More Fireplace stuff
May. 7th, 2006 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
icepixieThe more I think about this episode, the less magic it works on me. I was totally caught up in it the first time I watched, but if you think about it...plot holes. Contrivances. Annoyingness. Sigh.
- Still not buying the Doctor/Reinette thing, even with the mind meld. Because however intense it may have been for them, we cannot be in their minds and thus cannot see it. Puny human viewers, limited to the visual and audio with the occasional voiceover, need to see something like this develop over time. There was an attempt with the dialogue, but...nope. Didn't do it for me. I can see him with a crush on the historical figure of Madame de Pompadour, but...yeah. A two-parter would've solved lots of things about this. If they'd even played up the angle of "I must save her or history will be screwed," that would've been a lot more believable than a forced "romance." Yes, he's an impulsive idiot who doesn't always think, and he would totally burst through that mirror and save her, but NOT FOR THE REASONS STATED IN THE TIME WE WERE GIVEN.
If this permanently tars me with the "rabid shipper, ZOMG!" brush, so be it. For me, it's not really about Rose at all. It's more about what I can believe happening in forty-five minutes and how this episode does (or doesn't) jibe with what I believed I knew about the Doctor after having watched last season and this season. (After all, it took an entire season for Nine to sacrifice himself for Rose, not just forty-five minutes. And everything in "Father's Day" about how ordinary people are the most important, not the famous ones? Hello? I can get behind "I must save history!", but at the expense of two ordinary people stuck on a space station with robots who want to use them for spare parts? CONTINGENCY PLAN, ANYONE?) Maybe if I were a Classic Who fan (or more of one, anyway), I would see things differently, but right now? Given what we were shown, it seems to me to be inconsistent with what we've seen of the Doctor over the past season-and-a-bit.
(I am so avoiding practically everywhere Who-related this week, because I have no desire to see more of the fandom war fallout from this than I already have. Gah.)
- There really should've been a "Rose chews the Doctor out for leaving her behind even though he said last week that he wouldn't, dammit" scene. I know, I know, Moffat hadn't seen/read the script for SR before writing this, but whoa. Whoa. Seriously. Rose and Mickey kind of got shafted there. Also? If, as has been speculated, the Doctor was thinking he could just hitch a ride on the TARDIS when it materializes somewhere nearby in time (and of course he would remember where it had been), or that Rose knew about the button that would take her back to London 2006, and thus the Doctor wasn't actually leaving them to rot, then that really should have been mentioned. (Again, two parts would've helped here. And I kind of feel like there was stuff left on the cutting room floor about this.) I suppose the Emergency Program One thing that would take them back to London might have been implied with the Doctor asking Rose how long she waited--perhaps implying that there was something else she could have done--but that definitely wasn't the first thing I thought of. That went over the line between "leaving it too the audience to connect the dots" and "plot hole" for me. Your mileage may vary, etc. etc.
- Laura Fraser would have been better at this than Sophia Myles. The mind meld might have worked better for me with another actress.
- "My lonely angel." Strange guy coming through mirrors. OMG, I just now made connections to the Phantom of the Opera. Hee! There just need to be some singing going on...
- Man, those five years in between when Rose came to warn her and when the clockwork 'droids finally attacked must have been hell for the Madame. Ow.
- I love the music more and more each time I hear it. Yay for music boxes!
- I still really love the very macabre body-parts-used-as-repairs plot. I would've loved to have seen more of that, actually. I thought the clockwork robots' insane logic about repaiting the ship in any way possible, even with the crew's body parts, and then about needing Reinette's brain, was actually really awesome, and a great way to do "alien."
So to sum up--too much rode on the mind meld crutch, and the episode kind of tumbles down around it, despite everything else being basically really good. *shrug*
And now I really ought to be writing about trade during the Mongolian Empire...
- Still not buying the Doctor/Reinette thing, even with the mind meld. Because however intense it may have been for them, we cannot be in their minds and thus cannot see it. Puny human viewers, limited to the visual and audio with the occasional voiceover, need to see something like this develop over time. There was an attempt with the dialogue, but...nope. Didn't do it for me. I can see him with a crush on the historical figure of Madame de Pompadour, but...yeah. A two-parter would've solved lots of things about this. If they'd even played up the angle of "I must save her or history will be screwed," that would've been a lot more believable than a forced "romance." Yes, he's an impulsive idiot who doesn't always think, and he would totally burst through that mirror and save her, but NOT FOR THE REASONS STATED IN THE TIME WE WERE GIVEN.
If this permanently tars me with the "rabid shipper, ZOMG!" brush, so be it. For me, it's not really about Rose at all. It's more about what I can believe happening in forty-five minutes and how this episode does (or doesn't) jibe with what I believed I knew about the Doctor after having watched last season and this season. (After all, it took an entire season for Nine to sacrifice himself for Rose, not just forty-five minutes. And everything in "Father's Day" about how ordinary people are the most important, not the famous ones? Hello? I can get behind "I must save history!", but at the expense of two ordinary people stuck on a space station with robots who want to use them for spare parts? CONTINGENCY PLAN, ANYONE?) Maybe if I were a Classic Who fan (or more of one, anyway), I would see things differently, but right now? Given what we were shown, it seems to me to be inconsistent with what we've seen of the Doctor over the past season-and-a-bit.
(I am so avoiding practically everywhere Who-related this week, because I have no desire to see more of the fandom war fallout from this than I already have. Gah.)
- There really should've been a "Rose chews the Doctor out for leaving her behind even though he said last week that he wouldn't, dammit" scene. I know, I know, Moffat hadn't seen/read the script for SR before writing this, but whoa. Whoa. Seriously. Rose and Mickey kind of got shafted there. Also? If, as has been speculated, the Doctor was thinking he could just hitch a ride on the TARDIS when it materializes somewhere nearby in time (and of course he would remember where it had been), or that Rose knew about the button that would take her back to London 2006, and thus the Doctor wasn't actually leaving them to rot, then that really should have been mentioned. (Again, two parts would've helped here. And I kind of feel like there was stuff left on the cutting room floor about this.) I suppose the Emergency Program One thing that would take them back to London might have been implied with the Doctor asking Rose how long she waited--perhaps implying that there was something else she could have done--but that definitely wasn't the first thing I thought of. That went over the line between "leaving it too the audience to connect the dots" and "plot hole" for me. Your mileage may vary, etc. etc.
- Laura Fraser would have been better at this than Sophia Myles. The mind meld might have worked better for me with another actress.
- "My lonely angel." Strange guy coming through mirrors. OMG, I just now made connections to the Phantom of the Opera. Hee! There just need to be some singing going on...
- Man, those five years in between when Rose came to warn her and when the clockwork 'droids finally attacked must have been hell for the Madame. Ow.
- I love the music more and more each time I hear it. Yay for music boxes!
- I still really love the very macabre body-parts-used-as-repairs plot. I would've loved to have seen more of that, actually. I thought the clockwork robots' insane logic about repaiting the ship in any way possible, even with the crew's body parts, and then about needing Reinette's brain, was actually really awesome, and a great way to do "alien."
So to sum up--too much rode on the mind meld crutch, and the episode kind of tumbles down around it, despite everything else being basically really good. *shrug*
And now I really ought to be writing about trade during the Mongolian Empire...