Waffle

No, no, no, no, no!

Last week, some Doctor Who fans on Livejournal responded to criticism of Daleks in Manhattan by saying this was the best Dalek story since Genesis of the Daleks, Evil of the Daleks, Planet of the Daleks, you name it. THEY-ARE-INCORRECT!
Taken as a whole, the two-parter of Daleks in Manhattan and Evolution of the Daleks wasn't even the best Dalek story since Doomsday. it wasn't a Dalek story at all. It was a Cybermen story with the word "Cybermen" struck out and "Daleks" scribbled above it. Some other superficial changes were made: instead of a Cyber Controller in his station, we got a battle station that a Dalek fits into; instead of a cybernetic laboratory where the victims were hacked and slashed to bits, we got a genetics laboratory in which dead people's brains are filled with Dalek DNA —

And that brings me right to the second thing I hated about this episode. Just for once, could we have an episode where the science isn't 100% bullshit? 90% bullshit, I'm with you; 80% bullshit and I'll take time out to specifically praise the science in this here blog, 70% bullshit and I'll be as happy as a pig in shit. But for God's sake, try. Five minutes with the Great Gizzoogle and Wikipedia will take you to the level where 10% or more isn't baloney, bunkum or balderdash. And we'll have none of that "using gamma radiation from a solar flare, looking exactly like lightning, powering up the DNA-splicing machine that turns quasi-dead empty shells of human beings into Daleks with human bodies, only not really, because the Doctor is on top of the lightning rod when the flare strikes so that his DNA gets mixed up with that of the quasi-dead empty shells of human beings hundreds of meters below instead". Those aren't ideas you engage with or even suspend disbelief for. Those are ideas you point and laugh at before launching into a reactionary tirade about how science education in Britain has clearly gone to shit. Besides, everyone knows that gamma radiation will make you green and musclebound.

Rrright. I think that gets the criticism of the script out of the way. Sorry about the vulgarity – I mean sorry about it being insufficient. I should have been much ruder but I'm not feeling inspired today.

Thing I Hated Number 3. The acting. And I mean "acting" in the loosest sense of the word. What I said last week about the accents not being Nicola Bryant-level bad? I take it back. Tallulah even took over some Peri-like mannerisms. Solomon's accent slipped (though considering what he had to work with in this part, I can forgive him), as did Frank's. And I liked his character. Decent, average young man caught in a terrible situation and holding his own. Very American Dream, even if the girl decided to stick with the piggy in the end. He just about scraped through, believability-wise, but he didn't sound like he was from Tennessee at all.

Were there any good bits? Well, yeah. Despite it not being a Dalek story, I enjoyed the scenes in the basement, with the Daleks' interaction with Ex-Dalek Sec, the Doctor and especially one another. There was a wonderful moment where one Dalek spoke eyestalk-to-eyestalk with another, discussing what they thought about Sec's behaviour, and the second Dalek turned his head to look if no one was watching. The director and the Dalek operators at the BBC were clearly having a lot of fun making those things act. Nicolas Brigg's timing in that sequence was impeccable as well.

Solomon's extermination was a nice surprise; I expected hick-boy to be the one to buy it. I liked the switch from the Doctor seemingly launching into a Star Trek style appeal to Sec's humanity, using the radio and its music as a prop, to turning his sonic screwdriver on it and making it produce a ghastly noise that Daleks couldn't handle. Though now that I think about it, it's a bit strange that Daleks would be so vulnerable.

Finally, once you accept that Manhattan/Evolution really a Cybermen story, it's not so bad. At least these Cybermen didn't plod and plonk about looking bloody stupid; they had lovely 1940s costumes on and ... oh, who am I kidding. They did look pretty stupid. But better than the silver stompers.

Tennant and Agyema were good as always though. Sorry, force of habit here. I thought Agyema was a bit crap in this, too, to be honest. Miranda Raison's horrible acting must have been contagious. Tennant was good, but not as good as he's been earlier in the series. I think both can do a lot better.

First update: Gamma Radiation bursts from earth triggered by lightning, a scientific explanation of a phenomenon that is almost entirely, but not completely, unlike what Helen Raynor put in the script. Even so, we're at 99% bullshit and falling. (Hat tip: John Nor commenting on Behind the Sofa.)

