Day Three Hundred and Sixty-four - Dr.Who: Series 6, Episodes 8-14, "You just can't kill this SOB, can you? Even when you try."

Yes, I know about the hand off from Eleven to Twelve and, yes, it was the most watched thing in BBC history for its timeslot, apparently, but THAT season isn't on Netflix at the moment, is it? No, it most certainly is not. So no Fields of Trenzalore or John Hurt or Peter Capaldi or Clara Oswald.

No, no, no.

Instead, these last seven episodes currently available on Netflix encompass the much anticipated climax of River Song's much hinted marriage/murder of The Doctor. In fact, the beginning of the season was us watching The Impossible Astronaut actually doing so... and it's taken this long for everything else to catch up.

We start with Let's Kill Hitler, where a childhood friend of Amy and Rory's, whom we've never heard or seen before today but apparently was close enough that they named their daughter Melody after, forces our trio of time travelers to go to Berlin at gunpoint. Of course, it turns out that this Melody is actually their daughter Melody, in a regeneration she got after we last saw her dying on the streets... and she actually does manage to kill The Doctor after regenerating into the face we know so well before her better nature is appealed to and she spends all her regenerations (she can do that, apparently) to bring him back.

This is a fun episode for several reasons. For one, Hitler's in it for all of five minutes before he's shoved into a closet at gunpoint. Humiliating der Führer, then relegating him to a footnote in his own episode? Priceless. It's also great because it shows River before she's even River. I actually wish we had a bit more on that front, not to deny Alex Kingston screentime, but to not have everything be in such a rush, but oh well.

Next is a trip to a housing estate where a young boy is being tormented by his fears and manages to trap Amy, Rory, The Doctor, and his own father in a dimensional dollhouse where his fears live to torment him.

It's a sort of creepy episode, but never really gets beyond its own novelty. The whole "turning into dolls" device is boring as all get out, though I do like how The Doctor fast talks his way first into the apartment and then to the root of the problem, using his powers of persuasion to squeeze out answers from both father and son using only his words.

After that is a sort of "what if" episode that has Amy caught in a different time stream than The Doctor and Rory such that she is trapped for 30+ years in a quarantine facility in the future and her boys only catch up to her very, very late, leaving a possible paradox in that Old Amy doesn't want to die but that would mean leaving Young Amy to suffer through what her older self calls Hell.

I understand that Rory is the humanity anchor for the trio and his decisions all revolve around doing what is for the best and preserving life at any cost, but it feels like a simple decision both for him and for Old Amy to make. She's been living in her own private Hell for decades and has a chance to render it all moot. Sure, "rage, rage against the dying of the light" and all, but I can't see myself not making the choice to save my previous self all the trouble. I guess it's one of those impossible thought puzzles as I'll almost certainly never have to deal with anything similar, but my own feelings on the paradox spoiled the episode for me. That and the pancake makeup on Karen Gillan wearing thin in the closeups.

Moving on, we come to God Complex where the trio get caught in a spooky hotel where your worst nightmare is waiting for you to convert you to brainfood for a strange, hulking minotaur.

This is a silly as all get out episode, what with the Sad-faced Clown, the crap tons of ventriloquist dummies, and The Doctor seeing his fear but not having it revealed to the audience (personally, I think it's just Toby Jones again, or possibly just an empty universe). Still, the moment where he has to break Amy's faith in him is a pretty revealing one, even if he half-dials it back a bit after the fact. It just feels like ground we've already covered. For a bottle episode, it's not that bad, but could've been much better.

After dropping the Ponds off back at home, The Doctor starts making his last minute rounds to old friends and we get to see Closing Time where he reunites with Craig from The Lodger who is a new father now to Stormaggedon (at least, that's what the baby calls himself) and whose local department store is being targeted by damaged Cybermen. Cue The Doctor, male bonding, same-sex couple miscommunication, and plenty of comedy.

This is actually a fairly fun episode, almost purely due to The Doctor's non-adventure related antics and Stormaggedon. Having asides coming from the baby through The Doctor (because he speaks baby, remember) is cute as all get out, especially as Craig waffles between believing and not. I can always do without The Cybermen (and Daleks and so on), but since they're not the main focus of the episode, I can safely say that they don't annoy me here like they do elsewhere (same for their cameo a few nights back in A Good Man Goes to War).

I can safely say I was surprised, though, with The Wedding of River Song, which did NOT turn into the giant multipart episode that I was expecting and, instead, was merely the penultimate episode of the season since (by Netflix's reckoning and maybe the BBC's as I don't own the DVDs and haven't checked) the series ended on the Christmas special.

