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