First impression of Daleks in Manhattan: not very good. There were some good ideas in there, but the execution left a lot to be desired. The biggest problem was the acting: the BBC obviously has a huge, huge talent pool, but some things are simply too much to ask, and asking an ensemble cast of British actors to perform well while faking American accents is clearly one of them. The problem wasn't so much that the accents were bad, as such, though some were. Compared to Nicola Bryant's attempts 25 years ago, the bar has clearly been raised; the accents were consistent and there were even some attempts at diversification, with the black New Yorkers sounding like (generic) black Americans, the kid from Tennessee having a bit of a southern drawl going, and the showgirl type being from Queens or Brooklyn or wherever those showgirl types always come from. I can't pinpoint her accent with that much accuracy, but I'm sure some people would be able to. However, the effort involved in maintaining these accents hamstrung the performances and many of the characters came across as stiff and unconvincing as a result. This put a big damper on my engagement with the story.
The other problem was the reveal at the end, which managed to look even cheesier than the portrait of Dalek Sek's new form on this week's Radio Times.

A bit of a pity, really, because there was a lot to enjoy. There were lots of little filmic references (the corridor in the theatre looked like a shot out of The Blue Angel with the sad clown in it, the scenes on the scaffolding of the Empire State Building looked like classic photographs of working men from the era), there were Daleks using the brains they were cultivated with for a change, and the honest poor folks in Hooverville were painted as people you'd want to know more about. The script had some nice paralellism between what Solomon, the Hooverville community leader person, and Diagoras, the foreman-who'd-become-a-Dalek-stooge each brought back from the Great War, with one of them being ennobled by it and the other hardened and corrupted. This will probably be a setup for the next episode, as we're constantly reminded that the Doctor himself fought in a Great War.

Their names, incidentaly, are possibly significant. Solomon is wise and even hands out a Solomon's judgement (splitting the bread); Diagoras is apparently named after a Greek atheistic philosopher. I got that last tidbit from the Doctor Who communities, by the way.

I do hope next week's episode is a bit better. It's going to be difficult, because being the second part of a two-part story it will likely have the same problems as Daleks in Manhattan, but at least it will have all the mysterious business out of the way and all the players in position for a confrontation. AND there'll be some exterminatin'. That's what we want from our sink-plungered-pals, right?

I'd actually had a Doctor Who-related dream the other night, involving Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones, and several incarnations of the Doctor. I don't remember everything from it, but I do remember that Colin Baker, the Sixth Doctor, looked uncannily young and svelte in it. Even when he wasn't standing next to Mel Smith, I mean.

The real first episode was pretty good. Though I was disappointed by much of Series 2, I'd missed the guy and was looking forward to seeing him again with a new companion. "Smith and Jones" wasn't perfect - the plot was stretched a bit thin for 45 minutes - but it had a sense of fun that was missing in much of Torchwood, built up the tension well, had a few laughs, a lot of running-in-corridors and some neat visuals. It was formulaic, but the formula was executed well. I like new companion Martha Jones - she's smarter and less "primal" so to speak, than Rose Tyler was, and hopefully won't be as clingy towards him. She's pretty pleasing to the eye as well, and there was definitely a sexual dynamic between the two, so fanficcers can start sharpening their pencils right now.

The best direct comparison between the two companions is of course the bit where they see the inside of the TARDIS for the first time, a gag that the Doctor can't get enough of and neither can I. Where Rose just ran around it and went "ook?", Martha Jones stayed calm, talked, analysed, tried to figure it out, and of course failed, because there isn't really anything to comprehend. It's bigger on the inside, is all there is to it. Throughout the episode it was clear that the Doctor wanted to work with someone who used her brain, and Martha passed that test.

A good start to the season, I think. I'll definitely go on watching this.

I've seen a lot of negative response over the past few days to the start of the BBC's most overhyped new series, Torchwood. I blame the hype, because I just saw the first episode and found it perfectly engaging. It looked good, the script worked, and I easily found myself rooting for Gwen Cooper to get to the bottom of this Torchwood mystery, to remember what she found out and to get that job that she was inevitably going to get.

