Tag: Matt Smith (Page 3 of 4)

Doctor Who 5.5 – Flesh and Stone

May 15, 2010 /

Now I’d had a little bit to drink – OK, a lot to drink – before I watched “Flesh and Stone,” and when it was over I swore it was the best episode of new “Who” ever. Upon sobering up, I watched it again. It was not the best episode of new “Who” ever…but it was still pretty damn great, and certainly both parts of this story combined make for one helluva sterling example of what makes the new series tick. Indeed, from now on, when I want to turn somebody on to this show, it may very well be through this two-parter.

I’ve written before about my theories of “Who” cliffhangers, which essentially boils down to “the resolve is rarely as good as the hang.” In this case that probably still holds, but Moffat came awfully close to equaling the hang by delivering a way out of an impossible situation that was surprising and fun. I’m not sure it made a whole lot of sense – the destruction of the gravity globe gave them an updraft? They must make this shit up as they go along (of course, how else do you do it?). The shifting of the camera turning around to show the group on ceiling was gorgeous and great little reveal. But the save is short-lived, and the Angels are restoring themselves via the power of the Byzantium. Everybody follows the Doctor into the ship, and once again, the camera has a lot of fun here – the shot of the Doctor standing upright as Amy looks down the hole at him.

Octavian: “Dr. Song, I’ve lost good Clerics today. Do you trust this man?”
River: “I absolutely trust him.”
Octavian: “He’s not some kind of madman then?”
River: (beat) “I absolutely trust him.”

Then the story shifts into an action flick. The Angels attack in the dark in a thrilling, claustrophobic sequence, peppered with further tension between River (Alex Kingston) and Octavian (Iain Glen). What is this woman hiding? It’s within this sequence that we first hear Amy says the number 10. There’s really so much going on in the action arena in this section of the episode that it’d be pointlessly drab to recap it, and yet it’s amazing to watch. Once they discover the forest within the ship, the story pulls back on the action, but not the tension. It just keeps building. The gimmick of Amy counting down heightens, and during the conversation with Angel Bob, the Doctor finally snaps, and gets to the bottom of what’s going on with the countdown, and it appears Amy looks into the eyes of the videotaped Angel for a tad too long in the previous episode. And as if not enough is going on by this point, the crack from Amy’s wall makes another appearance, only this time everyone sees it. Octavian leads the group away from the crack and into the forest while the Doctor stays behind to investigate the crack. While he’s doing so, the Angels mount yet another attack, this time against the Doctor solo. Particularly effective is the shot of the Angel grabbing the Doctor’s jacket. He manages to worm his way out of his jacket while talking to the Angels about the crack and runs off into the forest.

Again, most of this stuff makes for a lousy recap, but it’s so much damn fun to watch. It’s like trying to explain why “Die Hard” is great action movie by telling someone who hasn’t seen it about John McClane tying himself to a fire hose and jumping off a building in his bare feet. There’s no substitute for the real thing, and it’s rather silly to break it all down, because it wasn’t written to be deconstructed – it was written and directed to be a thrill ride. So kudos to Steven Moffat for writing a cracking screenplay that Adam Smith then proceeded to direct the hell out of. With this two-parter, Moffat has really redeemed himself as both a writer and a showrunner. This is the kind of fare I expected from him but wasn’t getting in 5.2 and 5.3. Adding to that, if this is Moffat’s version of the action-packed two-parters that always featured early in the Davies era, then blow me down. This is scads better than stuff like “Rise of the Cybermen” and “The Sontaran Strategem.” It’s not that those stories were bad, but they always felt like the bubblegum installments of their seasons, whereas this may also be bubblegum, but it’s bubblegum that keeps its flavor for a long, long time; in the midst of all this action, there’s room for great character development, stellar acting and strong drama. Oh, you know what else is mildly noteworthy? As I understand it, these two episodes were the first of the season that were shot, so it’s fascinating to note how firm a grasp Matt Smith and Karen Gillan had on not only their roles, but also the concept of the series at this early stage in the game. I’d speculate on what it must have been like to work through the lame scripts for “The Beast Below” and “Victory of the Daleks” after shooting fare like this first, but I’d best not. Surely these two actors had the time of their lives while making this season no matter how weak any given script may have been.

