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-two - Dr.Who: Series 6, Episodes 1-7, "At last, River Song's origins are explained."

I want to say something immediately and highly critical of Series 6... it has a stupid intro sequence. For some reason that has yet to be explained to me, there's an introduction in front of every episode that is narrated from Amy Pond's perspective explaining her life with The Doctor.

Why... oh, WHY... was this deemed necessary or expedient?

After successfully (via deus ex) rebooting the universe at the end of Series 5, and apparently having dropped Rory and Amy back off to live their lives separate for a while, the newlyweds plus River Song receive invitations from The Doctor to visit America, which they do... only to witness him being murdered by someone in an Apollo-era spacesuit.

With The Doctor dead, they meet up with a younger version of himself and find themselves unable to tell him about it but vow to investigate with him and their only clue, the name of the fifth party invited to the soiree which turns out to be that of an ex-FBI agent. This leads them on a mad quest which includes Richard Nixon, creepy Men-in-Black called The Silence, and a little girl running from said spacemen.

This is a pretty sweet two-parter, even despite the weird MacGuffins and convenient saves. For one thing, it has Mark Sheppard playing the FBI agent, and that's just grand as I miss his Badger in Firefly. Hell, I miss Firefly. For another, there's the great opening device of half a dozen quick moments in The Doctor's history. From Charles II to a POW camp to Laurel and Hardy, it's a great series of gags. Oddly enough, I also like the gimmick of The Silence, who can erase every thought of them from your consciousness when you look away. It's a great enemy with an interesting solution that is seeded rather well throughout both episodes.

Moving on, there's a bit of a throwaway episode where the trio get stranded on a becalmed pirate ship that is being haunted by a mermaid who seemingly destroys any crew member who is the least bit sick or injured.

The pirate storyline, couple with the stowaway son, isn't really interesting at all. I can say that Karen Gillan looks great as an Elizabeth Swann impersonator... but then, both she and Keira look good in pretty much any get up.

Following that, The Doctor gets a message from an old friend called The Corsair which leads the adventurers outside the universe to be stranded on a living asteroid called The House which toys with them long enough to drain the TARDIS' soul and begin consuming its energy but, finding out that it's the last TARDIS, decides to abscond with it instead, heading back to the universe proper with Amy and Rory inside, leaving The Doctor and the newly human TARDIS to catch up and save the day.

The episode is more than a little bit crazy, but that can be attributed to its writer, one of my personal favorite authors, Neil Gaiman. You can definitely see more than a little bit of Delirium in the human iteration of the TARDIS and the episode definitely shows Gaiman's tendency to mix tragedy and sentiment into one big ball of happy/sad. I can't say that I was all that impressed with his villain, The House, but there's enough of everything else to keep me fat and relatively happy.

Episodes 5 & 6 for the night are a two parter about homunculi who are turned human by a solar storm, with the full memories of their human drivers, that are trapped in an island acid-factory with their twins, both sides becoming hostile to one another.

It's a simple tale of human nature and prejudice, both for the one-off humans and Amy and Rory, themselves. I like the device of the two Doctors and their silly game with the shoes even if it's horribly telegraphed and hamfisted in the writing. I wasn't too impressed with the progression of madness back and forth between the two sets of factory workers. Yes, they're under a lot of stress and, yes, suffering an extreme existential crisis, but I'd like to think humanity would act better than just Rory and The Doctors. Oh well.

Last for the night, but not least, is A Good Man Goes To War... which has The Doctor and Rory racing to save Amy from her mysterious captors after the revelation that her consciousness has been inhabiting a flesh clone like the ones from the previous episodes. Somewhere off in the future there is a cabal of humans, aliens, and other... things... that wish to entrap and destroy The Doctor, using Amy Pond's child somehow. In order to save them, The Doctor and Rory enlist the help of many folks that owe him favors, taking out squadrons of Cybermen in the process and all but winning, only to be shown in the last moments that they were outsmarted yet again.

I think this episode shows the culmination of a lot of the strengths that the show has gathered over the past couple of seasons in terms of writing and seeding hints... particularly when it comes to River Song and Amy's captivity. Sure, there's still plenty of things that will need explaining in a later episode, such as The Doctor's death at the hands of the Astronaut, but it's all sufficiently hinted at via out of sequence clues. I also like the side characters introduced here, like Vastra and Jenny. Something about women with katanas makes me happy.

