong ones than weakish ones and none at all I want to bury in a hole and never dig up.  I've enjoyed the format of having almost entirely two-parters.  It allowed deeper development of supporting characters, more worldbuilding, and richer stories.  Peter Capaldi is outstanding as the Doctor, and I feel like the writers have a much better handle on his Doctor this series than last.  Clara is still probably my least favorite main New Who companion in terms of who I identify with or want to travel beside, but I think her character arc in S9 was fascinating, and I think Jenna Coleman is wonderful in the role.

Sleep No More
Disappointing.  I really like that they tried something different with the found footage concept, and the atmosphere was effectively creepy.  However the monsters were SO nonsensical (carnivorous sleep dust monsters?? really???) and not terribly well executed, and the plot just didn't make a ton of sense.  I did like that most all of the guest cast were POC, but sadly the script didn't give the actors enough character development to work with.  There were some interesting worldbuilding elements, but those bits of interest and the cool episode title (from Macbeth) just felt wasted on the weak and weird (in a bad way) plot. I often like Mark Gatiss as a Doctor Who writer, but this was one of the weaker points in the season.

Face the Raven
The Doctor and Clara investigate a murder in Diagon Alley For Aliens and run into Arya Stark Ashildr Lady Me; things don't go as planned.  I wish that Sleep No More hadn't existed so this could have been a two-parter.  I love stories of hidden magic cities within a real city, especially when that city is London (see Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, the aforementioned Diagon Alley, Kate Griffin's Matthew Swift books, and more), and I thought this one was neat but needed a little bit more both about how it works and character development for its residents.  We had two recurring guest characters, Lady Me and Rigsy, though it took me most of the episode to place where we'd seen Rigsy before (Flatline, which was a great episode but quite a while ago).  Lady Me, meanwhile, seems to have bitten off a bit more than she can chew in trying to keep this powderkeg of an alien community at peace with each other and the surrounding humans, having some sort of contract with the raven spirit thing, and then having made a deal to entrap the Doctor with the mysterious powers whose identity we learn next episode.  I really like that she's allowed to be morally ambiguous.  She has more concern for others than she did when we saw her as a highwayman, but that doesn't mean she follows the ethical code we mortals or the Doctor might wish she had, and she certainly doesn't align herself with the characters we viewers are used to rooting for.  She's an antagonist for sure, but not a villain like the Master.

But I'm avoiding the most significant parts of the episode.  Clara died, two episodes before I expected her exit.  It was surprising and upsetting.  It wasn't even a death saving the world, but an attempt to save one person that turned out to be a mistake based on acting without full information.  It could have felt pointless and anger-inducing.  However, Clara's risktaking all season, her cleverness, and occasional sneakiness made this death feel like a natural possibility based on her character, and her courage in the face of doom and her insistence on reminding the Doctor to be his best self and avoid revenge made her death feel worthy of a long-serving companion.  Then the Doctor got kidnapped by teleport, and basically everything is awful.

I would like to point out that Lady Me edited the memories of humans using retcon, a drug developed by Torchwood.  This suggests that she followed the Doctor's suggestion to look up Captain Jack Harkness.  What happened when the two immortals met?  Is there fanfic???? 

Heaven Sent

This episode was really damn good.  It works because Peter Capaldi is such a strong actor that his performance can carry the show alone. The episode is a carefully crafted puzzle-box (literally) that pulled me in to the Doctor's dread, confusion, frustration, and anger.  (I haven't generally been a fan of Moffat as DW showrunner, but when he's in good form he can be one hell of a good scriptwriter, and this was a top notch script.)  The monster wasn't all that scary in itself, but Capaldi's reactions were enough to make me willing to accept it as a threat.  I'd guessed from the moment we saw the injured hand operating the teleport at the start that the hand likely belonged to the Doctor, but I'd assumed he was caught in a time loop and would get out through some clever timey-wimeyness.  The revelation of what was really going on shocked and horrified me, as it was intended to, and I never would have predicted until the montage of deep time passing that the Doctor would literally punch his way out of a problem.

