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Post By
HH
In Reply To
CrazySugarFreakBoy!

Member Since: Sun Jan 04, 2004
Posts: 1,235
Subj: On this.
Posted: Sun Jun 08, 2008 at 09:33:02 am EDT (Viewed 1 times)
Reply Subj: Doctor Who, "The Doctor's Daughter"
Posted: Sat Jun 07, 2008 at 01:15:26 pm EDT (Viewed 366 times)


> Our own Bill Reed observed that, after "Partners in Crime," Season 4 of NuWho has seemed remarkably like a tour through each Doctor's era

I think it's clear that this season at last that the creators of the new Doctor Who have had the courage to loose their inner fanboys, dragging the series closer to the original than they'd ever have dared during the edgy Ecclestone days.

I'm not saying this is neccessarily a good or a bad thing, but it's clear that Dr Who is embracing it's 45-year heritage more than ever. Try to find any interview with anyone associated with the production team where the word "iconic" isn't used.

This fanboy approach had never been more obvious than in the newly-released commentary podcast for "Forest of the Dead", wherein Tennant, Davies, and Stephen Moffett abandon all pretense to commenting on the story they're watching and instead engage in a glorious high-banter geekfest.

Moffett to Tennant: List your favourite episodes in a manner that will allow you to leave this room.

Tennant: It does feel as if I'm sitting in this room with two Presidents of the High Council of Gallifrey. Who's Borusa and who's Flavia?

Davis: I'm Flavia.

Moffatt: There's lots of Borusas. We could all be Borusas.

[Conversation on which was the best Borusa actor]

Davis to Moffatt: So will you be bringing back the Nimon?

Moffatt: I think Sontaran/Rutans okay but the Nimon/Bandrill war is where it...

Tennant: I want to see the Voord again.

[And so on]

>
  • And "The Doctor's Daughter" was a Fourth Doctor adventure on an alien world, whose conflicts were nonetheless noticeably, albeit broadly, allegorical in illustrating the absurdity of Earthbound behavior, with wild ideas struggling to compensate for a loose, disjointed plot, in which the characters were occasionally reduced to running around in subplots for no other discernible purpose than to pad out the episode.

    • I think it was important that we saw the Hath from another viewpoint. That way the audience was pulling for a peaceful end to the conflict, not for a human victory over horrible aliens.

    > After all the abuse to which her [Martha] character has already been subjected, laying that guilt trip on her just seemed gratuitous, especially since she'd already declared, at the end of "The Poison Sky," that she didn't want to deal with all the issues of traveling in the TARDIS again.

    I wonder if Martha's being set up for Torchwood series 3.

    > But enough about that; on to the central point of this episode. On the one hand, Georgia Moffett is an attractive and charismatic actress. On the other, even before we found out that she and David Tennant were probably fucking in real life, their performance felt a lot less like a biological daughter and father meeting each other for the first time, and a lot more like Rose Tyler's heretofore-undiscovered slightly younger sister and Ten were sizing one another up for a potential sexual relationship. It didn't help, on that score, that the script limited Moffett's range of expressed emotions to the two poles of "hurt" and "perky."

    I didn't pick up the sexual subtexts you did so that wasn't such a problem for me. I thought Moffett's choices were quite good given the material she was presented with.

    > And as long as we're talking about the script, I've never seen a more blatant in-canon Mary Sue fanfic in my fucking LIFE.

    The series seems to deliberately present a succession of such "identifier/wish fulfillment" characters. That's one of the key functions of the companion, one of the fundamental components of the series. It's not a series to shy away from Mary Sues.

    And then there's River Song.

    > And yet, in spite of all this ... I kind of like Jenny.

    It's an interesting addition to the mythos, but one with a huge potential for disaster as well as for interesting stories. I suspect any Tennant relationship with the actress might in fact mitigate against her return rather than then opposite.

    >
  • It's no fucking wonder people are shipping Ten/Jenny, when they look like they're about to start making out like horny teenagers every time they're onscreen together.

    • Again, I didn't pick that up at all.