It's weird to think of how much the modern series has evolved over the years from its humble beginnings in the mid-2000's. True, I'd still prefer Farscape to Doctor Who as the former handles its MacGuffins with much more aplomb and tact, but Tennant was a definite improvement over Eccleston and Smith the same over Tennant. Series 5 and 6 have so far been better examples of writing, as well. There's still cheese, to be sure, but it's far more engaging that it has ever been before. We'll see if the last seven episodes prove the same, day after next.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

3!

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-eight - Dr.Who: Series 5, Episodes 1-7, "And it's Matt Smith and Karen Gillan for the win... sortof! Win-ish? Win-ny? Win-like? Win-adjacent?"

With David Tennant bowing out of his role as the Tenth Doctor and Matt Smith tagging in, it's a whole new Doctor, TARDIS, and companion as the fifth series of modern Doctor Who visits old enemies and new, all with a brand new face.

The first episode of the series picks up where the poignant finale of the last left off, with Matt Smith's Eleventh Doctor crashing the TARDIS post regeneration. He winds up landing in a small English village where a young Scottish girl (the difference is important) is praying for help dealing with a strange crack in her wall. This crack is the series arc dilemma for this season, but we'll get to that. The main thing is new Doctor, new companion, new everything!

Getting his face on The Doctor briefly (from his perspective) leaves young Amy Pond to rough in his new TARDIS and meets her again in the same spot twelve years later where she has become a fetching lass with a humdrum life... and is still in danger from what escaped the crack in her wall, a multiform alien who is being chased by jailers who have no problem razing the Earth to get it.

This is a very fun episode mostly due to the cooking scene at the beginning where child-Amy fixes the brand new Doctor almost everything she has in her cupboard one after another while he rejects them comically. It drags on a good five minutes or so and is cute and funny. The alien menace itself is rather boring, be it Prisoner Zero or the Atraxi. There is one moment, though, at the end, where The Doctor rolls a natural 20 on his intimidation roll against the Atraxi that almost gives me chills and references all of the Doctors through the ages on up to him.

The world saved once more, The Doctor and Amy travel to a far-flung future where the United Kingdom is a ship soaring through space, but something sinister lurks in the shadows (and has an appropriately creepy series of faces). Along the way, they meet Queen Elizabeth the Tenth, who is very fetching, and managed to save both the last Space Whale and the entire United Kingdom.

The memory gimmick in this episode is by far the most interesting aspect, though I do love the Winders' plastic heads. There's something very Bioshock about this episode that really appeals to my aesthetic sensibilities. Plus, Karen Gillan in PJs... even chaste-cover-everything-PJs... rawr!

From there they go back in time to World War 2 where Winston Churchill (played by Ian McNeice, whom I last saw in Doc Martin) is fighting off the Nazi Blitz with the help of one of The Doctor's oldest enemies... of course, The Daleks. I suppose it could've been The Cybermen, but seriously? Did we need more Daleks? Isn't it so convenient that ANOTHER set of Daleks survived the apocalypse that supposedly destroyed them all the previous season?

Ugh.

Honestly, the only thing to like about this episode is McNeice's Churchhill, which is surprising less grumpier than I ever imagined him, and Amy's bouncy attitude, despite being in the middle of the Second World War.

Moving on, we get to something I really liked... a two-parter that features both my favorite villain, The Weeping Angels, and my favorite companion, River Song. Set in the future, The Doctor comes to River's rescue and joins a team of religious soldiers who are tasked with neutralizing a single Angel but find themselves facing an army of them.

River (Alex Kingston) is a delight, as always, but I do find myself disappointed a bit with the Angels. While the device of "Angel Bob" is pretty catchy, one of the things I really liked about the Angels is that they never moved in our sight because the act of observing them turned them to stone. This was a device that applied to the Fourth Wall as well! They never moved in the VIEWER'S sight... which was a brilliant nod to quantum mechanics. Sadly, this device is betrayed late in the second half of the two-parter when the Angels start moving to chase Amy. So disappointing.

Still... River Song. Love her sooooooo much.

Two more episodes for the day and the first is a trip to historical Venice after picking up Rory, Amy's fiance. Seems that Amy's a little confused thanks to all the adventuring and has a bit of a jones for The Doctor, now, that he is eager to nip in the bud with a romantic trip for the young couple to Venice... which is being dominated by not-vampires.

For the most part, this episode is a throwaway. The villains are boring (and occasionally CGI) and the problems/solutions are your typical Whovian nonsense. I do, however, like the competition between Rory and The Doctor. The pseudo-love triangle at play here is the only real fun to be had.

