A quick final farewell to 2009. Above all else, this was the year we emigrated to New Zealand, and so far it all seems to be going well. Our stuff finally arrived last week, which helps. 2009 was also the year in which I came third in the Fan Artist category of the annual Nova Awards - Yeah! Third place! Woo-ha!
Keeping a full record of my reading over the year certainly has helped me to remember it all - best fiction read, probably The Kingdom Beyond the Waves by Stephen Hunt, best non-fiction How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read by Pierre Bayard. It's also something I plan to continue to do this year, mainly because it forces me to blog on a fairly regular basis. The only film I blogged about in 2009 was Watchmen, and the only other one I could immediately remember seeing was Coraline; Jo has also reminded me about Moon and District 9. We didn't go to the cinema all that much last year. Of those four, I think Moon might be the best film watched last year.
Just to round the year off, here's the Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre's take on the big Doctor Who finale:
Showing posts with label 2009 Who. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2009 Who. Show all posts
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Sunday, January 10, 2010
For Gallifrey! For victory! For Bernard Cribbins!
Through means I am not at liberty to divulge (but you know who you are, and thank you), we have now seen The End of Time, David Tennant's two-part last-ever story as the Doctor. (Although this isn't our last-ever David Tennant story, as we've yet to see The Waters of Mars, thoughts on which will materialise as and when.)
This is it, the Big One, the finale of all finales. Whatever we all thought of it, and however you choose to interpret this remark, I don't think anyone would deny that it was a prime example of Russell T Davies' vision of Doctor Who, and a fitting testament to his five years as showrunner.
Let's just take a moment to silently give thanks for everything we've liked about the last five years of Who.
All done? On with the reviewing, then. Readers are warned that, necessarily, the following will include plot spoilers. Also, that this is quite a long post. Get yourself a cup of coffee and pull up a chair.
I liked it, and I liked it well. I certainly wouldn't rank this up among the 10s, but I certainly wouldn't sweep it under the 5-out-of-10 rug either. Emotionally and aesthetically I think it's one of RTD's finest works, but intellectually I see flaws in it and I feel I have to dock points for them. So let's say 8. The good news is that this is a consistent rating for both episodes, without a marked and sudden decline in the second half, so I'm placing it above the third and fourth series finales. I think I might rank it alongside the second series finale, although it's a close call. Since this blog was started after July 2006, I feel an urge to borrow the first two series DVDs from the library, rewatch them and inflict my retrospective thoughts on you poor souls, which would at least allow me to call a winner between The End of Time and Doomsday. The first series finale is an odd case, and I'd definitely need to rewatch that before stating an opinion.
So, clearly it's a story about itself. It's the Tenth Doctor's great big drawn-out two-and-a-quarter-hour curtain call, and it's chock full of characters who are themselves drawing out their final moments for as long as possible: the Master ("Never dying! Never dying!"); the Lord President of the Time Lords ("I will! Not!! DIE!!"); the Doctor himself, who knows it's coming but just doesn't want to go; to an extent, Joshua Naismith wanting to prolong his daughter's life indefinitely. In fact, the only character who demonstrably doesn't want to cheat death, who believes that he's had his innings and is prepared to come to terms with his own demise in that terrifically brittle scene near the end, is Wilf. (And in this context, of course it's Wilf who heralds the Doctor's death - as neat a bit of plotting as we've ever had from RTD.) Wilf becomes a hero even to the Doctor, and I don't think it's overstating it to say that Bernard Cribbins owns this two-parter. If this story packs a hefty emotional punch (and I believe it does), at least a couple of knuckles in that punch are the Cribb's.
As far as I can see, the biggest bone of contention around this story is the fifteen-or-so-minute coda. Apparently this is the Tenth Doctor's "reward", and I see a lot of people suggesting we should excuse its indulgence purely on this basis - that it's RTD's and Tennant's "reward" for their work on the series. Balls to that, say I - aren't the awards and the fan adulation reward enough? - but we don't need to resort to that to justify it. It works perfectly well within the story - it belongs there. This is the Doctor still drawing it out, still staving off the end, demanding just one more goodbye, even after he's been given the object lessons of the Master's and President's downfall and Wilf's gosh-darned nobility - he knows he's "lived too long" but he still "doesn't want to go". We might, if we wished - although we're really pushing our luck now - infer that when the Doctor cracks on that last line, it's because he too realises this, and sees himself going down the Master's path. Well, it's a thought. That little tantrum/outburst when he has a go at Wilf is a clear Master moment, which finally persuades him that he's lived too long. See, it all ties in.
