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auntiemeeshOkay, that was some intense Doctor Who. I think it was probably the best I've seen in a good long while.
I've seen very few spoilers for this episode, beyond a photo of Andy once he's changed into a Mars water creature. And I thought he looked rather too much like a Chucky inspired child's horror doll for my taste. And honestly, the actual look of them wasn't all that much better than I expected. But I loved the idea that the Doctor realized this was a fixed event that he shouldn't mess with, and his internal debate between his empathy for those doomed to die and his adherence to the laws of time as he understands them. There were a few nagging unanswered questions, the main one for me being what the tension was between Adelaide and Ed. She was so nasty to him almost the entire time, and he refered to her never being to forgive him, but didn't say for what. I hate that kind of lingering lack of explanation. Or maybe I just missed it.
There were some funny moments, such as when the Doctor modified the Gadget robot to become a turbo-charged Segway. And the whole conversation about the Doctor disliking robots, but the dog ones being a different story altogether. But in all, it was a very sobering story line. The Doctor became, in his defiance of the rules he's always followed, rather scarily like the Master. He's never been entirely sane by human definitions, but for a while at the end of this story he left sanity so far behind it was almost in a different universe. Time Lord Victorious, he called himself, so lost he couldn't even see it.
Honestly, I was a little disappointed that they brought him back to something approaching himself so quickly. It could have made for a really good Christmas episode, to see him being, essentially, the Master for an entire storyline, and having to fight to redeem himself. I think that would have led nicely into his regeneration story. Instead, they're bringing the actual Master back, which is intriguing in its own right, but makes it all about the Doctor versus an outside threat whereas the Doctor versus himself would have been so awesome. It's the sort of story that I think would go so well with David Tennant's style of Doctoring. His sort of larger than life emoting for the Doctor worked well in the crazy scenes and it would have been fun to have more of that. Eh, maybe there will still be an element of that in there somewhere. And it looks like Donna's going to show up again, and I'm all down with that.
And there's only a little over a month until the Christmas episode, which is also something I'm whole-heartedly behind. It was a long seven months between these last two, most of that time with no idea when Waters of Mars would air. It was very frustrating.
There was also Merlin this weekend. This was really quite a beautiful episode of Merlin. Bradley James was kind of excellent in the emotional arc he had to take Arthur through. The rage and hurt that Arthur felt at Uther's perceived betrayal was just the right sort of angsty to make me happy happy. And poor Merlin, who had to betray everything he knows to be true and right, in order to save Arthur from doing something terrible. He had to betray magic in order to save the possibility of magic ever being welcome in Camelot again. Each time Arthur seems to be breaking free and thinking on his own, he ends up getting sucked even further into the twisted world of Uther Pendragon.
But OMG how funny to watch him get his ass handed to him on a platter by a girl. And there were some really awesome moments between Arthur and Merlin, the conversation they had about their respective dead parents and how much that void has affected them. I'm going to just assume that the first few episodes of this season, when Arthur was treating Merlin as the lowliest of barely tolerable servants and nothing else, was just an abberation. Perhaps they were really meant to be shown early in season one and were just forgotten. You know, the producers may have found them over the summer and said, "hm, well, no sense wasting them, we'll just tack them on in front of season two instead. I'm sure no one will ever notice the difference." Never mind that those episodes completely reset their relationship back to zero. They've gotten things back on track now and I suppose that's all that matters.
So, yeah, probably one of my very favorite Merlin episodes to date.
I've seen very few spoilers for this episode, beyond a photo of Andy once he's changed into a Mars water creature. And I thought he looked rather too much like a Chucky inspired child's horror doll for my taste. And honestly, the actual look of them wasn't all that much better than I expected. But I loved the idea that the Doctor realized this was a fixed event that he shouldn't mess with, and his internal debate between his empathy for those doomed to die and his adherence to the laws of time as he understands them. There were a few nagging unanswered questions, the main one for me being what the tension was between Adelaide and Ed. She was so nasty to him almost the entire time, and he refered to her never being to forgive him, but didn't say for what. I hate that kind of lingering lack of explanation. Or maybe I just missed it.
There were some funny moments, such as when the Doctor modified the Gadget robot to become a turbo-charged Segway. And the whole conversation about the Doctor disliking robots, but the dog ones being a different story altogether. But in all, it was a very sobering story line. The Doctor became, in his defiance of the rules he's always followed, rather scarily like the Master. He's never been entirely sane by human definitions, but for a while at the end of this story he left sanity so far behind it was almost in a different universe. Time Lord Victorious, he called himself, so lost he couldn't even see it.
Honestly, I was a little disappointed that they brought him back to something approaching himself so quickly. It could have made for a really good Christmas episode, to see him being, essentially, the Master for an entire storyline, and having to fight to redeem himself. I think that would have led nicely into his regeneration story. Instead, they're bringing the actual Master back, which is intriguing in its own right, but makes it all about the Doctor versus an outside threat whereas the Doctor versus himself would have been so awesome. It's the sort of story that I think would go so well with David Tennant's style of Doctoring. His sort of larger than life emoting for the Doctor worked well in the crazy scenes and it would have been fun to have more of that. Eh, maybe there will still be an element of that in there somewhere. And it looks like Donna's going to show up again, and I'm all down with that.
And there's only a little over a month until the Christmas episode, which is also something I'm whole-heartedly behind. It was a long seven months between these last two, most of that time with no idea when Waters of Mars would air. It was very frustrating.
There was also Merlin this weekend. This was really quite a beautiful episode of Merlin. Bradley James was kind of excellent in the emotional arc he had to take Arthur through. The rage and hurt that Arthur felt at Uther's perceived betrayal was just the right sort of angsty to make me happy happy. And poor Merlin, who had to betray everything he knows to be true and right, in order to save Arthur from doing something terrible. He had to betray magic in order to save the possibility of magic ever being welcome in Camelot again. Each time Arthur seems to be breaking free and thinking on his own, he ends up getting sucked even further into the twisted world of Uther Pendragon.
But OMG how funny to watch him get his ass handed to him on a platter by a girl. And there were some really awesome moments between Arthur and Merlin, the conversation they had about their respective dead parents and how much that void has affected them. I'm going to just assume that the first few episodes of this season, when Arthur was treating Merlin as the lowliest of barely tolerable servants and nothing else, was just an abberation. Perhaps they were really meant to be shown early in season one and were just forgotten. You know, the producers may have found them over the summer and said, "hm, well, no sense wasting them, we'll just tack them on in front of season two instead. I'm sure no one will ever notice the difference." Never mind that those episodes completely reset their relationship back to zero. They've gotten things back on track now and I suppose that's all that matters.
So, yeah, probably one of my very favorite Merlin episodes to date.