The episode throws us right into the middle of all of Time (with a capital "T") mashing Earth's history together and The Doctor explaining to old friend Winston Churchill, Caesar of the Holy Roman Empire, why it's always two minutes after five on the same day... forever. This leads us to a sort of frame story where The Doctor explains how River managed to circumvent the fixed moment in Time that was The Doctor's death and is blowing up reality. From there it's just a hop, skip, and a jump to Amy, Rory, and River leading a revolution and only River and The Doctor knowing why.

Of course everything turns out alright in the end as the heavily hinted at solution to the whole thing (from Let's Kill Hitler) just happens to have shown up earlier in the episode. Well, at least the writers managed to seed their solution earlier than the ABSOLUTE last minute like so many other episodes of Doctor Who, but still. Could've been a little more elegant.

The last episode that is currently available on Netflix's Instant Stream, The Doctor, The Widow, And The Wardrobe, is a little bittersweet... both for me, personally, and in general. There's no River, barely a moment for Rory and Amy, and features a whole cast of one-off characters that are just entirely too sweet to occupy a single episode. But that's the way of it, I guess.

For some reason, during the cold open, The Doctor is on an exploding ship in orbit over Earth just before the Second World War and manages to get help from a mother who takes his spacesuit and alien-ness right in stride. After that brief intro sequence, time shifts forward a few years where that same mother is spending Christmas with her two children in the country to be safe from The Blitz and she's dreading telling them that her husband is MIA, presumed dead. The Doctor shows up as The Caretaker of the estate they're staying in and has souped up the place with gadgets and gizmos and extraplanar doors, oh my. This leads to an almost deadly adventure, concerning the entire family, where it's up to the mom to save the day.

This one really pulls at the heart-strings thanks to all of The Doctor's "child of wonder" antics and repeated "I know"'s. The trio of future forestry engineers are really rather precious as well, played as they are by Bill Bailey, Arabella Weir, and Paul Bazely. I do think the best moment, though, was at the end when The Doctor goes to visit Amy and Rory for Christmas dinner. Sure, it would've been nice for River to have been there as well, but you can't always get what you want.

And... I think that about does it. For my time with Doctor Who on Netflix anyways, at least until they put Series 7 on the Instant Stream.

It's been a weird couple of weeks and a very long year for me in terms of Whovian consumption. Yes, I will admit that the series has grown on me as time has worn on. Not those first few seasons, of course, but definitely during David Tennant's later episodes and most certainly during Matt Smith's run. I think Smith and Gillan made Doctor Who infinitely more palatable for me with their charm, wit, and charisma... not to mention their (and Darvill's) chemistry. And River... oh, River Song, even though I think you got shortchanged by all the rushing towards the end, you are by far my favorite character. Kudos, Alex Kingston.

Welp, just one more day before I'm done for the year. Any guesses as to how I'm going to finish out the Couchbound Project? My Year With Netflix? Place your bets now, because tomorrow is coming right quick!

Until that tomorrow, Potatoes~

1!

Day Three Hundred and Sixty - Dr.Who: Series 5, Episodes 8-13, "It's the End of the Universe... AGAIN! Wait. 'Again' again? Or just 'Again?'"

As the first of Matt Smith's seasons draws to a close, it's relatively fun (and sometimes mildly annoying) to watch he and Karen Gillan (and Arthur Darvill) fend off beasties and cease to exist only to come back from the brink in typical Deus Ex Whovian fashion. There's something so much more appealing about Smith's goofy charisma and Gillan's self-assured rawr-factor. Of the spread, as much as nostalgia dictates I should pick Baker or angsty aggression says I should pick Tennant, Matt Smith's run has definitely been the most pleasing to me so far.

Anyways, onwards through the episodes... gotta chug away if I'm going to make the end of Series 6 by New Year's.

Tonight starts with the two parter The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood where The Doctor, Amy, and Rory get trapped in a small English town where miners have accidentally broken into an ancient civilization of dinosaur peoples' hibernation creche and have managed to piss off it's overly aggressive war leader. Tensions mount as each side takes hostages and inflict casualties, leading to Rory's heroic death to save The Doctor from a Homo Reptilia firehose weapon (seriously, that prop looked ridiculous). Still, peace may be possible yet, in a thousand years, thanks to the cooler heads of the diplomatic and science castes of reptiloids helping The Doctor, et al., save the day.

The monsters of the week (or two weeks, really) are rather boring, with their inevitable conflicts and betrayals being telegraphed too obviously, but there are still some strong points to the episode. For one, there's the time paradox device of Rory and Amy standing on a hilly overlook at a far distance waving at themselves. It's not explained this season, but there's a moment where present Amy and The Doctor have to rationalize why Future Rory has disappeared from the hill. Mysteries for some future date... as it's certainly not explained THIS season.