Admittedly, it did briefly look as though someone had changed the channel when we suddenly found ourselves watching the slightly odd new adventures of Martha and Mickey - what the hell's going on there? - and a couple of these scenes struck a peculiar note, but the scene at Donna's wedding was a lovely wrap-up to this latter part of the RTD era, and then having the Doctor nip back to the beginning - to see Rose before the previous him meets her - rounded the whole thing off quite beautifully. And may I say, if you're going to bring Rose back for one more hurrah after irrevocably stranding her in another dimension, this is how to do it! I think a lot of people who objected to the coda are suffering from cameo fatigue, having watched Journey's End just a few stories ago, but I honestly didn't feel that the cameos here intruded unnecessarily on the story. It all felt quite natural, whereas in Journey's End it really did come across as just a case of piling everything in for the sake of it and hoping for the best. I'd much rather pretend that wretched Journey's End hadn't happened than wish away the end of The End of Time.
(Am I actively looking for new opportunities to slag off Journey's End, the reader might ask? Yes, I am. Sorry.)
Plot now. At the broadest level, it's surprisingly neat: a little supplementary self-resolving loop hanging off the back of the Time War. At a lower level, iffy bits present themselves, but I'm going to postpone the nitpicking for a couple more paragraphs. Indulge me here. In the middle of that, you've got the Master's spur-of-the-moment scheme to turn everybody on Earth into himself. Why? Why the hell not? It's clearly a spontaneous decision on his part, it lets him get back to what he was up to two-and-a-half years ago, and it provides some of the best material in the last year and a bit of Who. The scene of the Masters in the White House at the end of Part One and the first few minutes of Part Two are absolutely priceless.
And then the President of the Time Lords turns up and spoils the Master's shennanigans with a mere wave of his hand. Might seem a little - do excuse me - off-hand (nitpicking, see further below). We move on to the uber-plot, where the President's plan comes back to bite him and the loop resolves itself. And - joy! - it's not a deus ex machina and it's not a plot rewind! (I mean, yes, you could say that the President is the deus ex machina to the Master's plot, but the Master's resolution to the President's plot, and the overall story, seems proper and satisfying to me.)
Other thoughts. I think we might have guessed that whenever the Doctor previously lamented the loss of the Time Lords, he was really painting a picture of them as he'd wished they were. Never mind the Time War turning them bad, they were always like that even in the old series. The cactus aliens - well, can't have RTD's last hurrah without some comedy aliens, and they did at least have a) some fun lines, and b) that nice escape scene, not to mention a "ho-ho!" moment when they spring their escape. Nice to get one more roll-call of amusing names of the monsters of the Time War, even if we didn't actually see any of them. The Pretentious Name. The Golden Retriever. The Ginger Controversy. This is a game you can play at home, too - feel free to join in. The Adjective Noun. The Miami Dolphins. The Princess Bride. I'm drifting.
Time to pick nits:
So admittedly, The End of Time has its plot holes and a number of rabbiti ex hatta. And yet I don't begrudge it them in the same way that I begrudge the Series Four finale its many gross lapses, because there they detracted from the otherwise watchable spectacle posing as a story, whereas here I felt they either didn't matter or at least didn't disrupt the overall proceedings. Yes, for example, the woman in white remains a big gaping contrivance in the story, but her only obvious purpose is to encourage Wilf to bring along his old service revolver and give it to the Doctor, a decision he seems likely to have taken anyway. Lose her from the story outright, and you've lost nothing. If questions are raised about the Ood and then go unanswered, at least they don't affect the outcome of the story - lose the Ood and just have the Doctor turn up on Earth in Part One, and you're no worse off. Donna's end-of-episode headache, or the aura of mystery built up around Wilf - no need to look for improvements, because they didn't need to be in there at all. Which does beg the question of why RTD felt the need to include them and ask the Beeb for a special 75-minute Part Two, but hey, the Beeb let him have it. Anyone bothered by it could simply fast-forward those bits or ignore them as they go along with no ill effect whatsoever. Compare this with the resolution of Journey's End, where Donna dispatches the entire Dalek fleet (trans: the writer dispatches the entire script) simply by pressing a couple of keys ("Delete" and "Escape", I might suggest) on a keyboard that has no conceivable right to be where it is or do what it does.
(Just can't help myself, folks. It's bitterness that I can't buy Turn Left on DVD without also paying for a certain two-parter that I don't like.)