It was a small moment, but the one thing I strongly disliked about this episode was the Doctor confessing that he ran away from Gallifrey because he was scared.  That is fundamentally different from the way I see the Doctor and the previously established canon, and it's not a change I like.  I believe the Doctor is genuinely scared of dying, but I think his deepest motivation for leaving Gallifrey and becoming what he is, underneath all the sadness of what he's lost over the centuries, more central to his hearts than his fear of death, deeper even than the desire to help others, is restlessness at routine expectations and joy in exploring the unknown.  The TARDIS stole him because she wanted to see the universe, and he stole her for the same reason.  To suggest otherwise makes the whole show darker and smaller.  So that was a frustrating moment, but everything else was darkly excellent.

Hell Bent

I have profoundly mixed feelings about this episode.  There were parts that made me transcendentally happy and parts that made me want to grumble or even shout.

I didn't much like the earlier parts of the episode focusing on Time Lord politics, their reactions to having the Doctor back, or their prophecies about the Hybrid.  I've written before that I thought undoing the Time War's destruction of Gallifrey was a bad storytelling decision, and one of the many reasons for that opinion is that the Time Lords on Gallifrey just aren't that interesting IMHO.  Sadly, this episode supported my point.  I don't care about the Doctor angrily eating soup outside that stupid recurring barn.  I don't understand how the Time Lords are hiding out near the end of time but also apparently were communicating with 21st century earth in order to entrap the Doctor (wouldn't TARDIS-ing back and forth alert the Doctor and whoever else they're avoiding to Gallifrey's location?), but I don't really care to try to figure it out.  The whole scene in the cloisters did not come across as mysterious or dangerous.  One part I did like about the sojourn on Gallifrey was that we had a Time Lord regenerating onscreen change gender and race.   Nice to have something else to wave in the face of those who think the Doctor should always be a white dude.

The plot between Clara and the Doctor, on the other hand, was fascinating.  Given the fact that they'd killed Clara off with two episodes to go, I wasn't entirely surprised that the show found an excuse to bring her back onscreen. The Doctor strays very close to Time Lord Victorious territory in his refusal to accept Clara's death, and as worrisome as that always is to see I think it was very believable for how he would respond.  I found all the Time Lord's nonsense about a Hybrid prophecy to be pretty annoying, though I did enjoy some of the argument between the Doctor and Lady Me about who was meant by it.  (I simultaneously laughed and shouted at the screen when I realized they were going to throw the "Doctor is half human" notion, among the most mocked parts of the highly mockable TV movie, into the mix.)  I'm not clear from just one watching whether we got a final answer about whether they Hybrid is Lady Me, the Doctor, or the combination of the Doctor and Clara, but whatever.  I was pleased to unexpectedly run into Lady Me at the end of time, though I am somewhat dubious of the ability of someone who can be killed by sufficient injury to actually survive all those billions of years on the slow path.  Also, were the Toclafane hanging around outside her lair there at the end of time?

I was SO ANGRY when it looked like we were going to have a repeat of Donna's Unconsenting Memory Wipe exit from the TARDIS.  From a Watsonian perspective, I don't think the Doctor has ever done anything that made me angrier than stealing Donna's memories while she begged him not to. From a Doylist perspective, I am semi-okay with RTD's decision to write that because it was part of a larger arc of the Doctor going too far in imposing his will, an arc that was paid off in The Waters of Mars, but we didn't need to go all the way down that road again.  This time, I was overjoyed that Clara put into words why that stealing of agency, even to save her life, was a problem.  Man, sometimes Moffat's tendency to undo (literally or symbolically) the things he didn't like about RTD's era really rubs me the wrong way (see previously link about why Gallifrey should have stayed gone), but this one time it pleased me so much.  Also, this feels like for once the Moff actually paid attention to some of the things that people have criticized about his past writing of women and did better.  I am pleasantly shocked.  But why can't they go and FIX THE ACTUAL DONNA NOBLE instead of merely redoing that situation with someone different and a different outcome?  :`(

