Dr Who -- kinda lame this season

[Ed_Laprade]

I had the same initial thought on watching the show, but I have two answers to this;

1> Dr. Who is a "family" show. Killing a little girl, even if she is evil, isn't going to fly. Only constructs get shot by the good guys. Only the bad guys kill real people, including aliens.
2> You have to remember the time as well. That was the Age of Chivalry, and there's pretty much no chance they're going to machine gun a little girl in upper class Britain of the early 1900's.

Oh, I thought of both those points. But it still ticked me off. Made an excellent episode just that much less so, IMO.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

I was dissapoited in this 2 parter as well. I can see what they were trying to achieve with making the Doctor human but it just wasn't executed as well as I feel it could have been. Of the 2 parters I prefered the Daleks take Manhattan to this one. The best part I felt was only incedental to the story and that was the last 5 minutes and the tribute to the WWI soldiers.

I am still looking forward to Blick though.

 

[Elf Witch]

I have really liked this season. The only epiosde that kinda bored me was Gridlock. The rest I thought were great. I really like Martha I think she is an improvement on Rose who often just annoyed me.

Blink scared the hell out of me. The Shakesphere Code was just fun I got a kick out of the Harry Potter jokes.

42 was great I loved the rushed feeling and the fear the the Doctor showed. The scene where Martha is telling her mom she loves because she thinks she is about to die is heartbreaking.

Daleks have never been a favorite but I liked this one because of the one dalek realizing how they needed to change. I did think the pig slaves were stupid but its Dr Who.

The two part epiosde where the Dr becomes human I enjoyed quite a bit. Mainly because of Martha and watching her reactions of being an educated black woman forced to be a scullery maid and having to watch the DR fall in love with someone besides her.

I am looking forward to the rest of the episodes.

 

[Morrus]

I was dissapoited in this 2 parter as well. I can see what they were trying to achieve with making the Doctor human but it just wasn't executed as well as I feel it could have been. Of the 2 parters I prefered the Daleks take Manhattan to this one. The best part I felt was only incedental to the story and that was the last 5 minutes and the tribute to the WWI soldiers.

Wow. It's amazing how tastes differ. I thought Daleks in Manhattan was awful. But these two (admittedly it's been months since I saw them) I remember as being by far my favourite of the series - really, really strong performances. The ending with the "Fury of the Time Lord". Tennant's performance as Smith (that man can act!) and the guy who played the older, creepy schoolboy whose name I forget.

Blink was superb, too.

 

[Brown Jenkin]

Wow. It's amazing how tastes differ. I thought Daleks in Manhattan was awful. But these two (admittedly it's been months since I saw them) I remember as being by far my favourite of the series - really, really strong performances. The ending with the "Fury of the Time Lord". Tennant's performance as Smith (that man can act!) and the guy who played the older, creepy schoolboy whose name I forget.

Blink was superb, too.

I'm not saying it was awful. It is still many times better than anything Collin Baker did. I just don't feel it was up to the level that I know they can do with Tennant. The problem was not the acting (except I think Tennant overacted a bit) particularly with the supporting cast doing terrific jobs. "Son of Mine" was exceptionally good and deserves a nomination for whatever the British version of an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor is. I also recognized "Wife of Mine" from somewhere but I can't place it (I'm sure she has done lots). No the problem I felt was the misshandling of the Doctor being human in the script and then dragging it out for 2 hours (with commercials). Like I said previously I can see what they were trying to do, I just don't think they pulled it off. I am not sure how I would have done it better though. My complaints are not that the episodes this season are bad, just that they are not as good as would hope for because I am trying to compare them with the best of Doctor Who because I feel they can be that good right now.

As for Blink I do hope it is as good as everyone says.

 

[delericho]

Well, its two weeks later and I'm disappointed. Not because they didn't find an entertaining way to drag it out, but because of the PCness of it.

I'm not sure it's fair to call it on PCness. Unusually, that episode featured rampant racism, sexism and classism, presented not as something wrong with those involved, and not as just a product of the times, but rather just something that is. That was a bold move right there. If they'd been being PC, they'd have ignored the issue, or featured a scene of the Doctor and Martha discussing how we'd evolved beyond such things.

Plus, if they'd been being PC there would have been absolutely no question of them giving guns to teenage boys, let alone having them use them. Remember, unlike the US, the UK have massive controls on firearms, and the public at large is much more leery of them, and especially of them being portrayed in anything other than a horribly negative light.

And then there's the Doctor, our hero, authorising one boy to take another boy and give him a "good thrashing". Sure, he was human at the time, but still...

Headmaster, a former soldier, has just seen his second-in-command at the school killed. Goes back in and barricades the place. Good. Mr. Smith goes and looks out a window at the two of the Family of Blood who are there. Fine. But the headmaster must have known he could have seen them from there as well.