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I give The End of Time a nice high 8 out of 10.
And now we have Matt Smith, breath of fresh air that he is. His first few seconds as the Doctor, and the trailer for the next series, seem carefully designed not to spook fans who've grown used to Who done the RTD/Tennant way, but hopefully we'll see something new in the spring. Well, something newer than bloody Daleks again, anyway.
This is it, the Big One, the finale of all finales. Whatever we all thought of it, and however you choose to interpret this remark, I don't think anyone would deny that it was a prime example of Russell T Davies' vision of Doctor Who, and a fitting testament to his five years as showrunner.
Let's just take a moment to silently give thanks for everything we've liked about the last five years of Who.
All done? On with the reviewing, then. Readers are warned that, necessarily, the following will include plot spoilers. Also, that this is quite a long post. Get yourself a cup of coffee and pull up a chair.
I liked it, and I liked it well. I certainly wouldn't rank this up among the 10s, but I certainly wouldn't sweep it under the 5-out-of-10 rug either. Emotionally and aesthetically I think it's one of RTD's finest works, but intellectually I see flaws in it and I feel I have to dock points for them. So let's say 8. The good news is that this is a consistent rating for both episodes, without a marked and sudden decline in the second half, so I'm placing it above the third and fourth series finales. I think I might rank it alongside the second series finale, although it's a close call. Since this blog was started after July 2006, I feel an urge to borrow the first two series DVDs from the library, rewatch them and inflict my retrospective thoughts on you poor souls, which would at least allow me to call a winner between The End of Time and Doomsday. The first series finale is an odd case, and I'd definitely need to rewatch that before stating an opinion.
So, clearly it's a story about itself. It's the Tenth Doctor's great big drawn-out two-and-a-quarter-hour curtain call, and it's chock full of characters who are themselves drawing out their final moments for as long as possible: the Master ("Never dying! Never dying!"); the Lord President of the Time Lords ("I will! Not!! DIE!!"); the Doctor himself, who knows it's coming but just doesn't want to go; to an extent, Joshua Naismith wanting to prolong his daughter's life indefinitely. In fact, the only character who demonstrably doesn't want to cheat death, who believes that he's had his innings and is prepared to come to terms with his own demise in that terrifically brittle scene near the end, is Wilf. (And in this context, of course it's Wilf who heralds the Doctor's death - as neat a bit of plotting as we've ever had from RTD.) Wilf becomes a hero even to the Doctor, and I don't think it's overstating it to say that Bernard Cribbins owns this two-parter. If this story packs a hefty emotional punch (and I believe it does), at least a couple of knuckles in that punch are the Cribb's.
As far as I can see, the biggest bone of contention around this story is the fifteen-or-so-minute coda. Apparently this is the Tenth Doctor's "reward", and I see a lot of people suggesting we should excuse its indulgence purely on this basis - that it's RTD's and Tennant's "reward" for their work on the series. Balls to that, say I - aren't the awards and the fan adulation reward enough? - but we don't need to resort to that to justify it. It works perfectly well within the story - it belongs there. This is the Doctor still drawing it out, still staving off the end, demanding just one more goodbye, even after he's been given the object lessons of the Master's and President's downfall and Wilf's gosh-darned nobility - he knows he's "lived too long" but he still "doesn't want to go". We might, if we wished - although we're really pushing our luck now - infer that when the Doctor cracks on that last line, it's because he too realises this, and sees himself going down the Master's path. Well, it's a thought. That little tantrum/outburst when he has a go at Wilf is a clear Master moment, which finally persuades him that he's lived too long. See, it all ties in.
Admittedly, it did briefly look as though someone had changed the channel when we suddenly found ourselves watching the slightly odd new adventures of Martha and Mickey - what the hell's going on there? - and a couple of these scenes struck a peculiar note, but the scene at Donna's wedding was a lovely wrap-up to this latter part of the RTD era, and then having the Doctor nip back to the beginning - to see Rose before the previous him meets her - rounded the whole thing off quite beautifully. And may I say, if you're going to bring Rose back for one more hurrah after irrevocably stranding her in another dimension, this is how to do it! I think a lot of people who objected to the coda are suffering from cameo fatigue, having watched Journey's End just a few stories ago, but I honestly didn't feel that the cameos here intruded unnecessarily on the story. It all felt quite natural, whereas in Journey's End it really did come across as just a case of piling everything in for the sake of it and hoping for the best. I'd much rather pretend that wretched Journey's End hadn't happened than wish away the end of The End of Time.