I don't really understand why the Doctor forgetting Clara does anything to heal the damage to time caused by her walking around when she should be dead (does it? or is she just gradually splintering the time stream by refusing to go face the raven yet?), and the diner frame story annoyed me a little bit because the Doctor seeking after a person whose personal details he can't remember puts Clara back a little bit in Impossible Girl quest object territory.  However, while he might be viewing her as a quest, she is clearly allowed to have her own agenda.  Undead Clara and Immortal Arya Ashildr Lady Me flying off for their own adventures in a TARDIS they only sort of know how to pilot is the stuff of fanfic, and it's GLORIOUS!  I do worry that they are a Team TARDIS of highly questionable judgment in addition to the aforementioned possibility that Clara might be destroying time itself with her existence, but I am okay with that moral ambiguity.   Also, Moffat has an ongoing tendency to pull back from the most serious consequences by not letting death stick; I think it's a bad writing habit, and I do find it frustrating that the show undid Clara's death.  But her final exit from the show was just so pleasing to me that I can only muster up a  limited amount of annoyance.

Maybe they can track down Donna based on the Doctor's reference to having had to wipe a friend's memory before, figure out a way to restore her memory (surely Me has been around long enough to know some telepaths who can help), and travel with her on their TARDIS.  Yes, that could work nicely.


Husbands of River Song

Partway through this episode my dad asked me how I was feeling about it.  I told him that it was a tale full of sound and silliness, signifying nothing.  I did think it improved near the end, from River's rant about how the Doctor didn't come for her onwards.  The scene at the restaurant was well done.  However, while I felt that this episode handled River a fair amount better than the majority of her stories, my feelings for her overall character arc remain somewhere between indifference and actual annoyance, and the plot with the head-stealing cyborg thing was just a lot of nonsense, and not even especially entertaining nonsense.  I did enjoy the Doctor's irritation at River's inability to recognize him.  I didn't hate this episode, but it gets a yawn and slight eyeroll.

I've just realized that if we're getting a new companion next series and there hasn't been casting news yet, it's going to be a LONG time until more Doctor Who.  That hiatus will weigh on me, since I'm feeling more engaged with the show than I have in years. 

Here's the latest installment of my Star Trek original series watch-through.  The fight choreography on this show is proving to be an endless source of hilarity to me.  I mean, look at this:



Kirk attempts to use himself as a human bowling ball!  The guys he's fighting catch him, because...?  Notice also the guy who has his hand all over Kirk's butt and crotch.  Wowza.

Now, on to my episode reactions.  Spoilers, if you care about spoilers for a show that's been out for close to 50 years.
( 1x18, "Arena" )

( 1x19, "Tomorrow is Yesterday" )

( 1x20, "Court Martial" )

We have a new Doctor!  A new start!  Alas, it seems like my disconnect from recent Doctor Who was due to showrunner more than actor playing the Doctor, and that hasn't changed.  Still, this was an okay episode with some things I very much enjoyed in this episode in addition to the things that I disliked.

The Good

-Peter Capaldi as the Doctor.  He is every bit as good as I'd hoped. One thing I'm especially excited about is that he can bring the Oncoming Storm with all the ferocity and gravitas that aspect of the Doctor demands.  Matt Smith brought a lot of wonderful things to his portrayal of the Doctor, but I never really found his Oncoming Storm to be convincing.  When he shouted, he sounded more petulant than frightening.  (Eleven could be very scary, but he was scariest in cold and quiet ways, like outright lying to his companions, or when seemingly jolly and triumphant, like transforming every human who watched the moon landing into a killer.)  Eyebrows and insults to humans are both things I'm glad to have from the Doctor.  I will be interested to see him when he's not still rattled by regeneration, because scaring random tramps for no good reason may be taking things a little too far.

-Madame Vastra, Jenny, and Strax automatically double the awesome of any episode they are in.  I was especially excited when they mentioned the Paternoster Irregulars being out on the case.  We didn't see these irregulars, but I'm going to go ahead and assume it's a gang of street urchins.  IT WOULD BE SO NATURAL TO GIVE VASTRA AND JENNY A SPINOFF AIMED AT KIDS.  I also love that when appropriate they actually call the police to help them deal with stuff.

