You're the most wonderful man and I don't want you to die

[alexsarll]

Happy new decade, all, and it will no doubt surprise few of you to find me beginning with a Doctor Who review.
I'd expected some OTT RTD balls-out insanity like the end of the last full series, so that mostly rather quiet and contemplative little story (with a brief interlude of sh1t blowing up) rather took me by surprise. As with the first part, some of the best of it was just the Doctor and Wilf, two old soldiers talking. A rather surprising new entrant for the Best Companion Ever lists now we thought we were stuck on the young female template, no? There was an edge of whininess to both Doctor and Master by the end, which I'm not sure I liked, but I suppose can be seen as the effect family turning up unexpectedly and making a mess of things has on us all. Still, the Tenth Doctor should have gone out with something better than I don't want to go". As to why regeneration blew up the TARDIS...don't ask me. Ditto what was going on with the Woman, and the Weeping Angels reference.
The return of the Time Lords just so that the Doctor could destroy them all for, what, the third time now? It sort of worked, and if they had ended up with Rassilon in charge again, you can see why things got so bad. But it does mean that really, please, can we not see the Daleks again for a decade or so either?
The ending, or rather endings...well, I like Lord of the Rings so the train of farewells was OK by me.
And yet somehow, in spite of having spent most of the second half in tears and still being slightly sniffly now, I don't feel...what's the word I want? Sated, more than satisfied. I suppose with so much changing, it couldn't have felt too much like an ending, lest a generation that has only known Davies and Tennant not come back for Moffat and Smith.

Coincidentally, the last Who audio I listened to was also about Time Lord mindworks dirty tricks - Unregenerate!. The best I'd heard in a while, helped by being eerie - a mood which audio does very well. I heard an audio book, as opposed to play, for the first time recently, Stephen King's Arthur Machen homage 'N', and even though the peculiarities of the form threw me off a little (do you really need to read out the explanation 'he paused' when the speaker can simply pause?), that was devilishly effective too. An ingeniously sadistic story, in which one obsessive-compulsive's tics really do prevent the destruction of the world. Even if the CDs take more than two hours to read 80 pages of story, I think it worked better this way, particularly as an accompaniment to the fairly OCD task of ironing. I certainly don't see how the forthcoming comics adaptation will capture the effect, not even with Alex Maleev on art.

This is probably as good a place as any to talk about Tennant's Hamlet too, isn't it? Which from a ratings point of view probably couldn't have done better than airing between the two parts of his final outing as the Doctor; it's just that I find that sort of crossed streams effect slightly trying (same as, for instance, I can't read anything else by George RR Martin until he either finishes or abandons A Song of Ice and Fire, to which I am already committed. Same as I can't read a Who book between parts of one TV story). Too often I found myself thinking, ah yes, that's one of his Doctorisms there. "What a piece of work is a man" is pretty much the "You humans!" stuff, isn't it? And so forth. Sometimes to the benefit of the play - the "readiness is all" speech works even better overlaid with the knowledge that not just Hamlet but the Doctor is headed for his end. This on top of the difficulty I already have with just watching a play which, between A-Level and Cambridge, I've probably analysed more and deeper and longer than any other work. I see the strings - and that's not a bad thing, because they make one of the most wonderfully intricate cat's cradles a human mind ever constructed. But it does leave me a long way from getting caught up in the surface narrative. In some ways that's for the best, because under the surface all the stuff that looks like flaws, isn't (and without the whole project coming off the wheels like the similarly deliberate but far less satisfactory Measure for Measure); that the play within the play is an idiotic way to prove the Ghost's credentials is a flaw in Hamlet, but a masterstroke in Hamlet.
So was it any good? I don't know. I can't know. I'm too close to the play and the perform(er/ance) to know whether they matched up. But I know it wasn't an embarrassment. I also know that Christopher Eccleston, so desperate to avoid typecasting that he bailed on Who after one series, has never got closer than the Tarantino-style OTT remake that is The Revenger's Tragedy, and that before he was the Doctor. So good on you, Tennant, and good luck with the rest of your career. You were marvellous.

Comments

[azureskies.livejournal.com]

Regarding things you don't want to see for a while, you're probably best not watching the series five trailer on the website...

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was on my friendslist as soon as I clicked away from this post. Still, accentuate the positive: EARTH REPTILES!

Why the blazes was it not on after the show anyway, though?

[tiny-tear.livejournal.com]

but the angels! the angels!

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

The impression of the people I saw it with was that The Woman was his mum, though I think they're going on 'feel' rather than anything else.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

My guess was Romana. Though neither explains how she survived Rassilon's Gauntlet Of Doom to be beside him and wandering through time talking to Wilf.

Besides, if he has a mum (and I forgot that the first part had given Time Lords parents, interesting), then wasn't she human?

Happy birthday for tomorrow, btw, I don't think I'm going to be able to make the pub.