(Am I actively looking for new opportunities to slag off Journey's End, the reader might ask? Yes, I am. Sorry.)
Plot now. At the broadest level, it's surprisingly neat: a little supplementary self-resolving loop hanging off the back of the Time War. At a lower level, iffy bits present themselves, but I'm going to postpone the nitpicking for a couple more paragraphs. Indulge me here. In the middle of that, you've got the Master's spur-of-the-moment scheme to turn everybody on Earth into himself. Why? Why the hell not? It's clearly a spontaneous decision on his part, it lets him get back to what he was up to two-and-a-half years ago, and it provides some of the best material in the last year and a bit of Who. The scene of the Masters in the White House at the end of Part One and the first few minutes of Part Two are absolutely priceless.
And then the President of the Time Lords turns up and spoils the Master's shennanigans with a mere wave of his hand. Might seem a little - do excuse me - off-hand (nitpicking, see further below). We move on to the uber-plot, where the President's plan comes back to bite him and the loop resolves itself. And - joy! - it's not a deus ex machina and it's not a plot rewind! (I mean, yes, you could say that the President is the deus ex machina to the Master's plot, but the Master's resolution to the President's plot, and the overall story, seems proper and satisfying to me.)
Other thoughts. I think we might have guessed that whenever the Doctor previously lamented the loss of the Time Lords, he was really painting a picture of them as he'd wished they were. Never mind the Time War turning them bad, they were always like that even in the old series. The cactus aliens - well, can't have RTD's last hurrah without some comedy aliens, and they did at least have a) some fun lines, and b) that nice escape scene, not to mention a "ho-ho!" moment when they spring their escape. Nice to get one more roll-call of amusing names of the monsters of the Time War, even if we didn't actually see any of them. The Pretentious Name. The Golden Retriever. The Ginger Controversy. This is a game you can play at home, too - feel free to join in. The Adjective Noun. The Miami Dolphins. The Princess Bride. I'm drifting.
Time to pick nits:
- The cult who resurrect the Master are fairly well introduced and set up. They're then blown up after five minutes. Then this Naismith guy turns up, and he's barely set up at all. Wouldn't it have been neater to have had one well-set-up group that resurrects the Master and/because they want him to do what Naismith wants him to do? I mean, I can see why RTD did it this way - it allowed him to have a large sequence in between, of the Master running riot in a landfill and the Doctor confronting him, albeit without moving the story forward particularly. I'm just not sure that was the neatest way.
- Re Naismith. We know he's written a book (but not what it's about), we know he wants to make his daughter immortal (though that's the entire depth of his motivation as we're given it), we know he's managed to get his hands on a bit of technology that he believes (without any obvious reason) will help him do this and which he's therefore dubbed "The Immortality Gate". And we know that he knows about the Master, somehow, and that he expects that if his para-ninjas can bring the Master in, he'll be able to make the Gate work. And then Naismith vanishes from the story until it's mentioned right at the end that he was arrested for "unspecified crimes". (Which I choose to interpret as an unpaid parking fine. You may have ideas of your own. But it's hard to see anything, potentially barring the "acquisition" of the Gate from Torchwood - although they're not sanctioned or particularly favoured by the government and their entire infrastructure was recently blown up - that might get Naismith arrested.) He's clearly just a prop character, which makes me wonder all the more why he was given such a prominent place in Part One.
- The head-shaking at the end of Part One - not a technical problem, just wasn't impressed by it visually. And it felt like it went on for about five minutes. If they'd just had a bit of cackling from the Master, a couple of quick shakes and a light spot of morphing, I'd have been happier. Still, the scenes with all the Masters larking about made it all better.
- The idea of a medical device that operates on the entire species rather than on the individual is actually pretty damn stupid, unless you're an amoeba. Or possibly a Sontaran; but even then...
- Donna mustn't ever be reminded about the Doctor, because if she is, she'll die!! Unless, of course, she doesn't. Apparently her ability to simply knock out everybody near her and fall asleep is some sort of defence mechanism that the Doctor has suddenly decided to take credit for, notwithstanding what he's said on the subject on every previous occasion. A very poor hand-waving resolution to that particular slice of cliffhanger. It hurts more that the cliffhanger didn't actually need that extra slice.
- The Doctor takes a bone-breaking fall from a shuttle through a glass dome and onto a hard marble floor - and stands up! (There's no forehead under his quiff - there's just another fist!) Hmm-some.