-The pacing of the episode was much less irritatingly manic than a lot of the recent era of Doctor Who.  It felt like an appropriate amount of story for the time allotted, not trying to cram in an incredibly convoluted plot (not to mention every possible cheap joke) into too small a time.  That was such a relief!

-The moment in the restaurant when they realize that the other diners are all automatons was intensely creepy and cool.

-While it was clearly one of those things that Moffat wrote because he thought it would be neat rather than because it made sense, I did rather like the dinosaur appearing in Victorian London and then spitting out the TARDIS.

-Scottish Doctor gets to complain about things and naturally gravitates towards Glasgow.

The Bad

-Why the hell is Clara, supposedly the one companion who has known the Doctor in EVERY SINGLE ONE of his lives, so thrown by his regeneration?  My impression was that she remembered at least aspects of that whole saving the Doctor across many lives thing.  Her panic makes no sense.  Like, I can understand being deeply sad that the Doctor she knows from her real, original life is gone, but this degree of doubt and fear is super inconsistent with her character.  If Moffat felt the need for an audience surrogate to express viewers' distress and confusion at the Doctor's change, well, we never saw Vastra and Jenny interact with any Doctor besides Eleven, so they haven't personally experienced a regeneration.  Let Jenny be the one who's doubtful and upset on behalf of the audience!  Or just trust that your audience is aware of how this regeneration thing works.

-On the subject of inconsistent and weird Clara characterization, the Doctor basically called her an egomaniac childish game-player, and other than maaaaaybe being childish I can't really see how that describes her.  Maybe because the episodes with Modern Clara focused so much on her Impossible Girl status that they never really bothered to develop all that much of a personality for her beyond Generic Plucky Companion.  Or possibly the fault is with me for missing the signs that she's an egomaniac childish game-player because lately I've been so meh about current Doctor Who that I don't think I've watched any of Clara's episodes more than once.  With no disrespect to Jenna Coleman (who does a pretty good job with what she's given), I honestly don't care about Clara.  And that's a very bad thing for the show when it can't make me give a rat's ass one way or the other about the companion.

-Vastra and Jenny are married, but we still only watch them lock lips for a contrived sharing oxygen moment?  Moffat, if you are trying to do better about representation, it isn't working.

-Moffat sure loves recycling his ideas, doesn't he?  Here we have the need to refrain from a basic biological function so monsters can't get you (previously blinking, now breathing) and the clockwork droids from The Girl in the Fireplace.  I was seriously dubious about the whole "hold your breath and the robots think you're one of them!" thing, when the people were showing so many other signs of not being robots.   It doesn't make a lick of logical sense, but it does make a sort of nightmare-sense, so I'm not too annoyed at that.  However, I wasn't a fan of the clockwork droids being reused in this way.  They were great the first time, but I thought they made less sense in this context.  Like, there are all sorts of materials they could have used in Victorian London that would have been a hell of a lot easier than setting up a fake restaurant to trap humans.  (Context in which reusing the clockwork droids could have been cool:  start off on a fully-functioning 51st-century spaceship with all the humans aboard very proud of their new clockwork-biological-digital hybrid technology.  The Doctor shows up informs them that this technology is a terrible idea, but nobody listens until sure enough something goes wrong and the droids start picking off the crew one by one in some creepy space-horror.)

-"You can't see me, can you?  You look at me and you can't see me.  Do you have any idea what that's like?" Hey Doctor, remember all that time you looked at Clara and saw her Dalek and Victorian doppelgangers, seeing the mystery but not really her, Clara Oswald the real 21st-century woman?  I think she knows very well what that's like, you ass.

-They killed the dinosaur.  :(  :(  :(

Things About Which I Have Conflicting or Undecided Feelings

-The phone call from Eleven.  I didn't know that was coming, and even as someone who was happy to see him regenerate it still hit in the feels.  However, I also think it was unnecessary emotional manipulation.