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Doctor Who, TV Action, TV Sci-Fi

Doctor Who 5.4 – The Time of Angels

May 8, 2010 /

After being so thoroughly underwhelmed for the past two weeks, “The Time of Angels” almost leaves me speechless. I wish I could just write, “Man, that was so fuckin’ cool” and be done with it, since anything I’ve got to say isn’t going to make it any cooler. With this episode, we’ve finally gotten to material with major promise – probably even beyond promise, but since it’s only part one of a two-parter, everything could fall apart in the second half. But man oh man, what a setup!

The opening sequence – which begins with a man tripping balls – sets the stage for a whacked-out adventure. He’s been dosed with hallucinogenic lipstick by River Song (Alex Kingston). Was the field he was standing in part of the hallucination, or was it a part of the spaceship Byzantium? Clearly River has been up to something on the ship, but we don’t find out what that is straight up. 12,000 years in the future, the Doctor (Matt Smith) is showing Amy (Karen Gillan) a museum, and pointing out all the objects he’s had in hand in saving, which is really quite funny, and vaguely romantic, but mostly just boastful and stodgy on his part, especially since what Amy really wants to see is an alien planet. They come across an ancient home box on which some Old High Gallifreyan is written – it amusingly says “Hello sweetie.” The Doctor steals the box from the museum, which leads him to a rendezvous with River right outside the Byzantium. River, on the run from powers that be, releases an airlock and flies straight through the waiting, open TARDIS doors, and lands on the Doctor. The Byzantium flies away, and River issues a single order: “Follow that ship!” It’s an exhilarating start and very James Bond-like, directed by Adam Smith with precision and thought, as is the rest of the episode.

The sequence that follows it, set in the TARDIS, is equally entertaining, although on a more intimate level. The bickering back and forth from the Doctor and River is reminiscent of the Fourth Doctor (Tom Baker) and Romana I (Mary Tamm) from the early Key to Time stories, although whereas that relationship was two Time Lords getting to know one another, this one is, at least from River’s POV, rooted in familiarity. One really nice touch that gives me huge giggles is how River hangs her heels on the TARDIS scanner. I love that. Also, the fact that the TARDIS only makes the grinding noise it makes when it materializes because the Doctor leaves the brakes on. Hilarious, as is Smith’s impression of the sound. And of course the blue stabilizers, which the Doctor dubs “blue boringers.” Priceless dialogue here, all the way around.

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Doctor Who, TV Action, TV Sci-Fi

Doctor Who 5.3: Victory of the Daleks

May 1, 2010 /

“Daleks. I sometimes think those mutated misfits will terrorize the universe for the rest of time.”

Peter Davison’s Fifth Doctor, following yet another skirmish with the cockroaches from Skaro, uttered the above quote near the end of his reign as the Time Lord. If he’d known then that he’d still be dealing with them in his Eleventh incarnation, he may well have decided to forego his impending regeneration, and just gone ahead and called it a millennium. Many “Doctor Who” fans would likely have sympathized with him had he done so. Having been writing these recaps for five years now, I am exhausted by Daleks as well. What else is there for me to say about them that I haven’t already said, or hasn’t been said by countless others time and again? And yet here I am, once again backed into a corner by some angry pepperpots demanding that I find something fresh to say on the subject. Of course, if the series can’t be bothered to do so, I don’t really see why I should, either.

Surprisingly, “Victory of the Daleks,” written by Mark Gatiss, is drenched in promise at its start. Surprising not only because all ground concerning the Daleks seems so thoroughly trod at this point, but also because the last thing Gatiss wrote for the series, “The Idiot’s Lantern,” was a forgettable misfire. The idea of subservient, benevolent Daleks isn’t a new one. It was first explored in Patrick Troughton’s first story “The Power of the Daleks,” but since that serial was junked by the BBC ages ago, only the most hardcore of fans are going to care about this. For all intents and purposes the idea is new, or at least new to us. And the show has a field day with the notion for about ten minutes. Professor Bracewell’s (Bill Paterson) Ironsides are going to win the war against the Nazis, and they’ll serve you tea as well. Just the notion that the Daleks will become this story’s Inglourious Basterds is a fun one, since the Nazis are what the Daleks were based on in the first place. With “Victory of the Daleks,” on some obscure meta level, the entire concept of the Daleks has seemingly come full circle.

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Doctor Who, Reviews, TV, TV Action, TV Sci-Fi

Doctor Who 5.2 – The Beast Below

April 25, 2010 /

After gushing over the season premiere last week, it pains me to find “The Beast Below” is lacking. One element of the episode I found to be a huge letdown, and one that’s critical to the story is “the children,” and I had a bad feeling about this as soon as the episode started in a classroom. Now it’s not necessarily that the children angle of the story is sloppily plotted, it’s that I’m annoyed by Steven Moffat’s ongoing insistence at using kids as pivotal elements in his stories. I realize that last week I went on and on about how magical the stuff was between the Doctor and the young Amelia Pond – and make no mistake, it was – but with “The Beast Below” I found myself instantly bored with the angle. Of the four stories he crafted during the Davies era, three of them involved children to one degree or another, and the first two stories of his own era have now featured children.