Lastly for the night, The Doctor, Amy, and Rory are trapped in dreamworlds being tormented by a Dream Lord who has it in for them for some reason. In one world, Rory and Amy are married with a bun in the oven and in the other they're falling into a "cold star." The trick is only one world is real and they have to choose which one to abandon via death. Choose right, they die in one world and wake in the real one. Choose wrong? Well, I think you get the idea.

It's a silly premise that is supposed to add emotional weight to the characters, but I don't think we've had enough time with them for the sort of deep, personal epiphanies that Amy and Rory are having here. That said, the Dream Lord is being played by Toby Jones, an actor whom I quite like (check out Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and his other works when you get a chance).

All in all, an uneven start, I think, for Matt Smith's Doctor... but he's still better than Eccleston and has almost as much charisma and pluck as David Tennant. Speaking of, The Tenth seemed to have more fire and wrath to him that The Eleventh just doesn't seem to engender just yet. I do like the sexier TARDIS and opening theme song, though, so there's that.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

7!

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 Fifty-four - Dr.Who: Series 4, Episodes 5-11, "Double Duty Diablo Days!"

I'm going to do my best to hit the end of Doctor Who... if that means doing six or seven episodes every other night, then so be it! Tonight's binge of Tennant and Tate (and Agyeman... and a little Piper) takes us from Modern London to several different far flung futures and the somewhat recent past, where alien and human threats abound!

Starting off is a two-parter where Martha Jones recalls The Doctor to Earth to help her and U.N.I.T. investigate a GPS/CleanAir system that can kill. It seems that a wunderkind is teamed up with the Sontarans to war with humanity and it's up to The Doctor and Donna to save the day. I'd add Martha to that list, but she gets kidnapped rather early on and has to be rescued from her evil doppelganger self.

The Sontarans are actually a pretty fun villain, despite their "back of the neck" weak spot. I rather like their martial sensibilities, even if their ultimate plan goes against their strict codes and their tactics are laughable at best. I mean, honestly, half the stuff The Doctor tricks them into should've been easily avoided by their superior tactical minds. Instead it's just simple action/reaction from them. Still, nice to see U.N.I.T. again after all the Saxon fascism from the end of last season.

After modern times are saved, The Doctor, Martha, and Donna find themselves in the middle of a human/alien conflict fought by generation after generation of clones who cannot remember the true origins of their war, it being shrouded in the mysteries of one of the biggest games of telephone in such a short time span ever. I say that because Donna figures out that the war has only been going on for seven days. Seven days of generations of clones spawning, dying, and being reborn with the story getting more abstract as it goes. This is happening on BOTH sides, mind you, not just with the humans.

This episode is a standout due to the fact that the cloning machine makes a haploid clone of The Doctor, which just so happens to be female... and is David Tennant's wife in real life (granted, they didn't get married until later). I rather enjoyed watching The Doctor first reject his "daughter" then grow to love her only to lose her to death. While her resurrection is a bit too convenient, I do like that it happened after the TARDIS left so that she wasn't an add-on companion and was off to have her own adventures.

Moving on, after dropping Martha back in her own time, Donna and The Doctor go back almost a century to the age of Agatha Christie and a murder mystery dinner party high on the melodrama and sporting a giant alien wasp-creature. Cute little nods are made to Donna and The Doctor inspiring Agatha towards works she hadn't yet written by quoting titles and characters from her unpenned books. Kind of a paradox, but it sort of resolves itself by the end of her episode with a mindwipe. While I wasn't that impressed with the murder mystery itself (or the cheesy revelation sequence), having The Doctor and Agatha both being clever in tandem was entertaining.

Phew... still several episodes left to go... starting with another two-parter which introduces MY FAVORITE WHOVIAN CHARACTER OF ALL TIME: Doctor River Song!

Oh, how I love River Song (and her actress, Alex Kingston)... a great character, a great actress, and a great concept in story telling, River Song is an intimate companion to The Doctor who is running on timelines almost opposite to his. Their first meeting from The Doctor's perspective is her last as, spoilers, she dies saving both him and thousands of trapped souls in a planet-sized library that is being guarded/hunted by the Vashta Nerada, a species of mite-like carnivores that hide in the shadows... well, are the shadows, really... and begin to kill and impersonate the members of Doctor Song's archaeological team.

River Song is probably the most intriguing character I've encountered in time travel scifi save, perhaps, for Delenn in Babylon 5. She accepts The Doctor as one who, naturally, has known and trusted him forever, and can both cater to his needs and push him in the right directions when he needs it, and this is all evident from these two short episodes almost immediately. I very much look forward to the rest of her appearances.

