Somewhere Different Now

After yesterday's Doctor Who made me think of The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit, I stayed up far too late rewatching them.  I'd forgotten how utterly fantastic those episodes are.  (BTW, there's no deep meta thoughts here, just me gushing a bit. ) The guest characters are all real people I care about (especially Ida and the captain).  The building atmosphere of menace works really well.  The combination of the gritty sanctuary base and the ominous beauty of the black hole is visually impressive.  The music is some of my favorite from all of Doctor Who.  If it comes up on my itunes, I'm instantly back there, staring up at the black hole and contemplating the horrors of ancient evil and mortgages. 

And of course, there's Ten and Rose.  I love them so much.  Tennant is great in both his quiet moments of contemplating a life without his TARDIS and his grandiose shouting at Satan.  The seeds of crazypants!Ten are there in his urge to fall at the pit, but it makes perfect sense in context.  Rose is great when she tries to make friends with the Ood, and even more magnificent when she starts ordering around all the personnel on the base to make sure they survive and find the Doctor.  "Oh, she knows" is a lousy substitute for saying something, but she does know, and anyone with eyes and/or ears knows as well. 

Yeah, the plot of Satan in a hole is kind of overblown, and I caught two incidents of screams audible in a vacuum (science fail!), but this is Doctor Who we're talking about.  None of that distracts from the joy of watching characters I adore face down danger and come through.

In summary, dvd technology is great.  Doctor Who goes on, and I love getting fresh adventures (even those weeks it makes me shout at the screen), but I am so grateful to be able to revisit the era of the show that had an unmatched pull on my heart:  the Doctor and Rose Tyler, stuff of legends.

Completely unrelated to the rest of the post:  I saw a gray fox on my walk this evening!  So cool!  And now back to your regularly scheduled fannish rambles.

I just rewatched Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead.  I was somewhat hoping I'd like these episodes better the second time around, but nope.  It's still a collage of reused ideas that worked fairly well in Moffat's other episodes but were just tiresome here (repetition of a line, a threat with covered/messed up faces, strong focus on an original character, "everybody lives," the 51st century, etc.)  I still really dislike the way he wrote Donna.  The treatment of women is still problematic.  Most of all, I still found River Song annoying as all get out. 

This time, I came up with a new item to add to the list of reasons (both rational and irrational) why I dislike River Song.   She is so obsessed with the Doctor in her memories and how impressive he is that she largely fails to see the awesomeness of the Doctor in front of her.  The Doctor is busy figuring out what's wrong and desperately trying to keep everyone alive, and she gets worked up that he doesn't recognize her and he's not opening the TARDIS with a click of his fingers.  Seriously, who cares?  She says that she's seen armies turn and run away from the future Doctor...but they aren't facing an army, so she's making stupid assumptions that he couldn't do that now.  (Remember Nine's speech where he announced that he was coming to get Rose in BW/PotW?  Remember how the Daleks backed up when he got out of the TARDIS and started yelling at them?  Get a sense of perspective, Song.)

I'm against character bashing.  I won't say that River Song deserves to be ripped apart by a pack of rabid hyenas, because she doesn't.  (If a pack of hyenas got into her closet and ripped apart her favorite shoes, however, that would be pretty funny.)   She has a few moments of being  likable, funny, clever, and generally the sort of person you can vaguely imagine the Doctor voluntarily spending time with.  Part of my dislike of her is rooted the way the future she implies interferes with the Doctor/Rose ship, which is a pretty biased reason for disliking her.  Still, I don't think either the writing or the acting of this character makes her really believable as the incredible person with a very special relationship with the Doctor that she seems to think she is.  I really, really hope that Moffat doesn't try to bring her back.

Positive thinking time!  Here are things I really like about SitL/FotD:
-the look of the library.  It's a really pretty episode.
-Donna kicking down the door
-Anita!  Why can't the Doctor have all sorts of timey-wimey connections with her?  "Keeping it together, I'm only crying. I'm about to die, it's not an overreaction." 
-the "Is 'all right' some sort of secret Time Lord code for not all right at all?  'Cause I'm all right too" conversation.  That's the Donna Noble we know and love.  (Also, she says she's using Time Lord code.  Very slight foreshadowing for DoctorDonna!)