Time Heist
Sep. 20th, 2014 08:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
llywelaFun train!
Okay, Clara still rubs me the wrong way and there were nits I could pick if I wanted, but that was an episode I enjoyed without reservation. It didn't overreach itself and it wasn't trying too hard to impress. There was nothing out of place to jar me, nothing threw me out of the story, nothing infuriated me. It was just a rollicking good fun adventure-of-the-week, nothing extra shoehorned in, no clumsy attempt at Epic Significance. It had balance. The Doctor was allowed to be the Doctor and I loved him, Clara was allowed to be the companion and didn't annoy me. Good stuff.
In other thoughts, I'm starting to get the sense that Clara's part-time gig is not proving satisfactory for either her or the Doctor, which is the kind of character story I've been wanting. She never seems particularly pleased to see him and he seems to be competing for her attention - she's his (current) friend and he wants to share his travels with her but she's apparently always got something better to do. I've been frustrated by the part-time thing for a long time now, since it's never really been explored, but I started to get the sense here that it might actually be dealt with a little now at long last - hope to see this developed further in weeks to come (hopefully culminating in Clara's departure?). Forget Epic Mysteries about Impossible Girls, this kind of character exploration and relationship development is what I like to see in terms of ongoing storyline threaded through a season - an ongoing story that's about who the characters are and how they relate to one another, nothing tacked on for the sake of sensation and plot.
Okay, Clara still rubs me the wrong way and there were nits I could pick if I wanted, but that was an episode I enjoyed without reservation. It didn't overreach itself and it wasn't trying too hard to impress. There was nothing out of place to jar me, nothing threw me out of the story, nothing infuriated me. It was just a rollicking good fun adventure-of-the-week, nothing extra shoehorned in, no clumsy attempt at Epic Significance. It had balance. The Doctor was allowed to be the Doctor and I loved him, Clara was allowed to be the companion and didn't annoy me. Good stuff.
In other thoughts, I'm starting to get the sense that Clara's part-time gig is not proving satisfactory for either her or the Doctor, which is the kind of character story I've been wanting. She never seems particularly pleased to see him and he seems to be competing for her attention - she's his (current) friend and he wants to share his travels with her but she's apparently always got something better to do. I've been frustrated by the part-time thing for a long time now, since it's never really been explored, but I started to get the sense here that it might actually be dealt with a little now at long last - hope to see this developed further in weeks to come (hopefully culminating in Clara's departure?). Forget Epic Mysteries about Impossible Girls, this kind of character exploration and relationship development is what I like to see in terms of ongoing storyline threaded through a season - an ongoing story that's about who the characters are and how they relate to one another, nothing tacked on for the sake of sensation and plot.
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Date: 2014-09-21 07:38 am (UTC)You know there was a "it's so nice to finally meet a good man" reference squeezed in... *g*
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Date: 2014-09-21 07:44 am (UTC)My standards have dropped and I admit it - as a piece of typical Moffat-fare, this was better than a lot of his offerings so I appreciated it as such. With Moffat, there are always going to be certain tropes and shortcuts in play - timeloops and predestination paradoxes, the same basic character type over and over, guest characters info-dumping their backstories in lieu of more subtle exploration, monster that turns out to be victim, etc. But some weeks those ingredients feel a little more balanced than other weeks. This was a better-balanced week, and that came as a relief to me after last week's ending left me so ragey and the forced sit-com humour the week before turned me off completely. Even the 'good man' line didn't feel as out of place as that kind of arc-insert usually does under Moffat.