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~