Oh, please.

[icepixie]

RTD: Alien planets are "too expensive."

And a Slitheen ship crashing into Big Ben isn't? Or a massive CGI wereworlf? Or the sun blowing up and incinerating the Earth? I'm sorry, that doesn't fly. Try again.


P.S. Avast, me hearties! *walks around with peg leg and parrot*

Comments

[mrv3000.livejournal.com]

Brilliant icon!

Thanks! From here (http://empty-ambition.livejournal.com/42128.html).

I only know RTD from DW and Casanova, but in both instances, he's tended to go off the reservation. The last hour of Casanova has some seriously weird stuff that made me blink and say "Huh?!?" I still haven't figured out where it came from, because it sure isn't history!

Never saw Casanova. Probably won't from that description.

And with DW, I feel like he's already shown what little range he has, and is now running out of ideas--not that the ideas he's written himself have been all that fabulous. (A friend on another forum pointed out that a lot of "Doomsday" was basically like a little kid playing with his action figures, and I have to agree. Sure, you want kids to be able to watch, but a show with this much history shouldn't be constantly down on their level. Not when you want the adults to watch, too.)

Yeah. *sigh* What started me out with really digging this show was the whole "this is a different morality - get used to it or go home" thing. To me that's great science fiction: something that will take you out of your comfort zone or perceived social norm. Many times the show had an unsettling edge to it. But a lot of S2 seemed more going through the science fiction motions. Eh, I still watched and loved most of it because I was already hooked.

[alto2.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed Casanova, for the most part. It's just here and there that you kind of sit there going "Huh?" Mostly toward the end--though I was still almost in tears by the time it was over. I don't think that's got much to do with Rusty, though--I'd credit David Tennant, Laura Fraser, and Peter O'Toole with that one. It does border on being over the top in a few other places, too, but it's not too bad.

I've been hooked on DW for 20 years now, so the idea of it going downhill is literally painful. The morality of the show's always been quite consistent, until we got flaky mood-swings-on-a-dime!Ten, which is where my problem centrally lies. It got to where I'd watch each episode hoping that it would be the one without the "You won't thwart me!" egomania, and then it would inevitably appear and I'd be thinking "And....there it is. Sigh." I'd so hoped that the final scene with Harriet in TCI was a fluke (and I could deal with that if I'd thought he was right. But I don't). :(

[mrv3000.livejournal.com]

Right right right. The over-the-top acting got to me a bit as well. I think DT *could* have done an exuberant incarnation without the camp - it was possible to have one without the other. But that's partly the fault of the directors and the show runners as well - it should have been reigned in and it wasn't.

[alto2.livejournal.com]

I think DT *could* have done an exuberant incarnation without the camp

I had such high hopes after TCI--writing off that last bit with Harriet as a fluke, which I clearly shouldn't have done. He was so much fun, though, otherwise--a little goofy, able to be serious when necessary, but that sense of wonder was fantastic. I watched it...I don't know how many times before the series started in April! And then they went and turned him into Mr Takes-Nothing-Seriously-Until-You-Cross-Me, and I'm still hoping they'll fix that next year. It made him almost impossible to watch, and that's a shame.

[icepixie]

Yep yep yep. Loved him in TCI, quickly not so much in S2.

Man, I wish DoonaRose's Chem!Ten had been the real one...

[icepixie]

Never saw Casanova. Probably won't from that description.

Casanova really worked for RTD though, I think. He has a very limited range--which consists, basically, of Buffy Lite--but he used it for good here. I think, honestly, that RTD finds it hard to meld interesting SF stories and the more emotional stories he really wants to tell, and he doesn't have to fight that here. He's funny one moment and then incredibly sad the next, and it works in ways that it doesn't (IMO) on DW.

And David Tennant is awesome in it. I think he probably suffers from poor directing on DW, and here he doesn't, and he really shines. (And he has an amazing rapport with Laura Fraser, which doesn't hurt.) And hell, if nothing else--it's gorgeously costumed and designed. :D

ITA with your whole second paragraph.