That last bit was the one thing that didn't quite gel - Gwen got over the nasty tricks that Jack Harkness pulled on her, and the trauma of what she saw in the climax, a little too easily. But it's easy to forgive that - she was going to get that job otherwise there wouldn't be a series.

What I especially liked was how the breakdown of Torchwood's internal discipline was constantly woven into the story, a breakdown that turned out to be essential to solving the framing plot. Nice work. If Russell T. Davies wrote this, I'd like to see more of that in that other over-hyped series next season.

Now, on to episode 2...

Update (several hours later): Episode 2, on the other hand, started out being bollocks and got ... bollockser. Shag gas over Cardiff? The "You've lost what it means to be human" speech already? And gah! Fertility clinic! You can't get away with that sort of thing even if you have written 40 minutes worth of decent plot before it. I disengaged within 10 minutes, so at that point, it had little more than train wreck appeal going for it, but that final coincidence made it a particularly ugly train wreck. The only thing that could have made it worse would have been if the girl had been saved by twue wuv, which I'm now being told was the case in the episode of The Outer Limits the writer of this tripe stole his plot from. So he gets points for improving on his source material, but his final score still ends up at minus several million.

I.
Sass is very difficult to pull off in genre fiction. Not that there aren't tonnes of writers out there trying to write convincing scenes in which their plucky hero or heroine utters witty comebacks to the threats from the baddies who have just captured them and wouldn't think twice about killing them; the problem is rather that few of them succeed. Most of the time, one is left with the feeling that a real person, in that situation, would not be able to do anything other than wet their pants in fear.
But last night, when Rose Tyler totally sassed that Dalek, I believed it. I believed that she would do that, I believed that Rose had enough presence of mind to come up with retorts that sounded good, and I believed that Rose knew what she was doing, that she had learned how to keep a Dalek wound up tightly enough to start making mistakes, but not so tightly that it would lose its patience. Thanks to Billie Piper's acting ability, even the annoying, poorly-written Rose we saw too much of during Series 2 is always believable; but this wasn't poorly-written Rose, this was Piper's acting coupled with writing that actually worked. I was cheering her on.

II.
Daleks vs. Cybermen! And they exchange taunts! That bit, of course, was 4 the kidz, but I'm clearly well in touch with my inner child. I loved it! And the Dalek who said they could take on 5 million Cybermen with just one Dalek was just soo right. Of course, there are people with more credentials than sense who disagree with me, but come on. Daleks are better because they're such clumsy designs. A Dalek is a creature you have to learn to fear. Its appearance is stubby and bigheaded, like a mis-shapen robot baby. One appendage is a plunger, the other an egg-whisk. It looks comically helpless until you learn what it can do - until you learn that the egg-whisk is a deadly laser weapon, the plunger can suck your head dry, and God only knows what hidden uses that eyestalk has. And it hates everything on general principles. Giant line-dancing robots just can't compare.
If it was me producing the episode, I'd have had them actually stick with just the four Daleks instead of the massive army that emerged from the Phallus of Rassilion or whatever that thing was called. But that's just me, and even then I have to admit it made for great visuals.

III.
Some people didn't like the long, drawn-out ending with the crying, the final goodbye and then more crying. I think the emotional release was vital to the sort of ending that this episode had, and its length was proportional to the viewers' emotional investment in the characters and their relationship. By all means let them both have a good, long blub. They'll feel better for it in the end.

IV.
Nearly everyone hated the appearance of Catherine Tate in a bridal gown at the end. It seems to me that the reason was mostly that nearly every Doctor Who fan can't stand the sight of Catherine Tate. I had never heard of her before, and so I found that this sudden post-ending surprise was utterly, almost hallucinatorily jarring - but in a good way. Poor Doctor, he doesn't get a moment's respite. The moment he finally gets the waterworks running, he gets to deal with a psycho bride right there in his home.

V.
David Tennant? Aaawyeeeeeeah, hewasalright.

I loved "Doomsday" It wasn't perfect (hey, it had Cybermen in it), but it worked. Possibly better than last year's season finale, although I'd have to re-watch that to make sure.

"Army of Ghosts" was, on the whole, pretty good. I liked the fact that it wasn't rushed, and I loved the fact that David Tennant finally got it right again. For the first time in weeks I felt that these 45 minutes were well-spent, that the script mostly worked and that there were no major clangers dropped anywhere in the story. I didn't even mind the Ghost Busters moment too much.