-The mystery woman who appeared with the revived droid captain at the end.  I didn't catch it from the show, but apparently she's called Missy.  Missy could be short for Mistress, which could mean that she's the newest regeneration of the Master.  While I would kinda prefer to leave the Master character alone for a while longer, I could potentially get behind the Master as Evil Mary Poppins (especially if they make it clear that the Master always thought of the Doctor in a boyfriend way, even before regenerating female).  If she turns out to be a regeneration of River Song I will throw things.  Mostly I think I'd be glad if she's a new character.

-At the very end, the Doctor suggests that he and Clara go out for chips or coffee.  She tells him that he's buying, but he claims that he doesn't have any money.  This is a very clear callback to Nine and Rose's conversation in "The End of the World,"  a moment I absolutely loved.  I can't decide how I feel about it being used here.  It hits me in the feels, and is a nice reminder that some things about the Doctor stay constant even across many regenerations.  On the other hand, part of me wants Moffat to keep his grubby typing fingers off of the era when I consistently loved Doctor Who, to build his own characters and not just manipulate the audience's heartstrings with what came before.  Mostly, it makes me want to rewatch Nine and Rose.

In conclusion, RIP dinosaur.

So I haven't managed to post my thoughts on The Empty Hearse yet (they are complex, being mostly squee but with some caveats), and I need to go to sleep rather than writing a full post on The Sign of Three, but I have some preliminary things I must say about it.

1.  I REALLY LOVED THIS EPISODE.

1b. Like, A LOT.

1c.  Seriously, my face hurts from smiling.

2.  Sherlock, John, and Mary, you can so all three dance together!  Just ask Captain Jack Harkness!

2b.  Sherlock made a vow to John and Mary.  John referred to Mary and Sherlock as the "two people that I love and care about most in the world." Sherlock appears to have been as involved in the wedding planning as John, maybe more so.  In the few months since Sherlock's return, Mary appears to have attained a level of closeness with him that most non-John people can't reach in years.  They are all three so very married, for all that the legal vows only cover two of them.

2c.  I need all the John/Mary/Sherlock OT3 fic, preferably right now before whatever happens next week josses it.

2d.  I would also gladly accept John/Mary/Sherlock/Molly OT4, because really, do any of us care about Tom "Meat Knife" the Fiance?  (Even if he is giving Molly a lot of good sex.)  And did you see that Sherlock/Molly kiss in the first few minutes of TEH?   Hot damn.

3.  Oh god, why are they doing a pregnancy plotline?  Did they have to default to giving the excellent new female character a storyline centered around her womb?  I blame Moffat.  (OK, that was my only bit of non-squee.)  (I hope you all appreciate that I made this item #3.)

4.  Ballet!lock is pretty much canon, WTF, this is beautiful.

5.  Mycroft hates leg work, but here we see him literally working his legs.  And they're good legs too!

5b.  I was hoping Mycroft would make it to the wedding, it would have been amazing.  I bet a lot of Mystrade shippers were hoping so too, because that would have put their pairing in an actual scene together.  Tough luck, Mystrade shippers.

6.  I don't know whether to be annoyed at not seeing Harry Watson or pleased that headcanons remain undisturbed.

7.  Sherlock was trying so hard to be a good friend to John, even when he doesn't like the social tradition of weddings and is terrified of losing John.   His best man speech was GLORIOUS.  It was utterly Sherlock yet also deeply sweet.  He might have chosen a fucking awful way to announce his return last episode, but he has clearly gained a ton of emotional maturity.

8.  There were some cases and stuff too, I guess.  I am happy that the palace guard survived the attempted murder.  He seemed nice, and he was definitely hot.

9.  Oh god, Sherlock's attempt to deduce while very, very drunk.  Over the top, but I don't give a fuck.  It was fantastic.

10.  I think I may have gotten a new tooth cavity from the child glomping onto Sherlock.  My headcanon is that the sample of kids we've seen react to Sherlock is pretty representative:  50% are utterly terrified, and 50% think he is the coolest thing ever and adore him.

