mostly Doctor Who rambling & reviews...

[newmoonstar]

So I bought the fabric for Clara's governess dress, & now I officially have waaay too many Doctor Who cosplays in the works! But if it turns out, it'll look really cool. I wish I knew some other Whovians in real life so I could rope someone into cosplaying the Doctor with me, but oh well! Hopefully I'll run into one at the convention. If I can afford to even go, that is. It's going to be at a new hotel this year & I may be too expensive now. *cries* But at least I can still wear Clara's Victorian dresses to non-Doctor Who events, because they're just regular Victorian outfits.

I missed the Steampunk convention this year though, drat! Hopefully they'll have it again next year, I really like the dress I came up with.

Been listening to missing Classic Who eps. I actually think Vicki had a really good exit in 'The Myth Makers', and I totally ship Vicki & Troilus now. I'm not really a proponent of 'let's marry off this companion to this character they just met' stories, but even on audio, Vicki & Troilus have real chemistry & you do believe they'd fall in love that quickly & want to stay together. I have to say that their reunion scene at the very end is one of the more beautiful, romantic scenes Doctor Who has ever done. (I may even have started writing some fic for them for dw_guestfest...heehee!)

'The Daleks Master Plan' was really good too, & I'm so sad they killed off Sara Kingdom! Arg! She was such an interesting character, and really should have been a long-term companion. I guess there's her Companion Chronicles now...

'The Massacre' I really disliked though. It was an engaging story, but pretty dark stuff, and it ultimately felt like a pointless waste to have Steven go through a rather horrible experience & fight with the Doctor over it, only to have that waved away & dismissed when Dodo suddenly shows up at the end, in a scene that's very goofy & totally at odds with the very somber tone of the rest of the serial. Torturing companions is my least favorite genre of DW story, but I'll go with putting them through stuff if it has some greater part in the development of the characters & their relationships, but this one didn't. We already went over the whole 'you can't change history' angle in 'The Aztecs', & the Doctor's behavior and attitude here felt very callous & made him quite unsympathetic. And they didn't even do that in the context of him feeling upset over the deaths of so many friends in 'Daleks Master Plan', which would have made more sense & made him seem less obnoxious. But the Doctor & Steven's obvious issues are swept under the rug, and it just felt like a giant step back in the direction of the storytelling, because the First Doctor's whole journey from day one had been about learning to turn away from selfish impulses & engage with & care about the people around him. I liked 'The Ark' the first time I saw it, and still think it's a clever, interesting story, but now that I've heard all that preceded it, I'm incredibly disappointed that it doesn't follow up on the turmoil of previous episodes, but just switched back to business as usual. I think the new producers on the show at this point didn't probably care as much about the emotional through-lines of the characters as Verity Lambert had, & of course William Hartnell had always been cantankerous, & by this time was getting ill & wasn't really liked by anyone except maybe Peter Purves, so it wasn't a happy family atmosphere behind-the-scenes anymore, and that probably had an effect on what reached the screen. It's kind of sad, but it makes you realize how lucky we are that someone came up with regeneration so the show could continue & have a chance to re-capture that initial joy & freshness again. (Ugh, Now I'm sad. Definitely time for some silly Second Doctor eps to cheer myself up again!)

Comments

[thisbluespirit]

The thing about that final scene of The Massacre is that it isn't the script editor being careless - it's one script editor handing over to the other and the next one dropping the baton. Donald Tosh and John Wiles were responsible for The Massacre, but then handed over to the new team with INnes Lloyd and Gerry Davis (who, I think, thought Tosh and Wiles had been too serious about stuff) and Gerry Davis plonked in Dodo's arrival onto the end! Moral: Don't play Consequences with TV scripts??

[newmoonstar]

Aha! I didn't know Gerry Davis & Innes Lloyd had already been handed the reins before 'The Massacre' was finished, that explains so much now. It makes me really wonder what would have happened if they'd been able to continue on the more serious track, because the ending of The Massacre feels like such a huge non-sequitur as it is. So frustrating! The subsequent stories are certainly good, but it's annoying to switch gears when the continuity is so disjointed like that. But lots of shows go through that when new producers or writers come in, and quite honestly it's pretty amazing that Doctor Who has managed to maintain any kind of continuity at all, considering how long it's been going on and how many cooks have had their hands in the broth over the years! (And it's why I personally subscribe to the idea that the only canon the show has is what each of us individually chooses to accept!) ;D

[thisbluespirit]

heh, indeed! :-)