pubs
Yeah, this was pretty good. Certainly a leap up from New Earth, anyway. The tone and the pacing and some other ephemera aren’t really to my taste. As with The Chrismas Invasion, I’m not sure how fond I am of this “action movie” route the series has been taking. Not enough character development. Not enough exploration of concepts and themes. Not enough time for anything except Things Happening. Still, it’s all very well-done.
I think they missed an opportunity by making the solution mistletoe instead of frankincense. Torchwood House and all. Imagine if the walls actually had “torchwood” in them instaed of mistletoe oil.
Also, yeah. Billie’s running gag was annoying. I know it was supposed to be, to at least some extent. In context it didn’t come off as a bit clever, though; just flat-out flippant. That was distracting, and didn’t really fit her character. It’s one thing to be rude with some wit. This, though… well.
The actual end, with Vic’s speech, was also a little on the nose. The sub-ending was great, though: fine, here’s your reward — now get off my lawn before I call the cops.
I was far less annoyed by the cartoon wolf than I expected to be! Normally CG irritates me; this was used minimally and with enough taste that it pretty much worked. So good. And all the running plot stuff is kind of neat. Bad Wolf indeed. Was that just an in-joke, or does it mean something? What fun.
All in all, the episode hung together much better than it should have. It’s tied with twine; stll, it holds. Commendable stuff. And as a production, it’s pretty much perfect. Best direction so far, next to The Empty Child. Probably Davies’ cleanest script, one week after his messiest.
* * *
Other people have described the Silent Hill movie better than I could. The best part was the butched-up Cybil. The worst part is… well, everything after the white-out. Just, yikes. It’s too bad this didn’t really work in the end, as there are so many nice little things about it: the way the sirens are attached to the church (much as in a Junji Ito story I just localized), the way the transitions to and from the “dark world” were visualized. Johnny Cash. There was so much potential in the dual story with Rose and her husband. Then the movie never really did anything with any of this; instead it just took that left turn onto gore street. A darned shame.
Rose’s joke was incredibly grating; on the other hand, that itself is a relief from the Perfect Rose who shows up in some of these stories.
And it really makes this episode’s Victoria a profoundly sympathetic character. We get just as annoyed by Rose’s flippancy (and sometimes the Doctor’s as well, since #10 seems to be very indulgent of it) as Victoria does. Large stretches of the episode are emotionally from the Queen’s POV. It’s an interesting choice and one that I don’t think we’d seen before in this kind of story.
I think it’ll bear re-watching. The file I saw had the audio track badly synchronized, which was distracting and made some of the dialogue hard to understand. For all its flaws, this was definitely Russell T. Davies’ best writing for Doctor Who by a considerable margin.
I’m seeing a pattern here. First Harriet Jones, then Queen Vic. Both strong, sympathetic characters who the Doctor alienates somehow; both with ties to Torchwood.
…Also, it was interesting seeing this not long after seeing Ghost Light, which is also set in a spooky Victorian-era scientist’s mansion and involves an alien plot against “the Crowned Saxe-Coburg”, but takes a completely opposite approach in tone, pacing and Doctor/companion interaction.
Between those two and the surviving episode of Evil of the Daleks, I think we can safely establish one thing: I really like Doctor Who stories set in spooky Victorian scientists’ mansions.
Yes. The basic idea being that the British government has known since the 19th century that (a) it’s a profoundly dangerous universe out there, and (b) they don’t trust the Doctor to save them every time or even to be on their side, so they’ve got a backup organization with more nationalistic overtones.
I think it’s actually a fascinating revision to the 1970s UNIT mythology, though it does raise the question of where Torchwood was all that time. Hey, was the obnoxious ultra-nationalistic minister in Claws of Axos working for Torchwood? Interesting idea there…
As New Earth was a sequel to End of the World, this was a sequel Unquiet Dead. That was quite a powerful ending. Yes, on the nose is an accurate criticism. I don’t mind that (…yet. Maybe after watching it a few more times.)
There seemed to be something of a Bad Wolf reference when Rose was talking to the werewolf, pre-transformation.
Yes. I assume Rose was meant to seem flippant and at least a bit annoying, and that is a part of her character, but they were hitting it a bit hard. It’s Queen Victoria. Rose is obviously quite excited to see her… and then everything Rose says is simply trying to goad her into saying a catchphrase? Come on. Rose is a deeper character than that.
That flippancy, though. It seems as big a reason as anything else for Victoria’s decisions at the end: She was more than annoyed by it; she was frightened by it — as if, to do what the Doctor does and deal with those things might be acceptable, but to be so flippant and cavalier about it crosses a line.
Well, it is supposed to be a secret organization that even the UN doesn’t know about. Granted, the UNIT guy in Christmas Invasion knows anyway…
And next week, the Doctor comes back to Sarah Jane thirty years later instead of a few days later. Kinda like Aliens of London, maybe?!
After that, Cybermen two-parter that sets up the final cyberman two-parter… kind of like Dalek and The Long Game.
Right here, without any real basis except wild speculation, I’m guessing the alternate universe in the Cyberman episodes might have something to do with Father’s Day. We know Pete Tyler is alive in that episode, and we’ve seen in the past the way the Doctor and Rose have screwed things up with their tampering. Maybe when time got “healed”, this is the alternate timeline that got spun off?
And I now learn that’s actually an error, because Victoria wasn’t a Saxe-Coburg, though Albert was.