Finally, after the triumph and tragedy at the Library, The Doctor and Martha take a vacation on a trendy future tourist locale on the planet Midnight, where travel is restricted to closed box rolligons with shuttered windows and sealed doors. This is mostly a Doctor episode where he and a bunch of vacationers get trapped with an alien menace which tests the bounds of their charity and humanity by preying on their baser, paranoid natures.

To describe it, I'd call it a bottle episode as most of the episode takes place on a single small set with just The Doctor and six or so other people. The actually alien threat, itself, is boring and gimmicky, but the panic that it inspires in the passengers and how quickly they turn on one another is pretty decent. I can't say I'm happy with the Driver/Mechanic just being dropped halfway through the episode for convenience sake (and after they'd JUST been introduced, too), but the human drama that takes up the majority of the epi is decent.

Keep an eye out for quick cameos by Billy Piper's Rose in the backgrounds. I forgot to mention, but she showed up for a second during Donna's reintroduction and has been on monitors and the like just out of The Doctor's sight for several episodes now.

While I'm not won over yet (though, dancing pretty close thanks to Alex Kingston), I can definitely say that the quality of the series has gone up over the continuum I've watched. Now, let's see if we can plow through the rest of Series 4 on Sunday (as I need something non-Whovian and Christmasy for Saturday).

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Three Hundred and Fifty-two - Dr.Who: Series 4, Episodes 1-4, "There's no such thing as a peaceful Christmas in Whoville."

Martha is done and The Doctor is once again alone... for a moment.

It's almost feels like, if it's a Christmas episode, then a new companion is going to be introduced. Last time it was one-off companion Donna and her sham wedding. Before that it was Rose being assaulted by robotic Santas. This time, it's SPAAAAACCCCE TITAAAANIIIICCCC... and another one-off/almost-companion in the form of a down on her luck waitress named Astrid who is serving drinks on the maiden voyage of the doomed spaceliner.

After leaving Martha (and having a webisode adventure with the Fifth Doctor (Peter Davison) that is NOT available on Netflix), The Doctor needs a bit of vacation so he hops aboard the Titanic, which is traveling above Earth at Christmastime. It took me a bit to realize that we were in modern times on an alien ship with a lot of folks who look human but aren't. Still, the Poseidon Adventure recreation that The Doctor, Astrid, and several passengers that he's interacted with is pretty fun. I also like the small role for Geoffrey Palmer (whom most folks might remember from As Time Goes By or Tomorrow Never Dies) as the ship's duplicitous captain.

I wasn't exactly thrilled with the forced "cyborg-racism" angle that crops up in several places. There's not enough time to lay a proper foundation and the two characters it directly manifests with are disappointing to say the least. I did like Astrid's solution and her almost-resurrection, but everything else, from the other passengers to the Host, was just boring.

Moving on, after Astrid buys it saving the ship, The Doctor stays in modern times to investigate the Adipose... a cute little enemy which is also being investigated by last Christmas' companion, Donna (Catherine Tate). Seems she actually got the adventure bug despite her protests last time and is looking for The Doctor, snooping out the unusual in an attempt to find him... and find him she does, just in time for both of them to stumble on an alien nanny who is using human fad diets to raise alien babies (contrary to universal law), who chooses to just kill a million humans instead of being exposed for the criminal she is. This leads to a chase sequence and MacGuffin theatrics, as per the norm, and Donna joining as a regular companion.

The Adipose are silly and cheap in terms of their CGI, and I was really expecting quite a bit more from the reporter instead of her just constantly being caught and tied up or left that way for a rehash of her "you're not just leaving me like this" joke, but Donna and the Doctor pantomiming from different sides of the villain's monologue was pretty entertaining.

From there it's off to ancient Rome, or so they think, as it's really Pompeii, only a day or so before the infamous eruption that consumed the city. There are soothsayers that can read truths and see through time who are working for a cult that The Doctor has met before (or so he says, I don't remember them from older Who epis). Anyways, the soothsayers are working at the behest of fire aliens who are living in the mountain and are using their proxies to build tech for their eventual invasion of the planet. Boring, but it gives Donna another chance to act as The Doctor's conscience, a role that I very much approve of.

The ash demons themselves were rather boring, and I was hoping for something more interesting when it came to the stone transformations of the oracles... especially since the sisterhood had a gesture that covered their eyes, which made me think of a Weeping Angel connection that would've been fun. Alas, just a third (and fourth, I guess) eye reference as they used their inner sight instead of their actual vision.

The last episode was a trip to the far-flung future and the home planet of the Ood (whom we last saw in the thrall of Satan). It seems the corporation that is exploiting them as slave labor is having trouble dealing with a strain of rabid Ood who have glowing red eyes and are violent for some unknown reason. The Doctor and Donna investigate and find out that the humans are abusing the Ood and their large hive brain, but the Ood are fighting back against their masters.

