it does ding when there's stuff
Jun. 13th, 2007 01:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
llywelaFeel I should probably find something to say about this episode, because it was fab, and I loved every moment of it, which isn't something I find I can usually say about the guest led episodes, so it deserves an awesome rating just for that fact alone.
Doctor Who doesn't often manage to be really creepy, but this episode so was. If only this had been the pilot for a new companion! It totally would have worked, if Sally and Larry had gone to 1969 with the Tardis instead of being left behind, and ended up travelling with the Doctor from then on. Larry had the potential to develop into another Mickey (I loved Mickey so much in season two) and Sally would have been the absolute best kind of companion - the kind that's along for the ride, is clever, and has a mind of her own and isn't afraid to use it, rather than just mooning around after the Doctor because he's so lonely and he needs me and I'm all he's got. I mean, I like Martha, I do - she's feisty and pro-active, and I like that in a companion. But the writers have turned her into such a drip about the Doctor. And it really isn't necessary - we get it! We really do. We don't need a lovestruck companion pointing it out to us every five minutes to understand that the Doctor is a tragic hero, the last of the Timelords, doomed to live on indefinitely while the people around him age and die, or move on without him, and so on and so forth. It's more poignant if they don't, y'know, if they trust us to get it all by ourselves.
Ahem. This is turning into a bit of a rant, and I'm meant to be talking about the episode. Have we really had ten episodes of this season already? Wow. Time really does fly, no? This was such a fantastically creepy and clever episode - way to use time travel without any of those pesky paradoxes creeping in! Loved the stone angels that only move when you aren't looking at them. Don't blink! Such a fab idea for a monster, and the guest characters were all engaging enough to connect to and care about, even after only a short acquaintance, which is how it should be. Other writers could learn a lot from that.
Start at the beginning. Creepy derelict house? I had a Supernatural moment - don't go into the haunted house, Sally! And the writing on the walls, hidden under the wallpaper? Can just imagine how the 1969 residents felt about the Doctor and Martha installing that lot. Someone should write the wacky adventures of the Doctor and Martha trapped in 1969, him bumming around inventing timey-wimey machines out of a tape recorder, postcards and elastic bands and living off her minimum wage, and the two of them invading someone's house so they can write on the walls and then wallpaper over the top of it.
Beware the weeping angel! Fabulous. Creepiest villain DW has managed since the Empty Child, since you don't see them moving because you can't see them move. Don't blink! The actors playing the stone angels do an amazing job - wonder if they employed those blokes who occasionally paint themselves white and stand around in the city centre pretending to be statues...
So...the stone angels can only move if no one is looking at them, including themselves, and if anyone does look at them, including themselves, they turn to stone - way to have an existential crisis, angels! 'Cept the whole 'can't kill stone' argument doesn't entirely hold water, because no, you can't, but you can smash stone into many many smithereens, given the right equipment.
Sally's reaction to a stressful and inexplicable night is to go around to her mate's house, break in and put the kettle on. At 1am. What was she doing photographing the creepy derelict house at that time of night anyway? Asking for trouble! Or maybe I really have watched too much Supernatural, and there's no reason to fear derelict houses by night after all. *G*
Girl Investigators - Sparrow and Nightingale! "A bit ITV, isn't it?" Hee.
Kathy's grandson looks kinda creepy, but turns out to be a devoted grandson carrying out his beloved grandma's last request, having carefully hoarded that letter and her instructions about the date and time for twenty years. Whoa. Kinda makes you wonder about Kathy's life, 1920-1987, how she had no way of explaining what had happened to her, but must have gone over it in her mind, over and over, until all the details were engraved there. The place, the date, the precise time at which it happened - the creepy derelict house and mysterious man at the door. When did she figure out it was her grandson? Did she figure out it was her grandson, or was she simply desperate to get a message back somehow, anyhow, and fate took care of the rest? Such clever writing. I love that in her letter she sounds like a person who'd grown up in the period she found herself, so old-fashioned, having had 60+ years in which to lose all trace of her modern self.