[puzzled-anwen.livejournal.com]

I liked David Tennant as the Ghost of Christmas Present in Nan's Christmas Carol.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

That had three good actors guesting in it, but I still couldn't bring myself to watch Tate under her own steam.

[diffrentcolours]

And yet not even the combined talents of all the guest stars could make the whole thing worth watching...

[pylonography.livejournal.com]

Having tuned out of Dr. Who pretty much with the demise of Tom Baker (John Pertwee being my fave) I must admit I do try to tune in to the regenerations and watching this one made me wish I'd watched the lot!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Pertwee was ace, wasn't he?

They'll probably repeat the whole new series again on BBC3 soon, it's about all that channel's normally good for.

[juggzy.livejournal.com]

Tennant showed some of his breadth as an actor in this, I think. He and Wilf do very well together.

It's interesting that he recieved the 'death dose' from a machine that transmits 'personotypes' (for want of a better word) and so obviously has to store such personotypes before transmitting.

I don't think that this is the last we've seen of David as the Doctor.

HOWEVER, in the last two or so minutes we had of Matt Smith, I thought "Yeah, he's going to be OK." More pop culture than Tennant; that sat uneasily on our David.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Tennant being the first Doctor who was a fan of the show before he got the lead, I'm sure that soon enough he'll be glad to make an appearance for a multiple Doctor story, and aside from that there's the film, but I think the idea of having the Tenth Doctor running around separately via something like that device would be very shaky.

[braisedbywolves.livejournal.com]

Ah no, that device was just the power source - the Planet healer was the 'gate' that the cactii were working on.

[davegodfrey.livejournal.com]

The endless goodbyes really got to me, especially the second time he shows up to Donna and Wilf.

[perfectlyvague.livejournal.com]

As an ex TV critic friend of mine has just described it 'The story seemed rushed so that they could do the 'one more time around Albert Square in a taxi' ending'.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

As in upset you, or annoyed you? I know they were milking it, but I really didn't mind.

[miramanga.livejournal.com]

Hi I am here through juggzy :) Did you think that the old lady could have been his Mum? And I didn't understand why he didn't park the TARDIS somewhere safe while he regenerated. Maybe they want to redo the TARDIS interior, which is good for me. I preferred it from the Old Days!

[miramanga.livejournal.com]

oops Juggzy!

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Hello! Yeah, the mum theory seems popular, I think I'm just resistant to it because as soon as the question of the Doctor's parentage comes up one is opening the door to all manner of contradictory fanwank (is he half human? Are Gallifreyans grown on genetic looms? Do we really need to know anyway?). The whole family obsession seems more like RTD territory than Moffat to me, so my guess would have been that if it were the mother, that would have been said tonight, and that she wasn't identified makes it more likely she's someone else, quite possibly someone from the old series given how fan-friendly the new series looks. But, that's conjecture.

I'm fairly sure the TARDIS interior is getting a makeover, yeah - we know from a competition (possibly Blue Peter?) that at least one episode has an improvised console, but presumably after that there's the real new look. Whether it's the classic shiny one, I don't know...I always had rather a soft spot for the secondary room with the wooden console, and the gothic one McGann had was one of the few things the TV movie really did well.

Eccleston regenerated into Tennant while the TARDIS was in flight without it all going haywire, so I have no idea what was going on with the flames and that. Hey, only a few months 'til we find out, I guess...

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Last week the usual vocal minority was all "WORST. EPISODE. EVER" and I defended it, saying, well, it might all turn out fine. Nothing turned out fine - I can't think of anything in Part Two that remotely lived up to what I was hoping for, reaching a nadir in Martha and Mickey being married. Matt Smith looks good, though his post-regeneration behaviour and speech being almost exactly the same as Tennant's rings warning bells...

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I already knew about Martha and Mickey, and didn't really mind.

This was RTD's one and only moment of writing the Eleventh Doctor, I think if he'd done much establishing work it would have trod on Moffat's toes. Already in the, what, 47 seconds of the new series trailer, I get the sense of a very different personality.

Didn't you even like the Doctor/Wilf scenes?

[darkmarcpi.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed it, but by the end/last half hour (or whatever) it seemed too much about the money shot (which was inevitable I guess, and perhaps the right thing to do given it's not every episode there's a regeneration) and you could sense the burden of having to deliver this.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was a bit taken aback when he absorbed all those rads and then I looked at the clock and thought, hang on, shouldn't we only have five minutes left?

[puzzled-anwen.livejournal.com]

Read N last night (well, at about 5am when I couldn't get back to sleep, which is the ideal time for reading scary sh!t, obv), I am quite glad I wasn't listening to it in audio format... At least the speaker presumably didn't try to convey the deterioration in the spelling as the narrator was getting worse..?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

No! The voice got shakier, though. Or voices, there were three narrators for patient, doctor and sister.