11.  Yay, Sally Donovan was in this episode!  Also, there was a tiny speechless (and topless) cameo by Irene!

12.  Mrs. Hudson backstory, huzzah!

13.  Everybody is together and happy and life is beautiful. Even if Mr. Drama Queen felt that a two minute period during which nobody was talking to him meant that he was unwanted and ought to sneak off, overall this was super happy. I don't know what's happening next week, but it's going to be shattering, isn't it? Well, fuck.

That was way more post than I intended to write.  Oh well.  Sleep can happen any time.  New Sherlock episodes are rare and important.

I'm somewhat late to the reaction party due to traveling and now staying with family, but I want to post my thoughts about The Day of the Doctor.

The quick version is that while I really enjoyed the episode, finding it funny, moving, and well acted, I still really wish Moffat had found a different story to tell.

I'm going to talk about the episode as it stands first, with lots of but not exclusively squee, and get into the reasons I wish for a different story at the end.  Opening with the original-original title sequence was the perfect beginning.  Going to the same school as in The Unearthly Child was also a really nice choice, although it is somewhat random that Clara is now suddenly a teacher.  (How did she and the Doctor get out of the time stream cave or wherever they were at the end of The Name of the Doctor?  Did they remember to retrieve Vastra, Jenny, and Strax from Trenzalore?)  I liked the shot of Clara riding her motorcycle straight into the TARDIS.

Tennant and Smith were so much fun playing off of each other as the Doctors.  (I cackled when Ten sees Eleven's sonic and says "Compensating?"  My thoughts too, Ten!)  I've never heard the term "sand shoes" before.  Is that something people call Converse-type shoes?  It seems like Converse would be a really lousy choice to wear on sand because the little vent holes on the side would lead to a ton of sand in your shoes really quickly!  But I digress.  While I am often tired of Moffat's endlessly repeated hat jokes, I did really enjoy all of the throwing of the fez through the time portal things.  The War Doctor got some good lines as the grumpy grandpa voice of the classic Doctors.  I was amused at all three Doctors placed in a room, coming up with all sorts of intricate technical solutions to get out instead of just trying the door.  (I also enjoyed how the tactic of early incarnations starting the calculations so they are ready by Eleven's time was introduced here and then reused later in the episode.  Nice plotting there.)

Kate Lethbridge-Stewart is excellent, and I was super excited to see her again.  I appreciated that science girl Osgood was a continuation of the tradition of having ardent Doctor fanboys/girls in UNIT (which we earlier saw in Malcolm in The Planet of the Dead).  Hooray for the Four scarf!  I liked Osgood for being an avatar for the fangirls, but I do really wish that when the Zygon decided to taunt her Moffat had found some other words to put in its mouth besides feeling jealous of her pretty sister.  Are we really going to perpetuate the stereotypes that (a) geeks are unattractive and insecure about it, and (b) all girls really just want to be pretty?  *sigh*  While I was not pleased with the way Queen Elizabeth I was portrayed as lovesick in an adolescent sort of way, I did like it when she took out her Zygon duplicate and then successfully impersonated it to the other Zygons.  (On the topic of Zygons, I was amused that the first one we encountered was posing as the horse.)

The concept of a weapon of mass destruction with a mind and a conscience was SUPER FASCINATING, and I loved Billie Piper's performance as the Moment.  She is just so great.  I really liked that the Bad Wolf rippled back through time to help the Doctor with this end of the Time War in addition to that time on the Game Station.  I was deeply relieved that the War Doctor had to forget her, so that Nine's relationship with Rose was just as it seemed (the Doctor falling for an ordinary Earth shopgirl), not turning her into a Clara-like Moffat mystery girl who is more plot device than person.  Despite all of that I liked about Billie's role, it broke my heart that Ten didn't even get to interact with or even SEE Rose's likeness.  This was better than the worst-case "clingy girlfriend" scenarios I'd worried over when the casting was revealed and I thought about how Moffat might write Rose Tyler.  Still, I wish we'd gotten one last chance to see David and Billie acting together.  I missed some lines in the scene where everyone was in the gallery together near the end because I'd just realized that Ten and Eleven wouldn't get any interactions with the Bad Wolf girl and my brain went all white noise for a few moments.  Oh well.

