Doctor who series finale
Jul. 12th, 2008 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I really enjoyed the finale. I didn't think it was as good as the first half of the two-parter, but still very good. (As someone said, it can be easier to set up something insanely dramatic than to live up to it.) In fact, I looking back, I see every episode of season #4 was good (I think the weakest was the first, although in retrospect, I'm not sure, it was a bit flat, but it also had quite a few classic moments), as was every episode of season #1.
Great things
* German Daleks!
* When Jack winks, and when he tumbles exhausted out of the furnace. They make really good use of his invulnerability -- it's obviously never easy for him to exploit it, but he's just so gosh-darn cool he can make use of it when he needs to.
* "Who invented that? Well, someone called Osterhagen, obviously, but..."
* When Micky and Jack meet. "Captain Cheesecake!"
* When Jackie teleports to safety. Yes, I'd forgotten that could be possible.
* Prophecies!
* "Donna was somehow drawn to the doctor", ah, cool, it all made sense at the time, but it makes more sense now! That is how you set up a revelation!
* Jack "What I'm thinking..."
* The daleks exploding to music, and the ending music
* Jack: "Three doctors? I can't tell you what I'm thinking right now!"
* "He has the biggest family on earth! Awww."
* Micky so happy at the end! Awww!
* Rose and Doctor 2! Awwww!
* Apparently the doctor has gone through a complete emotional development arc over four seasons. I'm not saying it was perfect (it may have been, I don't know), but I love the suggestion that he did. It's often the sort of thing that books hint did happen later, but was not evident from the episodes at the time.
* Donna leaving was sad.
Nitpicks -- general
* I won't even bother pointing out flaws in the plot, but mention a few specific things.
* Why did Davros leave Donna free?
* I'm glad there was no reset button to put everything back how it was. However, thinking there might be took a small piece of the excitement out of everything that happened :(
Nitpicks -- Osterhagen key
Hundreds of nuclear weapons buried round the world, waiting to blow the earth up... Yeah, right. Interesting idea. But there is a good guide on the subject of blowing up the earth, readily available, that I've linked to before.
The headline is using something like 25 teratonnes of antimatter. And I don't mean antimatter having a yield equivalent to 25 teratonnes of TNT. I mean twenty-five trillion tonnes of antimatter. (And you do not want to bury antimatter in your crust. And you're not going to achieve this with conventional nuclear weapons, either.)
More than one German woman would have noticed.
Of course, presumably this is a Doctor-Strangelove-style[1] mutually-assured-destruction device. But that means it's not actually guaranteed to make the planet useless to the Daleks.
[1] I said there were spoilers :)
Nipicks -- Earth flying though space
Like the last episode, all the characters working together was really enjoyable and uplifting. And what they did was cool, but fairly stupid. Let's see if I can pick the top ten reasons wouldn't work:
1. They lassood the earth with a beam of energy. Pity the poor buggers under where it drew tight, eh?
2. The stars were totally different, so they were obviously in a significantly different place in the galaxy (if in the same galaxy at all!), so it would N years to get home, where N is somewhere between 4 and millions, even if they accelerated to close to the speed of light.
3. They must have had to accelerate at much less than G or everything (and I mean everything) would have fallen down.
4. Funnily enough, not being in orbit, doesn't make your atmosphere fly off. But flying through space at a significant fraction of the speed of light probably does. Not to mention the ionisation, radiation, mini-asteroids, etc.
5. The moon was conveniently there waiting for them when they came back?
6. Oh yes, that reminds me. You can probably survive without any tides when you're in the Cascade, but boy howdy, half the earth is probably going to get swamped if you accelerate too fast, not to mention if you go near something.
7. And people didn't notice. Is everyone now finally going to admit that aliens exist? Or not?[1]
8. What about the other planets? Was someone rescuing them?
9. OK, it seems I don't quite have ten. Still, eight reasons why something is impossible it pretty good going.
[1] Like the grammar issue, this is unfair of me. The show (correctly) doesn't pretend to make this serious or consistent. But it certainly fits on a list of "why flying the earth about like that would be a stupid idea" :)
Doctor #2
I flip-flopped several times on this. I thought implying the doctor could choose to regenerate into himself (even if, as I assume, he was joking) was a cop-out. And it also missed a marvellous opportunity to increase the sense of loss for the doctor by having his companions have to deal with a new regeneration instead (even if that's reverted at the end of the episode).
But I really, really liked how it turned out. I thought the contrast between the two (and three) doctors was really good.
I had a nagging feeling they could have shuffled round all the plot elements and come up with something that used all the best bits, but not the cop-outs, and hung together perfectly, but wasn't up to actually constructing something like that, it may be what they had was nearly the best.
Themes
The Doctor vs Davros as a villain. The Doctor's emotional growth since the time war. The doctor using people as weapons. All handled more or less well, but generally interesting ideas.
German Daleks
Daleks speaking German is good, as they're both (a) funny (b) ominous and (c) advance the plot. And (d) I think everyone understands the intent of what was shown.
I'm not sure why it seems incongruous. I think that we expect Daleks to say "exterminate", but this scene implies they naturally use a local language to communicate, and those aren't consistent. (Which isn't a flaw, I just think it's interesting.) After all, it would make sense if they always used a local language. But we probably also have the idea they say "exterminate" because they're not very articulate, so it's strange to imagine they can express themselves well in a variety of languages. (In fact, the question of language is unanswerable, fun science fiction can't always be bound by it. But that doesn't stop me thinking.)
