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Nu-View #1: SJS, Sontarans, and Gallifrey – Oh My!

The Time Warrior (Story #70, 1973-74)
Viewed 02 Feb 2011

Doctor/Companion:   Three, Sarah Jane Smith
Stars:  Jon Pertwee, Elisabeth Sladen
Preceding Story:  The Green Death (Three, Jo Grant)
Succeeding Story:  Invasion of the Dinosaurs (Three, Sarah Jane)
Notable Aspects:

  • First appearance of Sarah Jane Smith
  • First appearance of the Sontarans
  • First mention of Doctor’s home planet (Gallifrey) by name

Our viewing of this first episode of Three’s last season was dominated by two things:  his hair, and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  After the rather dizzying “new” opening credits (general consensus: thumbs down), it was a bare two scenes into Episode 1 that the Grail references began.  When the amusingly-named Irongron finally managed to get his underlings to ride out to look for the “fallen star,” the clopping coconuts made their appearance on the sofa.  Linx, the first-ever Sontaran on Doctor Who, garnered not only an “oh, dear” but also a “none shall pass!”

Once the stage had been set in the Middle Ages, the story turned back to the modern day, to a site heavily guarded by UNIT in an effort to prevent further mysterious disappearances of visiting scientists, and Three walked through the door.  Did we cheer the Doctor’s first appearance, or wonder when we’d first see Sarah Jane?  Nope.  “Wow!  Is that what his hair looked like before?!”

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Post-poned

Due to the unfortunate encroachment of Real Life, Confession #5 will need to be postponed until next week.  With yesterday’s release of The Movie and The Mutants, there should be some new reviews in the next week or two, as well.

My apologies if I’ve disappointed anyone (with my vast, single digit readership, I’m sure there’s somebody…).  I’ll get back on track as soon as possible, once these pesky RL issues are resolved.

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Confession #4: I Hate the “Standard” Regenerations

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Warning:
This site (specifically, this post) contains profanity.  If you can’t handle that, turn back now.

 

When Nine regenerated into Ten, Rose looked on in consternation as all the energy of the Time Vortex streamed back out of him as a bright, shining light pouring from his arms and head.  It was dramatic, it was beautifully done, and it was appropriate.  So what the hell was going on when the same effect turned the Jacobi-Master into the Simms-Master?  He’d just been shot, for shit’s sake – why would he get all glowy?

Former Head Writer/Executive Producer Russell T. Davies (commonly known as RTD) would have us believe that there needed to be a sense of continuity about the regeneration process, or new viewers wouldn’t understand that it was the way all Timelords change their bodies whenever they near death.  Give me a fucking break.  Are we really so stupid we can’t figure out that a body change is still a body change?  How does it make sense to have all regenerations the same, no matter the cause?  If a Timelord dies of a paper cut, should his regeneration cause him to stand up from where he’s collapsed and shoot golden light out of every orifice?  Hardly.  That’s clearly something else coming out of one of RTD’s orifices, if you ask me.

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Confession #3: I Might Like Matt Smith Better Than David Tennant

Blasphemy!  Heresy!  Buuuuuurn heeeeeer!

OK, that’s probably overstating the reaction a bit, but I may well be ostracized at my own get-together after this one.  The Ladies of WhoFest are firm Tennantites, so admitting my Smithian leanings is sure to engender some antagonism, or at the very least disdain. I can’t deny it any more, though.  I think Eleven has surpassed Ten for me in terms of watchability.

Don’t get me wrong – Ten is my Doctor.  I fell in love with him (yeah, I mean it that way – how Mary Sue of me; and yes, I wept like a pregnant lady during The End of Time…), and through him learned to love all the Doctors, each in their own way.  But there’s something a bit off-putting about The Lonely God after a while.  While I loved the Saddest Doctor when he was in a manic phase – oh, that smile… – I got tired of him getting screwed (metaphorically, and – depending on how you interpret a few things – literally) all the time.  The guy couldn’t catch a break.  Given how RTD chose to write his story arc, I have to say it was probably time for Ten to regenerate; I mean, how much lower could he go?

Perhaps it will come as no surprise, then, when I say that what I’ve come to love most about Eleven is the return of his joie de vivre.  Sure, the pain is still lurking there in his eyes when someone forcibly reminds him of it, but for the most part, he can put it out of his mind the way anyone who’s lost a loved one learns to do (or, as Two put it in Tomb of the Cybermen, “I have to really want to – to bring them back in front of my eyes. The rest of the time they… they sleep in my mind, and I forget.”).  But overall, Eleven gives off a kid-in-a-candy-store vibe, like he hardly knows where to begin because it’s all so fabulous – sort of like Ten’s breathy “that’s beautiful!” upon first seeing the werewolf in Tooth and Claw, except all the time. New regeneration, new companion(s), new outlook; in a sense everything that Ten was really did die.  And while part of me misses him, another larger part just doesn’t have the time, because watching Eleven is too damn much fun.

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Confession #2: I Haven’t Seen Them All

Now I may damage my cred with certain parts of The Community by this admission (perhaps especially those Neo-Whovian friends who regard me as a font of knowledge about Classic Who), but the sad truth of the matter is, I haven’t seen all the Doctor Who stories out there. Shocking, I know.

