Doctor who
May. 16th, 2010 01:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aumentouI liked the first two episodes of this series. The angel ones were also pleasing to me. There are issues - like the doctor is still an idiot who ponces around with neither weapons nor protective devices and no personal teleport back to his magic impervious box. Also, still nobody uses the fucking time machine - it's still just a "let's go adventure somewhere!" plot device. Also, no matter where or when they go, guns firing bullets still seem much the same. IIRC the angel episodes are 50k in the future. And humans are still human, not cyborg. And humans still use guns with bullets. And nobody tried blowing up the statues. And that scene where she wanders through the angels and they freeze up even though her eyes are shut made no sense - their freezing was supposed to be automatic before that.
But these are niggles, within suspension of disbelief.
One thing that isn't, is episode 3. The one with the daleks. Because there's a problem with that one: nothing in it makes any fucking sense whatsoever. It's just shit.
The fundamental problem with it is that modern daleks are shit bad guys. Original daleks were great - each individual dalek was basically a tank. Vulnerable to the things tanks are vulnerable to. And that's pretty scary, when you think there's a ship somewhere with a million tanks on it, but it means there are ways to deal with them. You can have an exciting combination of running hiding and occaisonally blowing one of them up.
Modern daleks don't have that. They're completely unkillable except for plot-powered large explosions. They can fly, so nothing stops them except the tardis door. They can teleport, so they have no tactical or logistic difficulties. And it appears that each and every one of them is capable of respawning the entire damn race.
So what can you do? You can negotiate. Except that they don't, really. They will always betray you. Or you can outwit them, which is easy because they're as dumb as toast. This is bad, for a race with amazing magic-tech. How can they be that stupid when they invented everything-but-the-plot proof armour and antigrav and teleportation and the only decent gun* in the entire canon?
*it's apparently the only one that can take out a dalek, so it's the only one worth having.
Answer: it makes no sense don't try to figure it out.
And this... this makes them like superman. You can't beat him unless you've got kryptonite. But there isn't any kryptonite, so you can't beat them unless they're stupid. Really really fucking stupid. So they're stupid. Again. And it's really really annoying, as every encounter makes them more and more the cartoonish stereotype villain and less and less something actually scary.
The whole thing makes no sense. They don't mind making the doctor an action hero. They don't mind making him kill, if necessary. They don't mind his assistants killing - in the vampire one, she burned a giant intelligent insect using a prism, for fucks sake. But they baulk at using weapons or armour, and they baulk at having anything damage a dalek.
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no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 07:38 pm (UTC)watch the second angels episode again, as well as the Doctor there is a time travelling second version of the Doctor from the future in that episode...
(this isn't a spoiler he's there in plain sight)
Oh and the Dalek episode is shit in many ways.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 10:42 pm (UTC)Isn't the standard excuse for not using the fucking time machine that the Doctor can't cross his own timeline? I know they're guilty of breaking that rule occasionally, but if he could use the time machine constantly within an episode, wouldn't that make things way too easy?
no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 11:01 pm (UTC)e.g. In Victory of the Daleks, he couldn't just jump back into the TARDIS after being told he was a month late and go a month back in time because that would cancel out events he had already experienced and thus he would have no need to go back in time and cause a giant loop of paradoxy badness.
HOWEVER
There's nothing really to stop him from following the example set by Bill and Ted and going back in time after an event to plant an item that would allow him to escape. (Bill's dad's keys for instance!).
With this series though, there have been a couple of references to time being written, re-written and un-written so I suspect that the current laws of temporal mechanics are being bent and broken by 'the Crack'.
no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 11:03 pm (UTC)Really? Which future when? You aren't one of these people who thinks that River is a later regeneration are you?
no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 06:30 am (UTC)The Doctor then comes back to Amy and asks her to remember what he said when she was 7. He's in his darker jacket with the sleaves rolled up and possibly a different watch. His behaviour is completely different he's much more agitated. The scene then hard cuts back to the present Doctor River and the Bishop.
Unless you rule ths out as poor continuity, then it's the Doctor fom later in the series in some desparate plan crossing over his own recent time line.
no River is not the Doctor, nice ide though, but very wrong!
no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 06:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-16 11:32 pm (UTC)(The atmosphere did seem to change slightly and he did reappear with River and the Chaplain quickly after)
Was he getting Amy to summon another crack?
no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 06:31 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-05-17 09:40 pm (UTC)I'm ok, I just focus on the gorgeous ging :-).
no subject
Date: 2010-05-20 05:18 pm (UTC)Yeah, it's nonsense. A wizard did it. Fun, though :-)