Moving on, now Rory-less as he, the love of Amy's life, is no more, eaten by the time crack (important season arc plot point that) and she has forgotten him, The Doctor and Amy go to the aid of Vincent Van Gogh (pronounced "gouggghf?" I never knew that) thanks to spotting a possible alien in one of his paintings. Along they way they bond with the moody painter and thwart the strange, invisible monster of the week while managing to inspire the doomed artist to his greatness.

The conflict, like with most episodes, is boring and convenient dreck, but the interpersonal relations between Vincent and the time travelers is emotive enough to be pleasing. While I think it's the height of irresponsibility to take someone into the future just to show them they haven't been forgotten, I'm not a Time Lord so I don't get to decide. I should point out that I really enjoyed Bill Nighy's cameo as the museum director. While he doesn't have much screen time, his back and forth with Matt Smith over bow ties is delightful.

Quick shoutout to the imagination sequence that has Starry Night playing out in fully CGI glory in the night sky for Vincent, The Doctor, and Amy. Beautiful.

Next is "The Lodger" where Amy gets trapped in a time jumping TARDIS and The Doctor gets stranded in modern England, forced via hints to take up lodging with a shy man who is secretly in love with his best friend and whose upstairs tenant is a mystery that The Doctor needs to solve in order to save both local lives and the TARDIS, itself.

Like the others, I find the threat an afterthought and the small bits of The Doctor interacting with humans to be genius. I love the way he inserts himself into the life of young Craig and manages to both help and threaten the man's existence. Sure, the romance is a little bit of nerd wish-fulfillment, a la Chuck, but it's cute nevertheless. This episode also helps to set up the time travel device of leaving notes to help oneself in the future/past that will be of paramount importance in the next couple of episodes.

Said device is immediately apparent at the beginning of The Pandorica Opens where River Song leaves a message for The Doctor that takes him and Amy back to Roman era Britannia where she delivers a message from Vincent Van Gough that was relayed through Winston Churchill to her (look at all of the Seasonal Continuity). It's a warning for the near future about the destruction of the TARDIS and leads them to a giant plot MacGuffin called the Pandorica, which all the hostile aliens in existence are swarming to 100AD Earth to deal with.

This is another two-parter, combined with The Big Bang, in which The Doctor tries to stave off the combined forces of all his old enemies... Daleks, Sontarans, Cybermen, Judoon, etc., plus the dinosaur people from "The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood" for some reason (my guess is "because the costumes were available")... but it turns out the whole thing was a trap to seal off The Doctor from the universe in order to save it from the cracks in time. Weird, twisted, Whovian logic that should piss me off but instead just washes over me. I accept things like this now, but that doesn't mean I enjoy it.

I do like having River back, of course. She'll always flip my switch as the concept of her character is just so damned intriguing. Plus, it's hard not to enjoy Karen Gillan. I think she's the perfect companion. Adventurous and direct, aggressive, but not violent... emotive and loyal. Just an all around well written personality played by a beautiful actress.

I can't say that I was all that impressed with the return of Rory (more Deus Ex drivel) or the saving of the universe. I actually could've been behind the whole "Big Bang Two" bit if they'd followed through and NOT kept the series going. If that had been the end of Doctor Who, I probably would've been satisfied with it. Instead, more Deus Ex nonsense and fan pandering. At least they'll explain River's backstory next season, which we'll start on Saturday. Still, feels like false drama looking back.

That being said, the "Crack in Time" story-arcing that they did this season was much more effective than the whole of the Bad Wolf seeding that the showrunners did during Eccleston's and Tennant's runs. Much tighter and entertaining, and oddly more believable. Can't believe I'm saying that in concert with Doctor Who.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

5!

Uh-oh, Netflix is DOWN at the moment. Luckily I had finished today's binge before the crash, but I hope it resolves before tomorrow. Wouldn't do to not be able to finish Couchbound this late in the game!

Day Three Hundred and Fifty-six - Dr.Who: Series 4, Episodes 12-18, "The Last Great Battles of The Tenth Doctor..."

...not to mention his companions all make appearances, everyone from Sarah Jane to Martha to Jack to Rose-freaking-Tyler, herself.

The first episode of this long slog to the advent of the Eleventh is entitled Turn Left and features Donna almost exclusively as she gets attacked by some sort of "potentiality consuming" beetle that feeds on the alterations to a timeline that could change a persons life... like say Donna turning left for a job closer to home than the temp gig that introduced her to The Doctor. That one choice leads not only to The Doctor's death (without regeneration) after the Christmas confrontation with the Racnoss and the other major battles on modern Earth. With each Doctor-less dilemma, more and more of Earth's heroes lose their lives to stem the tide of destruction.