Nevertheless, there were still some problems. The biggest one is that there were Cybermen in it. I like the Cybus Cybermen better than some other variants, but they are still big clunky metal things that plod around the place in artificial formations. And it did look awful when they turned up in artificial formations in front of publicity stills of the Taj Mahal and the bleedin' Eiffel Tower. And the one moment when I was nearly taken out of the story occurred when one showed up in some random family's hallway, scaring the mommy, daddy and two kids for no good reason at all. It could have worked with other creatures, but with a Cyberman? No way. The reinvention of the Cybermen, the clean break with their established continuity, was a great idea and necessary to give them any chance at all at not sucking. In this episode, it became clear that the break wasn't clean enough; several scenes of them marching in formation resembled their earlier, crap, appearances in stories like "Earthshock" (Note: I think "Earthshock" is a great story; I just wish it had been done without the metallic clowns in it). What a waste of an opportunity to bring out those old Leni Riefenstahl storyboards and make them march in a way that's actually menacing.
That would have fit the fascism theme running throughout the episode. It would, in fact, have been a lot less ham-handed than what we got in the portrayal of the Torchwood director. Yvonne Hartman, who basically looked like Ann Coulter, only female, prettier, and not quite as fascistic, because even Russell T. Davies knows where to stop, talked about the British Empire and National Greatness and, oh, independence from Middle Eastern oil. Can you see the problem here? If you're going to write a character like that, why not make her seductive? No one in their right mind wants to bring back the British Empire, but a lot of us in our right minds can get behind the idea of energy independence, so that is the kind of argument a real person would use in conversation, even if what she really wanted is Empire. In a good morality play, the villain has to have the potential to hook the audience, to evoke their sympathy, to make them think about what she's saying and what their own responses to that would be. This "Ooh, I'm a megalomaniac, watch me rant" schtick is just tiresome.
Luckily the actress playing Hartman, Tracy-Ann Oberman, played her well enough to compensate for the faults in her writing, imbuing her with a bit of warmth and a sense of mischief that made her a good sparring partner for the Doctor.
Director Graeme Harper gave the story a steady, unhurried pace and a cinematographic feel. I'm at a bit of a disadvantage writing about this, because I see the episodes 12 hours after the Brits do, but those who wrote it looked like a movie were right. And Rose worked, and Jackie worked even better, and the finally Doctorish Doctor was a delight to watch.
So it was good, in places even great. But there's still a lot that needs fixing in Series 3. So excuse me for not squeeing just yet. Let's just hope that with the arrival of the Daleks on the scene, things will get a bit more exciting.

So there is hope.

"Fear Her" was actually quite silly and too much like "The Idiot's Lantern" in basic plot, but at least the ingredients were all there: the episode got a few good frights in, had some funny moments that actually worked, and was at least directed and performed in a way that allowed me to lose myself in the story, rather than what happened last week, when small mistakes of timing and cutting (not to mention some really obvious clichés) broke the illusion for me.
I could have done without the animated child's drawings, and I could have done without the black road construction worker as comic relief - I don't think the team intended to single out a black character for that, after all the central character and her mum were also dark-skinned, but something about him left a bad taste in my mouth. I also could have done with tighter plotting, with less of the coincidence and the convenient plot resolution. So the alien of the week just happened to land in a pot hole that the road worker was pouring hot tarmac over, that just happened to be in the vicinity of a house where a child was feeling lonely, and happened to do that in the year of the London Olympics, and it just happened to need the Olympic Flame and its symbolism to reboot its spacecraft? Give me a break, and in any case that last aspect of it was bloody silly even without the coincidence. I also could have done without Rose's daddy issues, although I now realise that's all been part of the setup.

Nevertheless, for all that didn't work about this episode, it ended up clearing the bar, if only just. By the end, I was happy for the little girl and her mum as well as sympathetic to the Doctor and Rose as they separated themselves from the festivities at the end. I could even put up with them musing portentously in the final 30 seconds.

Next week: Surprise, surprise, the parallel-earth Cybermen will be back!But you know, it could just turn out all right. Though the narrative format may be a bit of a hindrance here, as that sort of stuff makes things heavy-handed.

