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 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~

Day Three Hundred and Forty-six - Dr.Who: Series 3, Episodes 5-8, "Daleks, and Pig-men, and Scorpions... Ho Hum."

Still plugging away at the modern Doctor Who series, hoping (but not betting) on finishing them before New Year's rolls around. Thank the many heavens and hells for Diablo 3. It's the only way I could survive, I think.

Tonight's block of MacGuffiny SciFi Adventure starts with a two-parter where the Daleks that escaped being sucked into the Void at the end of Billy Piper's run have set up shop in Depression Era New York and have taken over construction of the Empire State Building in the hopes of using its frame (and some Dalek alloys) to harness the energy of a solar flare to jumpstart a new Human-Dalek hybrid race.

Since the Cult of Skaro were bred to imagine new ways to victory, their leader (Dalek Sec) has imagined the Hybrids as the new evolution of Dalek Supremacy as humanity has such a strong will to survive and adapt... and is so confident that Sec volunteers to be the first true convert. This leads to a schism as Hybrid Sec has developed feelings like honor, compassion, and dignity, which the other Daleks find abhorrant enough to betray him and his plan, leading to both his and their destruction.

Well, all except one, anyway. Can't destroy the fan-favorite enemy entirely yet again, can they? No, gotta keep one around so they don't paint themselves into a corner.

Bleh.

The next two episodes happen in modern times and the far future, respectively.

"The Lazarus Experiment" covers the semi-successful attempt by a scientist to become immortal (of course, via MacGuffinry) and young again. It works, but also turns him occasionally into a giant, essence-sucking pseudo-scorpion that The Doctor, Martha, and her sister have to defeat via organ music.

That's right... organ music.

What's fun about this episode is that there are more and more references to Harold Saxon, including a sneaky bureaucrat who is trying to get to The Doctor via Martha's family, whispering evils in her mother's ear... which continues on to the next episode "42" where Martha and The Doctor are trapped on a ship soon to crash into the sun. The Doctor gives Martha's cell "Universal Roaming" so she can call home and, of course, her suspicious mother is working for Saxon's Secret Police.

Meanwhile, back in the future, an energy being has sabotaged a ship that has stolen its "heart" and is slowly killing the crew, blaming them for hurting it. The Doctor and Martha do their best and manage to save a precious few of the crew (and themselves) exactly one second before impacting on the sun. Based on the scale of the ship and the size of the sun, it looks like they're quite a long way away from its surface, but that's what you get when your series isn't concerned about details or believability.

I think the Dalek episodes were the strongest of the four, even if I am giggling over the Saxon subplots. It will be nice to actually see him... well, his future/former form anyway. I'm not a fan of Saxon, but I am a fan of Yana (Derek Jacobi). Still, much harder to complain now that I have Diablo 3 to play on the laptop while watching. I guess it's cheating a little, but it makes it soooo much more palatable to binge watch the cheese that is Doctor Who.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~ 

Day Three Hundred and Forty-three - Dr.Who: Series 3, Episodes 1-4, "KITTIES!"

Billy Piper is gone and now is the age of Donna... wait, Martha!

The first episode of Series 3 picks up exactly where Rose's last farewell left us, with Catherine Tate showing up in a wedding dress in the middle of the TARDIS for no good reason other than that it's Christmas time... and she's about to unknowingly get married to a traitorous spider-thrall who is beguiled by the Racnoss Empress.

Apparently the Racnoss, a species of hominid spiders who terrorized the galaxy billions of years ago, actually created the Earth as a timeship where they would lay dormant until the time was right and the Empress would return to them from the far reaches of the universe and reawaken the brood... with the help of MacGuffin particles that Donna (Tate) has been force-fed by her fiance. The Doctor is there to save the day, though, and all is well that ends well... save that The Doctor is a bit more mean and mercenary now that he's been separated from Rose.

Donna, of course, declines to follow The Doctor (this season), and instead he manages to pick up the plucky and intelligent med student Martha Jones while investigating a hospital that has been building-napped (along with its entire complement of patients and doctors) to the Moon by a group of alien mercenaries who have been hired to track down an alien... and, guess what, The Doctor just happens to be an alien (not the right one, mind you, but still) and manages to get in their crosshairs... on the Moon!

After dodging the Plasmivore and the rhinoceros-aliens, the Judoon, Martha and The Doctor travel to Elizabethan England and meet Shakespeare, himself, who is tangled up in a plot by word witches called Carrionites (who act rather like the three crones from Macbeth) who as using his plays and the architecture of The Globe Theatre to attempt to summon their trapped sisters and unleash a hell on earth.

Saving the day, once again (but running from Queen Elizabeth, who apparently knows The Doctor unkindly), they obscond to New New York (where he and Rose fought zombies and cat nuns) where Martha is kidnapped by friendly carjackers and The Doctor finds that the survivors of humanity (and cat-kind) are trapped in the underground motorway... and have been for over twenty years, not knowing that the outside world has fallen victim to a plague.

I think I'm going to spend a lot of time today gushing over this episode (titled - "Gridlock") for two reasons. One, it features the return of, and final call for, The Face of Boe (whom rumor has it is actually a hyper-evolved incarnation of Captain Jack Harkness)... and, two, KITTIES!

The first hovercar that The Doctor gets into is helmed by a mixed species couple who just had a litter of kittens. If kitties crying "mama" isn't the single most adorable scene that I have ever had the pleasure of watching (and re-watching) on Doctor Who, I will eat my hat. My GOD they are precious... and only there for a few seconds, but still... AMAZINGLY ADORBS!

It's nice to see Boe again, as he was a fun bit of mystery and intrigue that popped up several times during the first two seasons and the lore regarding the possibility that he's Cap'n Jack is a lovely bit of geeky goodness. The fact that he's yet another force for the all convenient plot MacGuffins is almost forgivable. I could see him using his immortality energies to sustain the motorways, but am annoyed that he's credited with saving Novice Hame via "his gases."

Yes, both notions are so utterly ridiculous that they should be equally headache-inducing to me, but I find I can take one over the other quite easily.

It's also rather funny that I don't get bent over the self-replicating fuel. Ahem, HEL-LOOOOO. That's not the way energy works, people... stop handwaving away the laws of entropy and thermodynamics just because you don't want to spend thought-sweat on better explanations. I mean, honestly, with the Macra right underneath them, why couldn't part of the motorway's economy be a guild of secret Macra-waste harvesters who never tell the rest of the convoy whats below the fast-lane? Yup, I'm a genius. Pay me, Davies.

Keep an ear out for early references to season arc villain Saxon. Almost every episode tonight has a mention of him in some aside.

Until tomorrow, Potatoes~