This is a fun concept episode to watch, especially since the writers decided to pay particular attention to the causality issues of The Doctor being absent. With no Doctor there would be no Yana regeneration into The Master, which means no Saxon. What I don't get is how Rose manages to avoid the causality shifts and knows why Donna is the focal point.

After Donna pulls it back together and dies for her regular self, she and The Doctor have to confront an ancient enemy that has stolen the entire Earth, along with dozens of other planets from space and time, in order to destroy all of reality that doesn't please them. Any guesses as to who? I mean, it could be any number of enemies, but it's the Daleks. Of course it's the Daleks.

It's a two-parter that drags the conflict out with lots more cameos from companions past. Sarah Jane, Captain Jack, Mickey, Rose, Jackie, and even Harriet Jones (former Prime Minister) defy the Daleks and Davros himself in order to save the Doctor and the world... but that's not all, thanks to an almost death at the end of a Dalek egg-beater, the Doctor regenerates not only his severed hand, but Donna as well, giving her his mind and his doppelganger a human heart... as well as all of his memories and experiences.

It's rather hilarious to see The Doctor Donna fasttalk her way through typical Whovian MacGuffin speak and easily defeat/confound/spin the Daleks. I also rather like the episode because it gives lots of action to all of the various companions that the Tenth has had over the years. Because of it all, I actually found myself enjoying seeing Mickey and Jackie. Maybe it's because they weren't daft idiots the whole time, actually proving useful with their guns and teleporters. Maybe it's because of nostalgia. I don't know. Either way, I was fairly happy with them... all of them. It was just the actual Dalek Doomsday itself that was silly and stupid.

After another tearful sendoff for Rose, et al., The Doctor goes back in time to the mid-18th century where The Cybermen have some grand plan in the works and it's up to The Doctor... both of them... to stop it. At first, it seems like The Doctor has caught up with some future incarnation of himself, but as time goes on, the truth is revealed that it's just a brainscramble that's tricked a local human into thinking he's The Doctor.

It's a cute episode to see a degenerated almost-Doctor trying to fight evil with his "sonic" screwdriver and inflatable TARDIS ballon, but that's all it is, really... cute. For the most part, the villains are boring and pedantic as we've all seen Cybermen before, this episode only taking a few new slants like the cat/dog Cybers, the female Cyberking, and the giant Cyber robot. It's all so much sound a noise. Spectacle to cater to the fans with no real substance.

The Waters of Mars, however, this is prime soft-scifi material worthy of The Outer Limits. The Doctor travels to mid-twenty-first century Mars where he encounters the first human colonists on the day of their deaths. It seems the commander of the mission is fated to trigger a nuclear explosion that wipes them and their base off the face of the Red Planet. The Doctor discovers that its their fate, a fixed moment in time, to die running from a sentient water virus... and has the hubris to defy the rules of paradox and help the survivors.

While I may enjoy the cheese and melodrama of other episodes, it's The Waters of Mars that makes the series for me. It shows The Doctor as having as much arrogance as the rest of us humans and, despite the guise of his immortality and alien-ness, The Doctor is a most compelling HUMAN character. It's not necessarily a fun or well-written episode, what with its one-off villain being so bad, conceptually, but the moral questions it begs are tremendous.

Last, but not least, is the two-parter that sends David Tennant off and welcomes Matt Smith as The Eleventh. After falling from grace, The Doctor gets a visit from Ood Sigma and races off to commune with the Ood for a warning about the return of The Master. Events have been set in motion (and retconned on the freaking fly by Timothy Dalton) to bring the Timelords trapped in the Time Lock back. It's all just one loop. The Timelords, The Master, Earth... everything is shoe-horned together in order to present The Tenth with a single choice: murder his race again or doom the entire universe.

Easy choice, that, I think... but it's all so much noise again, cheap melodrama with no actual worth aside from nostalgia. It's nice to see all of the companions for a second time this season as The Tenth has enough time before regenerating to hop in the TARDIS and see them all. I think my favorite was Jack and Alonso at a deep space Mos Eisley.

At the end of the fourth series and the last of David Tennant's run (save for his series 7 cameo with John Hurt), I find myself both content and disgusted. There are far better series out there and Doctor Who can be fun, but it's so very stupid half the time, with all of its handwaving. These are arguments that I should probably save till I'm well and done (hopefully by the end of the year), but I still feel a little bummed even now.

Still, miles to go before I sleep. As Tennant's Doctor would say... Alons-y!

