Sorry folks, it's been a busy week and I never found the time to post this first one.
The Doctor's Wife*big goofy grin*
Called it. *checks date* Almost four years ago to the day I posted a fanfic about the TARDIS being a communication-impaired Goddess who stole away with a Time Lord. Not that I'm saying Neil Gaiman stole the idea from me, or even that no one else had had it beforehand. Some ideas are simply too beautiful not to be true. It was wonderful to see what an expert writer could do with the notion.
Lovely story. Bittersweet, in the way that most NuWho has been. More sweet that bitter, in the way that most Moffet-Who has been. One could play a great game of "spot the Classic Who and Big Finish references" with this episode, and I'm sure someone else has already posted that. I loved the way the Doctor and the TARDIS bickered like an old married couple.
And yes Rory, of course the Doctor has a room. But it's lonely there, and sometimes fills up with ghosts. It's much nicer to stay in
her room.
The Rebel FleshLast night we watched
Men in Black, a very clever ripoff of a whole bunch of earlier works. It's like
The Rebel Flesh only not, because while
The Rebel Flesh also rips off a whole bunch of earlier works it's not the least bit clever.
For starters there's a helluva lot of
Star Trek in this episode. The structure is the same one used for most of the C-level plots from
Star Trek Classic: there's a threat to the
dilithium crystals TARDIS that is coincidentally concurrent with one or more otherwise minor problems that the crew have to attend to nearby blowing the danger level all out of proportion because the writer couldn't be arsed to come up with a decent storyline. The antagonists look exactly like and have similar abilities to the sheriff from
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; Odo, was that his name? And then there's the whole, "The monster isn't really a monster; it's just that some stupid humans are where they are not supposed to be, doing something they shouldn't be doing without either finding out what's really going on or obtaining permission" trope that was first done and best done in
Star Trek's genuine classic episode
The Devil in the Dark. (Seriously you need to watch that one even if you never watch another episode in your life. It's one of two
Star Trek Classic episodes that out-Doctor Who
Doctor Who.)
The WTF-ness of this episode reaches epic proportions. How come mere solar flares were able to upset the TARDIS? What was that acid they were mining? Why didn't the Doctor tell them, "That's a Sontaran clone tank; the creatures that come out of it are sentient, sapient, and intelligent."? There were some nice character moments and the acting was top-notch, but there's no excuse for doing a plot like this in 2011. It's understandable to tell a bad story while trying something new, but telling a bad story that follows a
45 year old formula for bad stories is asking to be mocked.