- The President's magical plot-resolving glove is a potential iffy point, but I'm inclined to let it go because he's the President of the Time Lords, and therefore pretty close to God in the show's mythology. If anyone can literally hand-wave away an element of the plot with complete legitimacy, I suppose it's him. This would also apply to the Clash of the Titans moment where the President (as Zeus) lobs a diamond at a picture of Earth and it actually appears there. (What can get out of a time lock? Nothing! Nothing at all - unless it's really small! But then this whole idea of the time lock was only raised in the now-infamous Series Four finale, when it was also shown that a time lock was something that could be cobbled together by deceased members of Torchwood, so I'd sooner just pretend no one ever said the words than take it seriously.)
- A thought from The Lovely Jo, re the President's plan to escape the end of reality itself by "ascending": has anyone on Gallifrey actually tested this, or are they just relying on the fact that, if it doesn't work out, the President won't be able to complain about it anyway?
- Three things that were made to look supremely important in Part One that weren't addressed in Part Two: the mystery of who accelerated the Ood's development (their telepathic abilities have been getting stronger too, but is that a result of their accelerated development or the other way round? or are both symptoms of something else?); this bit about Wilf being "the centre of coincidence"; and the whole business with the mysterious Time Lady.
This last point is a curious one. Claire Bloom was interviewed a while ago and had to take advice on what she could and couldn't reveal about her part in this story; yet it now appears that even the story itself can't reveal anything about her. Fandom and the production team seem to have a number of suggestions as to her identity - is she the Doctor's mother? the Doctor's granddaughter? the White Guardian? - but really, who she is is the wrong question. It doesn't matter a bean who she is, because the important (and unanswered) question is, how and why does she keep appearing to Wilf?
And in any case, the story shouldn't rely on viewers knowing the minutiae of Old Who continuity to fill in gaps like this. Not if it's made to look like it matters that much to the story.
So admittedly, The End of Time has its plot holes and a number of rabbiti ex hatta. And yet I don't begrudge it them in the same way that I begrudge the Series Four finale its many gross lapses, because there they detracted from the otherwise watchable spectacle posing as a story, whereas here I felt they either didn't matter or at least didn't disrupt the overall proceedings. Yes, for example, the woman in white remains a big gaping contrivance in the story, but her only obvious purpose is to encourage Wilf to bring along his old service revolver and give it to the Doctor, a decision he seems likely to have taken anyway. Lose her from the story outright, and you've lost nothing. If questions are raised about the Ood and then go unanswered, at least they don't affect the outcome of the story - lose the Ood and just have the Doctor turn up on Earth in Part One, and you're no worse off. Donna's end-of-episode headache, or the aura of mystery built up around Wilf - no need to look for improvements, because they didn't need to be in there at all. Which does beg the question of why RTD felt the need to include them and ask the Beeb for a special 75-minute Part Two, but hey, the Beeb let him have it. Anyone bothered by it could simply fast-forward those bits or ignore them as they go along with no ill effect whatsoever. Compare this with the resolution of Journey's End, where Donna dispatches the entire Dalek fleet (trans: the writer dispatches the entire script) simply by pressing a couple of keys ("Delete" and "Escape", I might suggest) on a keyboard that has no conceivable right to be where it is or do what it does.
(Just can't help myself, folks. It's bitterness that I can't buy Turn Left on DVD without also paying for a certain two-parter that I don't like.)
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why I give The End of Time a nice high 8 out of 10.
And now we have Matt Smith, breath of fresh air that he is. His first few seconds as the Doctor, and the trailer for the next series, seem carefully designed not to spook fans who've grown used to Who done the RTD/Tennant way, but hopefully we'll see something new in the spring. Well, something newer than bloody Daleks again, anyway.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Swirly Thing Alert
TV SF specials a-plenty this Easter. And yet "special" wasn't really the word, in the end.
Doctor Who - Planet of the Dead
At last, an episode of New Who in which you can actually see a double-decker bus being driven through the hole in the story. I'm assuming that was deliberate on the scriptwriters' part. Best to give the benefit of the doubt.
The actual base plot - space locusts create wormholes from planet to planet, next wormhole happens to lead to Earth - was extremely simple and would have made a solid comic strip storyline. It should have taken some stretching to make an hour-long special out of it, yet strangely the story just seemed to fly by. All that time for explanations, character development... padding... and yet it just drifted straight past the eyeballs. Inconsequential is the word. It was candy-floss Who. The seasonal special you can watch without ruining your appetite. No fattening tension, no filling drama. In itself, it isn't a problem for the Who seasonal special to be insubstantial fluff, provided that the visuals are pretty, the characters are interesting and the dialogue is zingy.