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

9!

Day Three Hundred and Twenty-seven - Dr.Who: Series 2, Episode 7, "Good thing there was an extra Rickey... er, Mickey... whatever."

As far as two-parters go, Age of Steel was definitely better than it's companion piece, Rise of the Cybermen. It felt very much like its predecessor was all about the tease of Cybermen than about the silly threat they post.

I mean, sure, they have no mercy or need for sleep, and can march endlessly in their quest for more humans to upgrade, but their only weapon is grabbing onto you with their electric jazz hands of death. I have a suspicious feeling that, without their Deus Ex mind control ear buds, just about every soul under seventy could've easily avoided their wrath long enough to find The Doctor's eventual solution.

Still, in spite of that, Age of Steel is a quaint little tale of free will versus control, as evidenced by several of the minor characters who don't survive the night, including (but not limited to): the evil henchman, Rickey, Mrs.Moore, Jackie 2.0, and thousands more residents of London. I honestly don't get why the CyberController didn't just upgrade The Doctor, Rose, and Pete. It's what I would've done as a metallic despot with no soul, but then we wouldn't have had a chance to see David Tennant's stirring speech about the imagination, creativity, passion, and pain of humanity.

Personally, I think I could've written a better one... but that's just my opinion and the Free Market has spoken as I haven't gotten paid the big bucks to do just that.

Another thing to like about this episode is that it finally gives Mickey a chance to be something other than an afterthought, something that the writers were apparently aware of and struggling with for some time. Sure, we'll see him again later (or will we?), but I think this was a fitting enough sendoff to the character such that he didn't need to come back.

As far as cheesy (often alien, but not here) threats go, I don't hate how the Cybermen were presented. They're just as ridiculous as they've always been, but in comparison to the majority of Whovian villainy (Weeping Angels notwithstanding), they're not horrible. I don't know, I'm conflicted. On the one hand, I'm glad they didn't get all that radical a redesign (just look at the furor over Daleks of different colors) from their classic motif, but they're still utterly laughable to look at.

On the whole, I can be happy with this episode because 1)they killed Jackie (well, alt-Jackie, anyway), 2)they killed Mickey (Rickey), 3)Mickey is done being a companion, and 4)Pete isn't ready to be a father in ANY universe. It's still mostly crap to me, but it didn't hurt to watch as much as many other episodes of Dr.Who.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Three Hundred and Twenty-five - Dr.Who: Series 2, Episode 6, "DELETE! DELETE! DELETE!"

If there's one thing that I hate about Dr.Who, and I've probably mentioned this before, it's the constant refresh of old fan-favorite villains. I know that I'm the minority, but I despise the Daleks and Cybermen, and guess who shows up in this alternate reality of Earth that The Doctor, Rose, and Mickey manage to MacGuffin their way into?

The Cybermen.

Toasters on their heads and everything, the Cybermen have returned to the Whovian universe... well, a version of it anyway, where Britain is a society under siege with curfews for the poor and zeppelins for the rich. This is also a Britain where Rose's father, Pete, is still alive and married to Jackie. Also, they're in the money... and there's no Rose. Well, there is a Rose, but not the one played by Billy Piper. No, the Rose in this universe is a lapdog. Literally.

Anyways, the meat of the episode is the coup that a Howard Hughes type attempts against the President of the UK (Get it? President instead of Prime Minister? It really IS a parallel universe! XP) in the form of the Human 2.0 Upgrade, which turns out to be a forced conversion into Cybermen.

Aside from the return of the Cybermen, I'm also annoyed by the instant stupidity that both Mickey and Rose seem to catch when they find out that they're in an alternate reality. Despite Mickey knowing just what can happen in A-U stories thanks to movies and television, he still runs off to visit his not-dead A-U grandma... and Rose does the same in looking for Pete, her father. I mean, really? Have they learned absolutely nothing thanks to their time traveling antics? Especially Rose after she nearly destroyed all reality by trying to save her father from the car accident that killed him in her own universe?

It's also annoying how spoonfed the clues are concerning the "eventual" reveal of the Cybermen. Whether it's the earbud antennae that form the familiar head box or the out of focus Cyber at the beginning and the near constant shots of their stomping feet during the rank and file attack on Jackie's birthday party... it's all just one big already spoiled tease.

More ham-fisted writing on behalf of the crew, I suppose. Only so much you can do to get the primary conflicts of an episode this ridiculous started.

But, it's all to be expected, I guess. Dr.Who is only okay on its best of days, so there are bound to be some pandering crapfests here and there, even if it had been improving lately. Sad thing for me is that this is a two part episode (which I will get to, probably in the next few days). Such is life.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~