I'll give you that one...

Why didn't he grab a rifle, and the best student marksman with one, and go blow their brains out? Because that was what he should have done.

But not that one. It was strongly portrayed as being incredibly difficult for those boys to engage in machinegun fire against a clear, present and immediate threat (and rightly so... that was a very powerful scene, IMO). And that was something they had trained extensively for.

Asking a boy to outright assassinate the enemy with a rifle? No, not going to happen. Perhaps if he'd gotten one of the other staff to do it. (Besides, that whole line of enquiry is like asking of Back to the Future III, "why don't they use the gas from the Delorean in the mine?" It simply doesn't fit the story logic.)

Then there was the little girl who disintegrates the Headmaster. Ok, I'll accept that the students were too stunned at that to blast her into little tiny pieces then and there... but not after she taunts them! She was dead as soon as she opened her mouth. (There would have been at least one or two, if not half of them, who would have been sufficiently enraged to shoot her. Especially as she shot the Headmaster after he tried to 'save' her.) But nooooo, that wouldn't have been PC.

Again, are you sure you're not thinking of modern American kids? Kids today are considerably harder and more jaded than their counterparts of even twenty years ago. In the show, we're dealing with priviledged English children of 1913, the last year before the Great War inflicted untold horrors on the world.

Even when they were being trained with the machine guns, they were being trained for military service in the British Empire, where they would most likely have to use the guns against 'savages' of the various colonies. To ask them then to use their weapons against a little girl, not to mention one they'd probably seen around the place, and may well have talked to...

I wouldn't have been too shocked had at least one taken a shot. But I couldn't declare it was unrealistic (or PC) just because none of them did.

And I didn't much care for the fact that the Doctor was perfectly willing to let dozens of Humans get killed just so he wouldn't have to get his hands dirty, and then did anyway. (Without actually killing anyone, of course.)

I was quite surprised that Mr Smith didn't take a shot. On the other hand, though, the Doctor rarely if ever actually kills someone. He even refused to wipe out the Daleks in "Genesis of...", despite knowing full well the horrors that they would unleash. And the episode did show that at least some of his personality remained as a human.

Oh yeah, and lets make one a scarecrow. Like the outfit is never going to rot away or be moved!

Again, story logic. Perhaps he put one of those perception filter thingies on the scarecrow?

 

[Morrus]

No the problem I felt was the misshandling of the Doctor being human in the script and then dragging it out for 2 hours (with commercials).

Well, any commercials you may get have nothing to do with the show's creators. It's shown without commercials here.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

But not that one. It was strongly portrayed as being incredibly difficult for those boys to engage in machinegun fire against a clear, present and immediate threat (and rightly so... that was a very powerful scene, IMO). And that was something they had trained extensively for.

Asking a boy to outright assassinate the enemy with a rifle? No, not going to happen. Perhaps if he'd gotten one of the other staff to do it. (Besides, that whole line of enquiry is like asking of Back to the Future III, "why don't they use the gas from the Delorean in the mine?" It simply doesn't fit the story logic.)

Again, are you sure you're not thinking of modern American kids? Kids today are considerably harder and more jaded than their counterparts of even twenty years ago. In the show, we're dealing with priviledged English children of 1913, the last year before the Great War inflicted untold horrors on the world.

Even when they were being trained with the machine guns, they were being trained for military service in the British Empire, where they would most likely have to use the guns against 'savages' of the various colonies. To ask them then to use their weapons against a little girl, not to mention one they'd probably seen around the place, and may well have talked to...

I wouldn't have been too shocked had at least one taken a shot. But I couldn't declare it was unrealistic (or PC) just because none of them did.

Again, story logic. Perhaps he put one of those perception filter thingies on the scarecrow?

Ok, I'll grant that it wasn't as PC as I was thinking. I still think that the Headmaster should have shot at least one of the Family.

As for the girl, I'm not so sure. Some of the boys were shown to be be not a lot older than she was. This was after they'd shot up the scarecrows and the Headmaster had been killed. More to the point, to many boys that age girls are The Enemy. Even more to the point, if you're not going to let kids get killed, don't put them into situations where they probably should be. That's just plain cheating.

I don't accept the proposition that 'story logic' trumps real locic. If you can't think of something that isn't dumb in the first place, don't do it!

 

[Mallus]

I don't accept the proposition that 'story logic' trumps real logic.

Don't you find that statement a little ironic in the context of a discussion about a show featuring 900 year old, self-reincarnating alien time traveler?

 

[Ed_Laprade]

Don't you find that statement a little ironic in the context of a discussion about a show featuring 900 year old, self-reincarnating alien time traveler?

Ok, but it can get to be a bit much at times.