Honestly, the whole "brain in their hand" gimmick is actually pretty interesting, even if the giant CGI brain that is being held captive is boring as all get out. Sigma's subtle poisoning of the CEO, Klineman, is another nice plot point that, for once, pays off well... and in a Doctor Who episode, at that. Amazing.

With only two weeks left to go in the year, I don't know if I'll make it to the end of Series 6, but I'll give it my best go on alternating days. We'll see if I can make it without doubling up.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~

Day Three Hundred and Forty-nine - Dr.Who: Series 3, Episodes 9-14, "Yeah, Martha really made this series worthwhile... -ish."

For almost the entire year I was trudging through an episode of Billy Piper's run on Doctor Who every few weeks and it was hell. Sure, things got better when David Tennant took over as The Doctor, but it wasn't until she left and Martha joined that the episodes started to become somewhat enjoyable.

The show must go on, though, if I have any chance of finishing the episodes available on Netflix and today I ploughed through the last six episodes of Freema Agyeman's run as Martha Jones... and they were weirdly decent. For one thing, there is Derek Jacobi, who guests as one of the incarnations of perennial Doctor villain The Master. For another, despite the same old MacGuffiny devices, there are some really interesting themes running through several of these episodes.

Let's start with Human Nature and Family of Blood, a two-parter where The Doctor and Martha are on the run from a mysterious alien force and find refuge in 1913 as a school teacher and housemaid. It seems that someone wants his Time Lord energy and, in order to fool their senses, The Doctor masquerades as a human... and falls in love. Not with Martha though, no matter how much she'd want him to, but with a local era woman, and he doesn't realize that he's The Doctor. Instead he's John Smith, average human teacher.

What's great about these episodes are the mildly subtle nods to the The Great War. It's a little schmaltzy, especially that ending where Martha and The Doctor visit the mildly psychic student who helps them ninety years later, but oddly endearing, too. Plus the moral quandary of whether Martha and The Doctor have the right to kill the John Smith personality in order to save the universe. Oddly good stuff.

Quick shoutout to Thomas Sangster who plays the psychic. Folks might remember him from Game of Thrones or Love, Actually... but I prefer him most as Ferb from Phineas and Ferb.

After that is the introduction of probably one of my favorite Whovian villains of all time, The Weeping Angels. There's nothing scarier, I think, than boogeymen (or women? maybe?) that move when you're not looking. It's a great gimmick, too, even if it isn't all that consistent. I mean, c'mon, the Angels (at least three of them) are looking at each other in the chapel. Still, the gimmick of the DVD Easter Eggs and the conversation across time to companions (one in particular), who aren't even real companions, just one-offs, is pretty fun.

And that's when we get to Derek Jacobi... Shakespearean actor, Brother Cadfael, and all around tremendous actor. He guests as Doctor Yana, an improbable scientist trying to get the last remaining humans to the mythical Utopia... which he manages to do, with the help of The Doctor, but not before all the talk of time travel and TARDISes (and a convenient plot device seeded in previous episodes) stirs the evil within. 

He... is... The Master. 

Unfortunately, Jacobi only plays The Master for that one episode, replaced at the end via regeneration into John Simms (who I've recently been watching in the TREMENDOUSLY compelling BBC drama, Exile) who announces that he IS The Master... and gets trapped in mid-millenial England, becoming the much-hinted Harold Saxon, newly minted Prime Minister of England, who hatches a plan to take over the universe by sacrificing the human race, both prosaic and future-versions via cannibalizing the TARDIS that he escaped in and doing generally MacGuffiny things, as per the norm.

This is a really fun two-parter (The Sound of the Drums & The Last of the Time Lords) because it features the return of fan favorite Captain Jack Harkness! I love the tete-a-tete they have throughout the episodes that lampshade Jack's licentious nature. Captain Jack (John Barrowman) also just has this wonderfully bouncy nature and great chemistry with whomever he's with. Not to mention the Face of Boe crack finally happens.

Don't get me wrong, all of my recent happiness with the series doesn't belie the fact that it's a pretty crap show overall. It's terribly lax with its science, characters, writing, pretty much everything... and expects you to merrily join them without asking questions. Unfortunately, my mind doesn't work that way, and no amount of handwaving will make me.

Still, there are moments of fun, here and there, and these episodes represent a good deal of what I've managed to enjoy so far. Is it worth recommending? On the whole? No. In small spurts of the better stuff, like this? Maybe. 

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~