"Told him you were 18, you lying cow." I really, really like that this episode makes me care so much about the guest characters, without ever over-playing them - they work because the episode just gets on with telling the story, instead of hitting us over the head with how sympathetic it wants the characters to be.
I wonder just how the Doctor's encounter with the stone angels panned out, for them to have got hold of the Tardis key like that. I mean, he doesn't usually go waving it around. Clearly it was the same one that touched both him and Martha, for them to have ended up in the same year - lucky for Martha. So it couldn't have been a group skirmish or anything. Interesting to speculate.
I like Sally and Larry together, because he's clearly got plenty of brains, but is so gormless, and she's completely got him on the back foot from the moment of meeting him while he was naked, and she's so amused by him, but fond of him for Kathy's sake, and then later for his own, and it's just nice and works. And another reason why they'd have made decent companions because they'd have had a fledgling relationship of their own to confuse them, so no Doctor hangups.
And then there's Billy, and he's another really cool character who got totally jibbed by his storyline. "Life is short and you are hot."
I got touched by an angel and woke up in 1969, am I dead, in a coma or- nope sorry wrong show, said someone else's review, which is awesome. Because Sam Tyler totally got a way better deal than Billy!
The Doctor trapped in 1969 is nine kinds of awesome, as he'll happily tell anyone who cares to listen, and I like Martha being all 'just nod when he stops for breath', because I like my companions snarky not sappy and she should always be like that. "It goes ding when there's stuff," is the Doctor's highly technical explanation of his timey-wimey machine. That is so him. It's like Nine explaining his upgrading of Rose's phone as jiggery-pokery.
And then half an hour and 38 years later Billy and Sally are reunited, and I like about her that she's the kind of girl who will sit with an old man she barely knows so he doesn't die alone. Because Billy is still lovely even when he's old and sick and dying, and he never forgot her, through all those years, and now she'll never know if they could have had something or not, and he lived his whole life wondering the same thing and waiting to deliver the Doctor's message, and thought about looking for her before now. But he couldn't, because this is the day she met him, so what could he have said to her if he'd found her earlier? I mean, besides the Doctor's dire warnings about what would happen if he did, all of which were totally made up to scare him out of doing anything stupid, like stalking her as she grew up, clearly.
I love that Billy got into video and DVD publishing, and pirated all those DVDs with the Doctor's message, because coming from 38 years in the future he totally had the headstart needed to launch himself into the industry. But he has to have had technical smarts, too, to pull it off.
Just why Sally and Larry had to watch the Doctor's message at the creepy derelict house is beyond me. I mean, I get the dramatic storyline necessity for it, but it seems like a really stupid thing to do, and I thought they were cleverer than that. But I love the future/past conversation, and how cleverly it is written, because the conversation across the years completely works, but the Doctor's remarks also tie in neatly with what Sally said way back in the shop, as well, and that's what makes it so cool.
"I'm clever and I'm listening, and people have died and I'm not happy." See, this is why I'd have loved for Sally to be a new companion, because she is clever (apart from coming back to the creepy angel-infested house to do this) and she doesn't take any nonsense, and she can stand on her own two feet and doesn't need her hand held when things get tough.
And the Doctor on wobbly 1969 video footage with the glasses? Adorable. Plus, the brief glimpse we get of Martha's 1969 hairdo is fab.
"Don't blink. Blink and you're dead." And everyone's lives depend on her, to boot. So...no pressure, or anything.
The transcript runs out, because Larry is frozen with terror, and because he can't keep his eyes fixed on the stone angel and keep up the shorthand all at the same time! Because men just don't multitask in that way. He looks so terrified when Sally leaves him alone to rush off in search of an exit. See, this is why they should have had the DVD session in someone's house and worried about the creepy derelict building later!
Any show that can have you yelling 'Don't blink!' at the TV this many times in one 45 minute session must be doing something right. There's even a bit of classic Doctor Who running about thrown in there for good measure.
How cool is it that the DVD is encoded to activate the Tardis! Just how long did the Doctor and Billy hang out for the Doc to explain everything he had to do to achieve it? Or did he have all the technical jiggery-pokery all ready when Billy arrived, and just had to convince him to act upon it? I don't read DW fanfic, but maybe I should start if someone starts writing 'trapped in 1969' stuff!