It's at this point that you should imagine your humble blogger briefly grimacing and sucking in his breath.
Dubai - why? Let's all go to an exotic location, shipping a bus out with us (and crushing the top deck along the way), so that we can take full advantage of... the sand. Lots and lots of the boring yellowy stuff you can find easily and cheaply in substantial quantities right here in England, or else mock up with CGI and a studio set. The guest aliens - two blokes in boiler suits with big fly heads on. Just when you thought RTD might finally have got over having obvious men with (terrestrial) animal heads for aliens. As characters, they were thrown away after only a couple of scenes anyway, so perhaps it wasn't deemed worth the effort of doing anything more inventive. The flying monsters were at least quite pretty.
Only one definite character in the guest cast in Dubai, and that was Lady Christina de Souza. Yes, nice to have an assertive female assistant who's a match for the Doctor, but I'm quite glad not to have her as a regular. The posh accent was a bit ropey and as a character she was already starting to get on my nerves by the end. The rest of the bus passengers didn't really have anything to do except stay on the bus and variously scream, loaf and make cod ominous pronouncements. Damned if I can name any one of them now, mere days after the event. Damned if I could have fifteen minutes after transmission, or even tell you how many of them there were. Back on the London tunnel set, we had an off-the-peg comedy boffin; we had a UNIT captain whose job was to threaten the comedy boffin with a gun until there wasn't any need, after which everybody apparently agreed to pretend that the whole gun thing had never really happened at all, and to amusingly salute the Doctor because we all know he hates that kind of thing; and that was about it.
No stand-out zingers in the script either. The one bit that sticks in my mind was the comedy boffin telling the Doctor he'd watched all his DVDs (or some such thing) and the Doctor saying he bet The One With The Giant Robot was his favourite - and that's only because I'd mentally inserted the follow-up "Ah, no, actually that one was a bit crap, Doctor". And then, at the end, the Fear Her moment - the abrupt insertion of a bit of heavy-handed laid-on-with-a-trowel doomy foreshadowing. "He will knock four times" - gee willerkins, wouldn't be two postmen, would it? (Edit: that joke only works if, like me, you completely forget for a couple of days that The Postman Always Rings Twice. Numpty.) No, I think we can all guess who's in David Tennant's big finale.
So not an actively bad episode, but not really actively anything. This is Doctor Who, in the Year of Specials, when it ought to be giving us nothing but Event TV, decidedly marking time. Let's say 5 out of 10. The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre have already produced their take on it:
Excellent point about the TARDIS.
Red Dwarf - Back to Earth
Now this is a shocker - apparently the ratings for this were not only Dave's best ever, but favourably comparable to Torchwood's ratings. And if a niche satellite channel can mount a successful comeback for Red Dwarf a full decade after the last TV series on a budget of naff all, there surely isn't any good reason why the Beeb couldn't pump some serious money into a full series.
The only question is, should they?
After seeing Back to Earth, I'm more firmly convinced than ever that Red Dwarf is a show that has had its day. I think the essence of the show in its heyday, what originally gave it much of its charm - apart of course from the excellent interaction between the cast - was that it was filmed on a physical stage set in front of an audience. It always worked best as a kind of theatre, and I think the move away from that as much as the departure of one half of the writing team spoiled the show for me after Series 6. Red Dwarf was always SF second, a sitcom first, and nothing gave the comedy a bigger boost than having a studio audience reacting to what the cast were doing, so that they could themselves react by discovering which bits of the script or their performance were funniest and ramping those up to best effect. People have said that what these new episodes were missing (like Series 7) was the sound of audience laughter, but I believe that's only the surface symptom of the true problem - without that feedback at the time of filming, the performances fall flat.
It doesn't help that there was bugger all comedy in the script in the first place. Rob Grant is still sorely missed.
Part 1 looked quite promising. Better than Series 8, although that wasn't hard. The nice shiny CGI didn't jar like the blocky, primary colour CGI in Series 7 and 8 did - the "outside" shot of the Garden of Remembrance can hold its head up high next to lovely model shots like the Series 2 observation dome. Even a few smiles and a chuckle or two in the bunkroom scenes.