This lapse in my own Doctor Who education is the product of one of my general character flaws (or “quirks,” depending on who you ask): I’m not only a completist but also very particular about what I choose to collect. When I began my search for Classic stories, I didn’t want anything on VHS, dinosaur technology that it is, so I started looking for what was out on DVD. Rather to my surprise, not everything had yet been released. (What had the BBC been doing all these years that I didn’t care about Doctor Who? They were supposed to be getting everything ready for me, for when I discovered a new obsession!) Not only that, but each story (often misleadingly labeled as an “episode”) was its own DVD, worth anywhere from $10 to $35 (“on up” for boxed sets of related stories) at list price. Yikes!

Much to my chagrin, my local library system failed me. Not only were there no DVDs in the system to check out, there were precious few VHS tapes, either. Fumbling around in the dark on my own, not having found any real link to The Community yet, I didn’t even know whether or not to waste my time with what the library had. There had to be a better way…

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Meet the Ladies of WhoFest

On a quasi-regular basis, a group of girlfriends get together to watch Doctor Who. We catch up on current episodes during a series' broadcast and watch Classic Who to get a feel for the extensive backstory. There's usually a fair bit of laughing, along with food and wine. We like to do it up right. So who are we? Let me make introductions:

  • MRFranklin (me): If you don't "know" me yet, go read Confession #1.
  • jA : The youngest of our group (by nearly a generation), jA is someone I interested in the Doctor via Nu-Who. She'd never seen any Classic Who before we began WhoFest.
  • jE : As the only one in the group to have watched Doctor Who growing up, jE has a unique perspective among us. However, having disliked Six, she quit watching in the '80s. Many of the Classic episodes (before and after her active watching days) are still new to her.
  • jO : Though also of an age to have watched in her youth, jO didn't discover wonders of Doctor Who till I got her hooked on Nu-Who. She'd never seen any Classic Who before we began WhoFest.

This is where I'll post about the Ladies' reactions to the Classic Who episodes we view together.  Thumbs up?  Thumbs down?  What made us giggle, what made us facepalm, and what was just plain cool – it's all here in Nu-Views.

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A Dickens of a Good Time

Review of A Christmas Carol

Try as I might, I cannot find a way to make “Christmassy-wistmassy” sound good in a sentence.  But how else do you accurately describe the action in A Christmas Carol, which is simultaneously about as timey-wimey as we’ve seen and also unrelentingly inspired by the holiday season (and, more specifically, by its namesake)?  After a somewhat shaky start (“Christmas is canceled!”? What kind of rubbish line is that?), the episode turns rollicksome and barely pauses for breath.  Little details made me smile before the story really even began.  I mean, how can you not love Amy & Rory’s discomfiture at being caught with their barely-metaphorical pants down?  And after all that happened last series, it’s brilliant finally to see Arthur Darvill’s name in the credits.

From the title down, the whole episode is deliberately Dickensian – the Doctor himself makes a conscious decision to mimic the story when his answer to Amy’s query changes from “a Christmas carol” to “A Christmas Carol”.  Thus it’s no surprise right off to hear Kazran’s rant (“I call it expecting something for nothing!”) so closely echo Scrooge’s complaint that Christmas is “a poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every twenty-fifth of December!”  It’s almost like a game to find as many references as you can, though perhaps it would be wise to stop before you started counting every little quasi-Victorian detail on the set.

While I’m on the topic of minutiae, I may as well mention the Doctor’s new jacket; his fabulous entrance; and the way he continues to be as frenetic as ever, delivering viciously funny lines that are all too easy to miss while you’re still laughing at the last one.  (A few of those – like the whole bit about the face spider – feel like something Moffat couldn’t bear to leave on his Wonderfully Scary Ideas clipboard despite the fact they wouldn’t support a stand-alone episode.)

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Confession #1: I Am a Neo-Whovian

My folks didn’t watch a whole lot of tv when I was growing up, and when they did, it was mostly PBS (public broadcasting). I suppose that’s why on very rare occasions, I’d come across my dad watching some unknowably ridiculous thing and have to ask what it was. A few times, it would be Star Trek, which – as an American – is a show I learned quite a bit about, eventually becoming a bit of a Trekker myself in college (where we watched new episodes of TNG religiously). On at least one occasion, though, I remember being really taken aback at the absurdity of the two minutes of something-random I watched with my dad. That was my first introduction to Doctor Who.

It wasn’t a part of the American psyche the way it was – is – in Britain. I mean, sure, I’d heard of Doctor Who and its slightly… OK, very eccentric fans. For example, the Doctor Who Club in college tended to consist of shady figures who wore long woolen cloaks around campus (come to think of it, many of them were part of the campus Druids, too…), which didn’t particularly inspire the uninitiated to jump right in and join the fandom. I didn’t really know much of anything about the show, though. I’m a bit embarrassed in retrospect to admit that when my husband commented that the first little house we bought was like a TARDIS, he had to explain to me that he meant it was bigger on the inside.

Not until one of my friends nearly forced the “new series” (aka, Nu-Who) on me by showing me the first four episodes (which I thought were OK, but not exciting; thankfully he persisted) did I really catch the fever. And when I did, I caught it bad. In the course of approximately two weeks, I watched the end of Series 1, the entirety of Series 2 and 3, and caught up to the then-currently-airing Series 4 at about episode 6. I have watched every episode from S04E07 (The Unicorn and the Wasp) onward as they were broadcast.

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