Oh, it's bigger on the inside. Every new person to step through that door has to have that reaction. I mean, just because it's old hat for viewers doesn't change the impact it has on anyone new, so it's only right that the reaction should always be there.
It is very cool that the angels are able to shake the Tardis around from the outside, because it's just a wooden box, and Sally and Larry get thrown all over the console room inside, which is massive. It's because of quantum, undoubtedly.
The Tardis leaves without them. How scary is that? But this is the point at which we could, in another universe, have veered off into new companion territory, if it did take them with it. Of course, the Doctor would then be stuck with the problem of getting them home again, which could potentially involve more of that 'just one trip to say thanks' malarkey - and that's where the new companion thing would come in - and he's probably already got a pretty good idea that that never happened, because of that meeting he had with Sally in his past and her future, and it does tend to make your brain hurt if you think in too many circles. But he's thought of everything! Because he's the Doctor! Tardis gone, the angels are trapped looking at each other, and Sally and Larry are saved. The angels are forced to play ring-a-roses forever. Or until the light bulb dies. Or until someone with influence acquires the right equipment to have them smashed to smithereens. You know, whatever happens first.
The Doctor and Martha running around with bow and arrows? Forget the Doctor and Rose with those stupid coloured buckets last season - this is the kind of off-screen adventure hint we like to see! Because Ten with bow and arrow slung over his shoulder in the middle of the high street? Adorable. And Sally is awesome in this scene, figuring out the last details and handing him the folder of exposition, and finally allowing herself to move on. And I love how the Doctor is with her in this scene, because he has no idea what she's talking about, but he doesn't dismiss her, accepts what she's got to say, because he's interested in people, and he understands that time doesn't always move in a straight line.
Now, for the Doctor to still be holding that folder when the angels attack, does that mean that whenever he encounters them - a year or whenever ago - must be pretty soon after this? Those final shots of random statues seems to imply that. And also - talk about location spotting heaven! I can locate every single one of the statues we see in that final medley. Fantastic.
So - clever and creepy story, engaging characters, and lots of snappy dialogue = one highly entertaining 45 minutes of TV. We'll have more of that for the rest of the season, please!
Doctor Who doesn't often manage to be really creepy, but this episode so was. If only this had been the pilot for a new companion! It totally would have worked, if Sally and Larry had gone to 1969 with the Tardis instead of being left behind, and ended up travelling with the Doctor from then on. Larry had the potential to develop into another Mickey (I loved Mickey so much in season two) and Sally would have been the absolute best kind of companion - the kind that's along for the ride, is clever, and has a mind of her own and isn't afraid to use it, rather than just mooning around after the Doctor because he's so lonely and he needs me and I'm all he's got. I mean, I like Martha, I do - she's feisty and pro-active, and I like that in a companion. But the writers have turned her into such a drip about the Doctor. And it really isn't necessary - we get it! We really do. We don't need a lovestruck companion pointing it out to us every five minutes to understand that the Doctor is a tragic hero, the last of the Timelords, doomed to live on indefinitely while the people around him age and die, or move on without him, and so on and so forth. It's more poignant if they don't, y'know, if they trust us to get it all by ourselves.
Ahem. This is turning into a bit of a rant, and I'm meant to be talking about the episode. Have we really had ten episodes of this season already? Wow. Time really does fly, no? This was such a fantastically creepy and clever episode - way to use time travel without any of those pesky paradoxes creeping in! Loved the stone angels that only move when you aren't looking at them. Don't blink! Such a fab idea for a monster, and the guest characters were all engaging enough to connect to and care about, even after only a short acquaintance, which is how it should be. Other writers could learn a lot from that.
Start at the beginning. Creepy derelict house? I had a Supernatural moment - don't go into the haunted house, Sally! And the writing on the walls, hidden under the wallpaper? Can just imagine how the 1969 residents felt about the Doctor and Martha installing that lot. Someone should write the wacky adventures of the Doctor and Martha trapped in 1969, him bumming around inventing timey-wimey machines out of a tape recorder, postcards and elastic bands and living off her minimum wage, and the two of them invading someone's house so they can write on the walls and then wallpaper over the top of it.