In fact, it's not clear why they would say "exterminate" in anything other than their native language -- after all, they're more talking to themselves than their victim at that point, aren't they?
Great things
* German Daleks!
* When Jack winks, and when he tumbles exhausted out of the furnace. They make really good use of his invulnerability -- it's obviously never easy for him to exploit it, but he's just so gosh-darn cool he can make use of it when he needs to.
* "Who invented that? Well, someone called Osterhagen, obviously, but..."
* When Micky and Jack meet. "Captain Cheesecake!"
* When Jackie teleports to safety. Yes, I'd forgotten that could be possible.
* Prophecies!
* "Donna was somehow drawn to the doctor", ah, cool, it all made sense at the time, but it makes more sense now! That is how you set up a revelation!
* Jack "What I'm thinking..."
* The daleks exploding to music, and the ending music
* Jack: "Three doctors? I can't tell you what I'm thinking right now!"
* "He has the biggest family on earth! Awww."
* Micky so happy at the end! Awww!
* Rose and Doctor 2! Awwww!
* Apparently the doctor has gone through a complete emotional development arc over four seasons. I'm not saying it was perfect (it may have been, I don't know), but I love the suggestion that he did. It's often the sort of thing that books hint did happen later, but was not evident from the episodes at the time.
* Donna leaving was sad.
Nitpicks -- general
* I won't even bother pointing out flaws in the plot, but mention a few specific things.
* Why did Davros leave Donna free?
* I'm glad there was no reset button to put everything back how it was. However, thinking there might be took a small piece of the excitement out of everything that happened :(
Nitpicks -- Osterhagen key
Hundreds of nuclear weapons buried round the world, waiting to blow the earth up... Yeah, right. Interesting idea. But there is a good guide on the subject of blowing up the earth, readily available, that I've linked to before.
The headline is using something like 25 teratonnes of antimatter. And I don't mean antimatter having a yield equivalent to 25 teratonnes of TNT. I mean twenty-five trillion tonnes of antimatter. (And you do not want to bury antimatter in your crust. And you're not going to achieve this with conventional nuclear weapons, either.)
More than one German woman would have noticed.
Of course, presumably this is a Doctor-Strangelove-style[1] mutually-assured-destruction device. But that means it's not actually guaranteed to make the planet useless to the Daleks.
[1] I said there were spoilers :)
Nipicks -- Earth flying though space
Like the last episode, all the characters working together was really enjoyable and uplifting. And what they did was cool, but fairly stupid. Let's see if I can pick the top ten reasons wouldn't work:
1. They lassood the earth with a beam of energy. Pity the poor buggers under where it drew tight, eh?
2. The stars were totally different, so they were obviously in a significantly different place in the galaxy (if in the same galaxy at all!), so it would N years to get home, where N is somewhere between 4 and millions, even if they accelerated to close to the speed of light.
3. They must have had to accelerate at much less than G or everything (and I mean everything) would have fallen down.
4. Funnily enough, not being in orbit, doesn't make your atmosphere fly off. But flying through space at a significant fraction of the speed of light probably does. Not to mention the ionisation, radiation, mini-asteroids, etc.
5. The moon was conveniently there waiting for them when they came back?
6. Oh yes, that reminds me. You can probably survive without any tides when you're in the Cascade, but boy howdy, half the earth is probably going to get swamped if you accelerate too fast, not to mention if you go near something.
7. And people didn't notice. Is everyone now finally going to admit that aliens exist? Or not?[1]
8. What about the other planets? Was someone rescuing them?
9. OK, it seems I don't quite have ten. Still, eight reasons why something is impossible it pretty good going.
[1] Like the grammar issue, this is unfair of me. The show (correctly) doesn't pretend to make this serious or consistent. But it certainly fits on a list of "why flying the earth about like that would be a stupid idea" :)
Doctor #2
I flip-flopped several times on this. I thought implying the doctor could choose to regenerate into himself (even if, as I assume, he was joking) was a cop-out. And it also missed a marvellous opportunity to increase the sense of loss for the doctor by having his companions have to deal with a new regeneration instead (even if that's reverted at the end of the episode).
But I really, really liked how it turned out. I thought the contrast between the two (and three) doctors was really good.
I had a nagging feeling they could have shuffled round all the plot elements and come up with something that used all the best bits, but not the cop-outs, and hung together perfectly, but wasn't up to actually constructing something like that, it may be what they had was nearly the best.
Themes
The Doctor vs Davros as a villain. The Doctor's emotional growth since the time war. The doctor using people as weapons. All handled more or less well, but generally interesting ideas.
German Daleks
Daleks speaking German is good, as they're both (a) funny (b) ominous and (c) advance the plot. And (d) I think everyone understands the intent of what was shown.
I'm not sure why it seems incongruous. I think that we expect Daleks to say "exterminate", but this scene implies they naturally use a local language to communicate, and those aren't consistent. (Which isn't a flaw, I just think it's interesting.) After all, it would make sense if they always used a local language. But we probably also have the idea they say "exterminate" because they're not very articulate, so it's strange to imagine they can express themselves well in a variety of languages. (In fact, the question of language is unanswerable, fun science fiction can't always be bound by it. But that doesn't stop me thinking.)
In fact, it's not clear why they would say "exterminate" in anything other than their native language -- after all, they're more talking to themselves than their victim at that point, aren't they?
no subject
Date: 2008-07-12 06:44 pm (UTC)They'd managed to send the other planets back the way they came but then the daleks broke it so the earth was left behind. Yes the flying though space was silly but they had at least explained that bit.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-14 11:58 am (UTC)