My problem with this is that even though “Doctor Who” is a family series, and that children are a large part of the viewing audience, that doesn’t mean children must be a component of the narrative. It becomes doubly irritating when you’ve already got a lead character who acts like a kid much of the time anyway. Somebody might argue that they’re used as audience identification figures for younger viewers, to which I say balderdash. For 26 years “Doctor Who” hummed along quite nicely, rarely making anyone younger than a teenager part of the storyline. Kids, I believe, are perfectly content to watch adults on the tube and in film. They don’t long to see other children involved in these types of adventures. Somebody else might argue that Moffat uses children in order to help adults find their inner child. I can actually buy that more than the former proposed argument, but it needs to be used sparingly and smartly, and hot on the heels of the young Amelia Pond is hardly sparing, and the climax of “The Beast Below,” which hinges on crying children doesn’t strike me as particularly smart.

Once again I’ve gotten ahead of myself and jumped to the end of the episode, but once again I reiterate – you’ve no business reading these pieces if you haven’t seen the episode being written about. Events kick off in the 29th century where the entirety of the Britain (apparently save Scotland) exists on a giant spaceship appropriately named the Starship UK. Due to solar flares, humanity has been forced to relocate from the planet’s surface. (They’ll one day head back down to the planet once the danger is gone.) We’ve seen so many different periods of Earth’s future on the series so far, in episodes like “The End of the World,” “The Long Game,” and “New Earth,” that it isn’t a stretch to buy into this, yet at the same time there’s a certain “been there, done that-ness” to it all.

The post opening credits sequence with Amy floating in space outside the TARDIS, while the Doctor holds onto her leg is really rather splendid, as is her voiceover about her imaginary friend who has come back to her. Before the duo travel to the ship, he gives her a very goofy speech about his one rule, which is to never interfere in the affairs of other people. Ha!! Who does this cat think he’s foolin’? But it’s interesting nonetheless, because in telling Amy that, it demonstrates how little she actually knows about this man whom, we, the viewer, actually know a great deal about. These are early days for Amy, and there are many adventures yet to come. What causes the Doctor to break the rule he just set down? A crying girl seen on the scanner. Amy follows him, still dressed in her nightie, which has a certain Arthur Dent-ness to it. (If so, then is the Doctor Ford Prefect?)

The world of Starship UK is a dreary place, and the residents live in fear of these figures called Smilers, which are frankly one of the dumbest elements of the entire episode, as I still, after seeing it twice, have no real idea what their function is other than to look scary. A water glass comes in mighty handy, when the Doctor uses it to deduce that there is no engine running the ship. The Doctor and Amy split up only to each find clues leading them closer to the great mystery of the Starship UK. Tentacles, voting booths, and a masked woman who knows the Doctor are parts of the equation. The masked woman is eventually revealed to be Liz 10 (Sophie Okonedo), or Queen Elizabeth the Tenth, who’s heard all the stories of the mysterious, wise Doctor. She’s been working against the government to get to bottom of the “this ship has no engine” problem as well, but hasn’t made much headway.

There are so many seemingly random elements knocking up against each other in this episode, that by the time it’s revealed that the ship has no engine because an enormous space whale has been carting it across the stars, I’d all but lost interest in what was going on, despite the fact that I actually sort of like the space whale idea, as well as the bigger, more important idea of a society in denial. But when it was revealed that the whale was doing it for the crying children, I just rolled my eyes. If this were any show other than “Doctor Who,” I never would’ve made it through the entire episode. In the end, Amy saves the day and proves her worth, while the Doctor is left with just a little bit of egg on his face.

What saves the proceedings is Matt Smith. I can’t turn this recap series into a Smith gushfest every week, so it’d be best to keep it short: This guy’s incredible. Even though Amy had a lot more to do in this episode, I’m still not finding her character to be all that. I’m not sure Karen Gillan has found her yet, either. Ultimately this episode didn’t come close to living up to the promise of “The Eleventh Hour.” I hope that Moffat is building up to something big, as was evidenced by the crack from Amy’s wall appearing on the side of the ship as the episode came to a close. We’ve had duff entries in the first act of many a season of new “Who,” so I’m not worried about this stumble, but it’s a shame that such a lackluster offering should be the second of this new era. I guess it goes to prove that even with Steven Moffat there are bound to be missteps, and that not everything is going to work perfectly. In any case, the tag at the end with Winston Churchill and the Dalek was great fun, and hopefully next week will be better.