Beware the weeping angel! Fabulous. Creepiest villain DW has managed since the Empty Child, since you don't see them moving because you can't see them move. Don't blink! The actors playing the stone angels do an amazing job - wonder if they employed those blokes who occasionally paint themselves white and stand around in the city centre pretending to be statues...
So...the stone angels can only move if no one is looking at them, including themselves, and if anyone does look at them, including themselves, they turn to stone - way to have an existential crisis, angels! 'Cept the whole 'can't kill stone' argument doesn't entirely hold water, because no, you can't, but you can smash stone into many many smithereens, given the right equipment.
Sally's reaction to a stressful and inexplicable night is to go around to her mate's house, break in and put the kettle on. At 1am. What was she doing photographing the creepy derelict house at that time of night anyway? Asking for trouble! Or maybe I really have watched too much Supernatural, and there's no reason to fear derelict houses by night after all. *G*
Girl Investigators - Sparrow and Nightingale! "A bit ITV, isn't it?" Hee.
Kathy's grandson looks kinda creepy, but turns out to be a devoted grandson carrying out his beloved grandma's last request, having carefully hoarded that letter and her instructions about the date and time for twenty years. Whoa. Kinda makes you wonder about Kathy's life, 1920-1987, how she had no way of explaining what had happened to her, but must have gone over it in her mind, over and over, until all the details were engraved there. The place, the date, the precise time at which it happened - the creepy derelict house and mysterious man at the door. When did she figure out it was her grandson? Did she figure out it was her grandson, or was she simply desperate to get a message back somehow, anyhow, and fate took care of the rest? Such clever writing. I love that in her letter she sounds like a person who'd grown up in the period she found herself, so old-fashioned, having had 60+ years in which to lose all trace of her modern self.
"Told him you were 18, you lying cow." I really, really like that this episode makes me care so much about the guest characters, without ever over-playing them - they work because the episode just gets on with telling the story, instead of hitting us over the head with how sympathetic it wants the characters to be.
I wonder just how the Doctor's encounter with the stone angels panned out, for them to have got hold of the Tardis key like that. I mean, he doesn't usually go waving it around. Clearly it was the same one that touched both him and Martha, for them to have ended up in the same year - lucky for Martha. So it couldn't have been a group skirmish or anything. Interesting to speculate.
I like Sally and Larry together, because he's clearly got plenty of brains, but is so gormless, and she's completely got him on the back foot from the moment of meeting him while he was naked, and she's so amused by him, but fond of him for Kathy's sake, and then later for his own, and it's just nice and works. And another reason why they'd have made decent companions because they'd have had a fledgling relationship of their own to confuse them, so no Doctor hangups.
And then there's Billy, and he's another really cool character who got totally jibbed by his storyline. "Life is short and you are hot."
I got touched by an angel and woke up in 1969, am I dead, in a coma or- nope sorry wrong show, said someone else's review, which is awesome. Because Sam Tyler totally got a way better deal than Billy!
The Doctor trapped in 1969 is nine kinds of awesome, as he'll happily tell anyone who cares to listen, and I like Martha being all 'just nod when he stops for breath', because I like my companions snarky not sappy and she should always be like that. "It goes ding when there's stuff," is the Doctor's highly technical explanation of his timey-wimey machine. That is so him. It's like Nine explaining his upgrading of Rose's phone as jiggery-pokery.
And then half an hour and 38 years later Billy and Sally are reunited, and I like about her that she's the kind of girl who will sit with an old man she barely knows so he doesn't die alone. Because Billy is still lovely even when he's old and sick and dying, and he never forgot her, through all those years, and now she'll never know if they could have had something or not, and he lived his whole life wondering the same thing and waiting to deliver the Doctor's message, and thought about looking for her before now. But he couldn't, because this is the day she met him, so what could he have said to her if he'd found her earlier? I mean, besides the Doctor's dire warnings about what would happen if he did, all of which were totally made up to scare him out of doing anything stupid, like stalking her as she grew up, clearly.