Some people have been giving out marks out of 10 for these episodes. I haven't, but if I did this one would be 6/10. Delivers the goods, could have been really good if the scriptwriter had tried harder.

Random thought: This episode could be characterised as a bit of a filler, a cheaply-made item to fit between the last epic two-parter and the two-part finale. So could "Love and Monsters" which was set up so it could be filmed simultaneously with another ep. Two fillers in a row can't be good for a series' momentum - but why have fillers at all? There are only 13 episodes in each series! "The Girl in the Fireplace" basically screamed to be expanded into a two-parter, and there were one or two more that would have benefited from a slower pace. No wonder people are getting fed up.

Well, I'm all out of love. So much potential in the idea of a group of Doctor obsessives. So badly squandered on hackneyed story ideas.
We've known since series 1 episode 1, "Rose" that there were people who have noticed the reoccurrence of the Doctor throughout history and gone a bit nutty over it. In "Love and Monsters", we get five of them. Five people with their own backgrounds and their own reasons,major trauma and loss for some of them, mere curiosity for others, to lose themselves in the quest for the Doctor. They meet, exchange theories, ideas, even fan art, and out of their meetings grows something else, a stronger bond, a purpose in life. I was actually touched by that. I instantly sympathised with the characters, sketchy as they were, and found myself rooting for them. It's a lovely mirror to fandom, or fandoms, the social networks and subcultures they form, and the way fan groups move on beyond what brought them together into real friendships that otherwise would have been prevented by barriers of age, class and location.

Then the monster*) shows up and the whole thing goes to shit. I don't mean for the characters although they do get picked off one at a time**) (and I don't feel bad about spoiling this at all. When this episode comes on in your area, whether you see it on Scifi Channel or Nederland 3 in a year's time, don't waste your time on it - go do something else instead). I mean disastrously bad writing. After the monster appears, the story unfolds in an utterly predictable manner: the monster, in disguise, asks to speak one member of the group after another to speak with him in private, then eats, sorry, absorbs that member while the others walk away from the meeting place, oblivious to the screams (honestly, I'm doing you a favour by spoiling this). The one thing that isn't predictable is the very end when the writer makes the Doctor do something that completely contradicts everything he stood for in the past two series (not to mention what I've seen of the twenty-odd seasons before that): he partly resurrects the love interest and last victim of the episode's hero, trapping her mind and face in a piece of pavement so the hero can go on loving her forever and ever and she can go on giving him blowjobs for all of eternity. Errr... what? Whatever happens to the idea that everything ends?
Don't get me started on the Scooby Doo chase in the beginning of the episode, by the. Just don't. The only things that redeemed the episode somewhat, except for the setup, were the scenes with Jackie Tyler. The writing in those was cheesy too, but at least it succeeded in being funny, and Camille Coduri has grown into the character so much she can make any old rubbish work.
And any old rubbish is exactly what this script was. I'll need to make a note of who the writer was so I can avoid his work in the future. Update: It was Russell T. Davies himself, which means that avoiding his work will be very difficult. On the other hand, he is capable of turning in good stuff. Sometimes.

*) I mean the real monster, not the thing with the teeth that went "RAWR!" at the beginning. The thing with the teeth that went "RAWR!" at the beginning served its purpose well enough.

**) Sort of like Series 2 has been doing until now.

My reviews of the new Doctor Who episodes have been pretty brief lately. My problem with the series isn't that it's suddenly become bad - it's worse than that. Season 2 of the new series has shaped up to be a very ordinary sort of series. Every week, we get a perfectly entertaining, competently-made action adventure that could just as easily have been any other series.

But not everyone feels that way, and it's nice to know that some traditions are being maintained:

(37) "Oh. Dear. God." says Adam slowly and distinctly. "Exactly. The. Opposite," says Dad. Harry abandons his cushion and races behind the sofa, closely followed by Amy. For the next few minutes, they're like meercats, popping up and down depending on whether the Beast is on screen or not.

(From The Fear Forecast which is always fun to read. The kids rated "The Satan Pit" 5 out of 5, or "terrifying", by the way.)

...turned out all right. I'm in no mood to write a full review, but for the record, I liked it. Next week's trailer looks interesting as well. Won't see that one until the Monday after, at the earliest, though.