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NEXT TIME: It’s back to the Blitz for the TARDIS, when the Doctor and Amy visit Churchill in “Victory of the Daleks.”

Classic “Who” DVD Recommendation of the Week: I can’t be bothered to recommend any classic “Who” this week, so instead I’ll recommend Terry Pratchett’s “Hogfather,” which features an entire world floating on the back of an enormous turtle.

(Thanks as always to Sonic Biro for the screencaps.)

Doctor Who, TV, TV Sci-Fi

“Doctor Who” 5.1 – The Eleventh Hour

April 17, 2010 /

It feels like it’s been forever since Steven Moffat was announced as the new showrunner and Matt Smith as the new Doctor. It hasn’t been, of course, but well over a year in both cases is nothing to sneeze at. For some fans, the anticipation has been damn near excruciating. Another very vocal minority had little interest in the continuing adventures of the Time Lord without David Tennant steering the TARDIS. And yet another group – perhaps the most important, due simply to the fact that they comprise a huge segment of the viewing audience – were understandably nervous that a new Doctor alongside a new head honcho might lead to a series that was somehow lesser than what had been seen over the past five years.

I’d like to believe that everybody was as utterly intoxicated by “The Eleventh Hour” as I was, but that’s probably wishing for too much. On the other hand, I can’t really see that it offered up anything that would possibly alienate audiences – not even in the form of the new Doctor, who’s not such a drastic departure from the antics of Tennant so as to drive viewers away. Indeed, the differences between Eccleston and Tennant are far more tangible than the divide between Tennant and Smith. All that said, Smith definitely has something of his own going on, and whatever that “something” is will most certainly grow as the season progresses. Both Eccleston and Tennant each took about a half season to find their Time Lord groove; Smith found it by the end of his first episode. I was wholly won over by him upon his delivery of “I am definitely a mad man with a box,” which was followed by an uneasy cackle that seems to imply this Doctor is not quite as right in the head as his recent predecessors.

But I’ve clearly jumped to the end of the episode far too quickly. The pre-credits sequence with the Doctor hanging onto the TARDIS as it flies over London is utter nonsense – derivative of the worst aspects of the Davies era, and completely different from the tone of the rest of the episode. Maybe that was the point? To reassure viewers right off the bat that they’re still watching the same show? I don’t know, but let’s hope there’s less of that and more of all that follows as the weeks move on.

Of course the sequence is followed by a brand new set of opening titles and a rearrangement of the theme tune. I haven’t done an immense amount of reading reactions to this episode, but even with what little I have read, there appeared to be an immediate backlash to these changes. Every time these basic alterations are made to the series, people complain, which is understandable, because why fix what isn’t broken? But “Doctor Who” thrives on change, and this is just another aspect of it. Eventually they get over it and move on, realizing that it probably isn’t quite the disaster their fanboy gut had told them on first viewing. Having seen the sequence numerous times now, I’m already digging it. Unlike the previous credits, the lightning bolts and cloud tunnel seem to indicate the TARDIS is travelling through some sort of space as opposed to time, and the rearrangement has grown on me with each subsequent viewing.

The next 15 minutes, which detail the first meeting of the Eleventh Doctor and the 7-year old Amelia Pond (Caitlin Blackwood) are deliriously charming, and it kicks off with the girl praying to Santa on Easter, and it’s nice to see Moffat’s keeping things on a vaguely secular level. Using children as a big part of the narrative has been a Moffat hallmark (“The Empty Child,” “The Girl in the Fireplace,” “The Silence on the Library”), and here it once again works as a wonderful means to cement the Doctor/companion relationship (although you may not find me as supportive of this gimmick in the coming weeks). No doubt the highpoint of this section is the search for food, which is something that’s never been done before during the post-regenerative state. If every cell in the body of a Time Lord rearranges itself during regeneration, then it’s perfectly reasonable to assume the tastes buds have changed, too. The Doctor thinks he knows what he likes, but it turns out he finds most of it disgusting. In the end, he finds a thoroughly revolting dish – fish fingers and custard – the most tasty and appetizing, which is a gas (or surely will be once it passes through his digestive tract).

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Doctor Who, TV Sci-Fi

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