And then it all went horribly wrong in Part 2. The script was exactly what you'd expect to get if you showed the plot outline to a teenager and asked him to write a fanfic around it. The plugging of the merchandise was merciless. The child actors were possibly the worst in the country. And for extra cheeky self-reference, throw in spurious references to a ninth and tenth series, although apparently the only interesting thing to happen in these two missing series (and ten missing years) is that Kochanski leaves Lister while he's in the bath. I don't think we missed much there.
It was in Part 3 that the Blade Runner references came to the fore (after a brief ropey interlude on the set of Corrie). This chimed nicely with the theme of the characters learning of their imminent deaths and asking their creator for more life, although it didn't sit well with the present-day real-world setting. Still, it gave the set designers a chance to show what they could do on a low budget, and it all looked good. (Implausibly, we're now asked to retroactively believe that the entire series was originally inspired by Blade Runner, even though the resemblance is non-existent and the obvious source film is Dark Star. Tsk.) Sadly, the ending was pat and, by retreading an old RD storyline, it only made it look as though Doug Naylor had run out of fresh ideas. The mash-up of reality and Blade Runner may have been awkward but it was livelier than the wrap-up.
Overall, a disappointment with occasional nice bits. Some good acting from the cast. Carbug was nice, as a prop. The pacing within scenes was bad, slowing the dialogue down which didn't help the less-than-zingy script - was this the fault of the director (Doug Naylor doubling up - not his first time, either) or the editor (if there was one - I can't find a credit anywhere for a production editor on this, which might explain things). Could've used some more close-ups of the actors' faces too - now that would be down to the director. Some moments where it seemed as though different versions of the script were poking through - what exactly was the point of the Russian hologram character, when she was disposed of so arbitrarily, and was there any reason at all for the strange Police Squad pause before Part 2's advert break (I'd expected some post-modern reference to the advert break, but alas, no)? A more satisfying coda to the show than the end of Series 8, perhaps, but still no great shakes.
Still, imagine if Doctor Who's comeback after sixteen years had looked like this. Small mercies, eh?
Doctor Who - Planet of the Dead
At last, an episode of New Who in which you can actually see a double-decker bus being driven through the hole in the story. I'm assuming that was deliberate on the scriptwriters' part. Best to give the benefit of the doubt.
The actual base plot - space locusts create wormholes from planet to planet, next wormhole happens to lead to Earth - was extremely simple and would have made a solid comic strip storyline. It should have taken some stretching to make an hour-long special out of it, yet strangely the story just seemed to fly by. All that time for explanations, character development... padding... and yet it just drifted straight past the eyeballs. Inconsequential is the word. It was candy-floss Who. The seasonal special you can watch without ruining your appetite. No fattening tension, no filling drama. In itself, it isn't a problem for the Who seasonal special to be insubstantial fluff, provided that the visuals are pretty, the characters are interesting and the dialogue is zingy.
It's at this point that you should imagine your humble blogger briefly grimacing and sucking in his breath.
Dubai - why? Let's all go to an exotic location, shipping a bus out with us (and crushing the top deck along the way), so that we can take full advantage of... the sand. Lots and lots of the boring yellowy stuff you can find easily and cheaply in substantial quantities right here in England, or else mock up with CGI and a studio set. The guest aliens - two blokes in boiler suits with big fly heads on. Just when you thought RTD might finally have got over having obvious men with (terrestrial) animal heads for aliens. As characters, they were thrown away after only a couple of scenes anyway, so perhaps it wasn't deemed worth the effort of doing anything more inventive. The flying monsters were at least quite pretty.
Only one definite character in the guest cast in Dubai, and that was Lady Christina de Souza. Yes, nice to have an assertive female assistant who's a match for the Doctor, but I'm quite glad not to have her as a regular. The posh accent was a bit ropey and as a character she was already starting to get on my nerves by the end. The rest of the bus passengers didn't really have anything to do except stay on the bus and variously scream, loaf and make cod ominous pronouncements. Damned if I can name any one of them now, mere days after the event. Damned if I could have fifteen minutes after transmission, or even tell you how many of them there were. Back on the London tunnel set, we had an off-the-peg comedy boffin; we had a UNIT captain whose job was to threaten the comedy boffin with a gun until there wasn't any need, after which everybody apparently agreed to pretend that the whole gun thing had never really happened at all, and to amusingly salute the Doctor because we all know he hates that kind of thing; and that was about it.