I love that Billy got into video and DVD publishing, and pirated all those DVDs with the Doctor's message, because coming from 38 years in the future he totally had the headstart needed to launch himself into the industry. But he has to have had technical smarts, too, to pull it off.
Just why Sally and Larry had to watch the Doctor's message at the creepy derelict house is beyond me. I mean, I get the dramatic storyline necessity for it, but it seems like a really stupid thing to do, and I thought they were cleverer than that. But I love the future/past conversation, and how cleverly it is written, because the conversation across the years completely works, but the Doctor's remarks also tie in neatly with what Sally said way back in the shop, as well, and that's what makes it so cool.
"I'm clever and I'm listening, and people have died and I'm not happy." See, this is why I'd have loved for Sally to be a new companion, because she is clever (apart from coming back to the creepy angel-infested house to do this) and she doesn't take any nonsense, and she can stand on her own two feet and doesn't need her hand held when things get tough.
And the Doctor on wobbly 1969 video footage with the glasses? Adorable. Plus, the brief glimpse we get of Martha's 1969 hairdo is fab.
"Don't blink. Blink and you're dead." And everyone's lives depend on her, to boot. So...no pressure, or anything.
The transcript runs out, because Larry is frozen with terror, and because he can't keep his eyes fixed on the stone angel and keep up the shorthand all at the same time! Because men just don't multitask in that way. He looks so terrified when Sally leaves him alone to rush off in search of an exit. See, this is why they should have had the DVD session in someone's house and worried about the creepy derelict building later!
Any show that can have you yelling 'Don't blink!' at the TV this many times in one 45 minute session must be doing something right. There's even a bit of classic Doctor Who running about thrown in there for good measure.
How cool is it that the DVD is encoded to activate the Tardis! Just how long did the Doctor and Billy hang out for the Doc to explain everything he had to do to achieve it? Or did he have all the technical jiggery-pokery all ready when Billy arrived, and just had to convince him to act upon it? I don't read DW fanfic, but maybe I should start if someone starts writing 'trapped in 1969' stuff!
Oh, it's bigger on the inside. Every new person to step through that door has to have that reaction. I mean, just because it's old hat for viewers doesn't change the impact it has on anyone new, so it's only right that the reaction should always be there.
It is very cool that the angels are able to shake the Tardis around from the outside, because it's just a wooden box, and Sally and Larry get thrown all over the console room inside, which is massive. It's because of quantum, undoubtedly.
The Tardis leaves without them. How scary is that? But this is the point at which we could, in another universe, have veered off into new companion territory, if it did take them with it. Of course, the Doctor would then be stuck with the problem of getting them home again, which could potentially involve more of that 'just one trip to say thanks' malarkey - and that's where the new companion thing would come in - and he's probably already got a pretty good idea that that never happened, because of that meeting he had with Sally in his past and her future, and it does tend to make your brain hurt if you think in too many circles. But he's thought of everything! Because he's the Doctor! Tardis gone, the angels are trapped looking at each other, and Sally and Larry are saved. The angels are forced to play ring-a-roses forever. Or until the light bulb dies. Or until someone with influence acquires the right equipment to have them smashed to smithereens. You know, whatever happens first.
The Doctor and Martha running around with bow and arrows? Forget the Doctor and Rose with those stupid coloured buckets last season - this is the kind of off-screen adventure hint we like to see! Because Ten with bow and arrow slung over his shoulder in the middle of the high street? Adorable. And Sally is awesome in this scene, figuring out the last details and handing him the folder of exposition, and finally allowing herself to move on. And I love how the Doctor is with her in this scene, because he has no idea what she's talking about, but he doesn't dismiss her, accepts what she's got to say, because he's interested in people, and he understands that time doesn't always move in a straight line.
Now, for the Doctor to still be holding that folder when the angels attack, does that mean that whenever he encounters them - a year or whenever ago - must be pretty soon after this? Those final shots of random statues seems to imply that. And also - talk about location spotting heaven! I can locate every single one of the statues we see in that final medley. Fantastic.
So - clever and creepy story, engaging characters, and lots of snappy dialogue = one highly entertaining 45 minutes of TV. We'll have more of that for the rest of the season, please!
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