I enjoyed the aspects of the episode that paid tribute to the show's history.  The brief moment in the coral-struts console room caused my loudest squee of the episode, though the brief glimpse of Peter Capaldi came a close second.  And what a joy to see the montage of all the Doctors for the Time War sequence!  The Tom Baker scene was lovely.  I'm not sure it made much sense, but it was just really sweet.  I'm glad to see that at least one of the classic Doctor actors got some screen time.  The name-check of Captain Jack Harkness also pleased me, though not as much as actual onscreen Captain Jack would have done.

I definitely enjoyed the experience of watching episode. The plot was much less of a hot mess than a lot of Moffat's episodes for the past two series.   The look and special effects were lovely.  So if you take the general outline of the plot as a given, this was very good.  But I think it was a mistake to tell this story.

I mentioned in my discussion of "The Night of the Doctor" that I thought the Time War was best left entirely offscreen, and nothing in this special changed my mind about that.  Scenes of Gallifreyans running and screaming while stuff burns and a couple Daleks roll past do so much less to convey the scope and horror of this war than, for example, Nine's reaction to discovering the survival of a single Dalek.  I also mentioned that I disliked the concept of the War Doctor, and that opinion stands.  John Hurt gave an excellent performance, but I really wish they'd persuaded either McGann or Eccleston to play the part of the Doctor who fought the War.

And then there was the climax, the saving of Gallifrey.  If that scene had happened in a fanfic, I would be clapping my hands in delight, but I think it was a mistake for canon.  I have a LOT of thoughts about this topic, and this entry is already long enough that I think I'll make a second post to discuss why I think that Gallifrey should have stayed lost.  The very condensed version is that I think having the Doctor be the last of the Time Lords is part of why, as much as I really do like Classic Who, I find New Who to be more interesting.  I think the Time War is the big dark cloud that makes every time the Doctor earns a silver lining so much more meaningful.  I hate that all the grief and guilt we watched him live through over that now feels cheapened because he was operating under a delusion.  (The End of Time already made things weirder, but at least there the bottom line was that even if Gallifrey wasn't actually blown to bits it was irretrievably gone.)  I understand why other people are glad of this change, especially those who are old school Who fans.  Fair enough.  I'm glad you're happy.  I'm glad the Doctor is happy.  But I think from a storytelling perspective Gallifrey should have stayed lost.

I am turning into one of those crotchety fans who always complains that the show was better Back In My Day.  Still, as often as I vehemently disagree with Moffat's decisions as showrunner, I am still deeply in love with this concept of a man who changes his face, his magical blue box, and the brave women and men who choose to see the universe with them.  Ups and downs are going to happen in a show that goes on this long.  Even if there never again comes a Team TARDIS I love quite as much as Nine, Rose, and Jack or Ten and Donna, I love knowing that they were part of a story that goes on and on.  Who knows what the future will bring?  Maybe for the 60th anniversary Eccleston will agree to guest star.

And in the mean time, there is always The Five(ish) Doctors Reboot, which is practically perfect in every way.  If you have somehow missed this magical half hour of RPF written by Peter Davison, starring Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, and cameos by bazillions of others both expected and surprising, go watch it right now.  You'll be glad you did. 

I have been largely absent from LJ lately for no good reason.  I hope to catch up on my flist over the next few days, but for now, the fast version of a Hounds of Baskerville reaction.


( Footprints of a gigantic SPOILER )

Merlin is such a frustrating show.  Sometimes it can be so loveable, but far too many other times it makes me want to scream at the screen, and not in a good way.  This latest episode (4x08, "Lamia") was mostly in the latter category.

( spoilers through Lamia (4x08) )

There were a lot of things I liked about "The Wedding of River Song" and some things I loved, and overall I enjoyed it.  However, I don't feel that it managed to salvage some of the messy, frustrating plot arcs of S6 as a whole, and it didn't speak to me emotionally as strongly as previous New Who finales. 

( spoilers! )

I decided to post about "The God Complex," then realized that  I never posted about "The Girl Who Waited."  I'll cover TGWW briefly first, then move on the the latest episode.

( The Girl Who Waited )

( The God Complex )