No stand-out zingers in the script either. The one bit that sticks in my mind was the comedy boffin telling the Doctor he'd watched all his DVDs (or some such thing) and the Doctor saying he bet The One With The Giant Robot was his favourite - and that's only because I'd mentally inserted the follow-up "Ah, no, actually that one was a bit crap, Doctor". And then, at the end, the Fear Her moment - the abrupt insertion of a bit of heavy-handed laid-on-with-a-trowel doomy foreshadowing. "He will knock four times" - gee willerkins, wouldn't be two postmen, would it? (Edit: that joke only works if, like me, you completely forget for a couple of days that The Postman Always Rings Twice. Numpty.) No, I think we can all guess who's in David Tennant's big finale.
So not an actively bad episode, but not really actively anything. This is Doctor Who, in the Year of Specials, when it ought to be giving us nothing but Event TV, decidedly marking time. Let's say 5 out of 10. The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theatre have already produced their take on it:
Excellent point about the TARDIS.
Red Dwarf - Back to Earth
Now this is a shocker - apparently the ratings for this were not only Dave's best ever, but favourably comparable to Torchwood's ratings. And if a niche satellite channel can mount a successful comeback for Red Dwarf a full decade after the last TV series on a budget of naff all, there surely isn't any good reason why the Beeb couldn't pump some serious money into a full series.
The only question is, should they?
After seeing Back to Earth, I'm more firmly convinced than ever that Red Dwarf is a show that has had its day. I think the essence of the show in its heyday, what originally gave it much of its charm - apart of course from the excellent interaction between the cast - was that it was filmed on a physical stage set in front of an audience. It always worked best as a kind of theatre, and I think the move away from that as much as the departure of one half of the writing team spoiled the show for me after Series 6. Red Dwarf was always SF second, a sitcom first, and nothing gave the comedy a bigger boost than having a studio audience reacting to what the cast were doing, so that they could themselves react by discovering which bits of the script or their performance were funniest and ramping those up to best effect. People have said that what these new episodes were missing (like Series 7) was the sound of audience laughter, but I believe that's only the surface symptom of the true problem - without that feedback at the time of filming, the performances fall flat.
It doesn't help that there was bugger all comedy in the script in the first place. Rob Grant is still sorely missed.
Part 1 looked quite promising. Better than Series 8, although that wasn't hard. The nice shiny CGI didn't jar like the blocky, primary colour CGI in Series 7 and 8 did - the "outside" shot of the Garden of Remembrance can hold its head up high next to lovely model shots like the Series 2 observation dome. Even a few smiles and a chuckle or two in the bunkroom scenes.
And then it all went horribly wrong in Part 2. The script was exactly what you'd expect to get if you showed the plot outline to a teenager and asked him to write a fanfic around it. The plugging of the merchandise was merciless. The child actors were possibly the worst in the country. And for extra cheeky self-reference, throw in spurious references to a ninth and tenth series, although apparently the only interesting thing to happen in these two missing series (and ten missing years) is that Kochanski leaves Lister while he's in the bath. I don't think we missed much there.
It was in Part 3 that the Blade Runner references came to the fore (after a brief ropey interlude on the set of Corrie). This chimed nicely with the theme of the characters learning of their imminent deaths and asking their creator for more life, although it didn't sit well with the present-day real-world setting. Still, it gave the set designers a chance to show what they could do on a low budget, and it all looked good. (Implausibly, we're now asked to retroactively believe that the entire series was originally inspired by Blade Runner, even though the resemblance is non-existent and the obvious source film is Dark Star. Tsk.) Sadly, the ending was pat and, by retreading an old RD storyline, it only made it look as though Doug Naylor had run out of fresh ideas. The mash-up of reality and Blade Runner may have been awkward but it was livelier than the wrap-up.
Overall, a disappointment with occasional nice bits. Some good acting from the cast. Carbug was nice, as a prop. The pacing within scenes was bad, slowing the dialogue down which didn't help the less-than-zingy script - was this the fault of the director (Doug Naylor doubling up - not his first time, either) or the editor (if there was one - I can't find a credit anywhere for a production editor on this, which might explain things). Could've used some more close-ups of the actors' faces too - now that would be down to the director. Some moments where it seemed as though different versions of the script were poking through - what exactly was the point of the Russian hologram character, when she was disposed of so arbitrarily, and was there any reason at all for the strange Police Squad pause before Part 2's advert break (I'd expected some post-modern reference to the advert break, but alas, no)? A more satisfying coda to the show than the end of Series 8, perhaps, but still no great shakes.
Still, imagine if Doctor Who's comeback after sixteen years had looked like this. Small mercies, eh?
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