Doctor Who: King's Demons + Warriors of the Deep

There was thunder and lightning, so I unplugged everything. Which took a ridiculously long time - computer refused to shut down. Obviously needs poking by computer wizard. Possibly with big stick. Anyways, laptop was working great and was fully charged no matter what the little amber light implied, so I got a bunch of hours out of it. Tweaked the settings so it can get 6 episodes and have half an hour left. Course I'd like it better if I knew what the settings actually *did*. I should probably dig out the instruction book...

ANYways

King's Demons:
I always like the Master
but the biggest surprise in this ep was it had Sean Burns (Highlander character) in it obviously suffering his first death (crossbow bolt in the back).
... yes I realise there's problems with that interpretation ...
There was also a guy who was bugging me with almost-recognition and turns out to have been in Ultraviolet. Which obviously is another way it could be Exact Same Guy. You know, if all TV happened in the same world.

I recognised the Master from his voice, and then was paying attention for the anagram, and then I guessed about his TARDIS because it would be exactly the most fun thing to do with it, so really it was a bit short on twists because I am Just That Clever and can outwit TV made for 8 year olds. *Nods*.
And the thing where I may well have seen it before and lost it in my subconscious doesn't hurt either.

The Doctor playing with swords again is fun.
The Chameleon robot was... well, kind of too powerful for a player character. I mean he can exactly imitate anyone, which could short circuit any number of stories.
Does he just disappear? He seems disappeared.

Turlough mostly got captured and chained up again. Interesting habit.

Plus the being whiny and happily telling anyone anything as long as they don't stick pointy objects in him.

... oddly I still like him.

I think it's the way he can be snarky with just a head tilt. Add a raised eyebrow and body language snark reaches near poisonous levels. It's kind of fun.


Next would be the Five Doctors, but I not only have that on DVD, it was the first book I ever bought for myself, so I rather have the story memorised by now.


Warriors of the Deep had lots of running around getting in trouble. Some of which could have been avoided by the words 'don't touch' being the first things said instead of waiting for after the inevitable button pushing.

Actually the first thing I noticed was it had to be a new season cause everyone except Turlough had new hair. (I don't know if it's actually a new season, that was just my logic). I had the monitor turned right down to conserve power so Tegan's outfit wasn't too radioactive. It's really excessively 80s is the problem. Too. Many. Colors.

The stuff the future people were wearing (2084 and living in a sea base... I kept thinking 2032 and seaQuest, and it wasn't helpful) reminded me of something. Half way through I realised they were wearing High Guard uniforms from Andromeda only minus some buckles and plus a bunch of different colors in every outfit and a puffy collar. Sort of distracting really. I realise there's only so many ways to make a uniform that screams uniform but it was vaguely amusing.

And the programmable brain with an implant in reminded me of seaQuest too. Except for the thing where this came first.

the 'nothing changed' bit with two major powers pointing missiles at each other... bets on how good a prediction that is?

Silurians and Sea Devils have nifty shapes but excessive lack of movement. If an outfit needs a little flashing head light to tell you who is talking it better be a Dalek or it just looks silly. but the Sea Devils are like samurai turtles, which is cool. You know, for a really geeky value of cool.

They put the solution on a shelf at random in the first episode so you were just waiting for them to get around to using it. Which turned into a tragedy as far as the Doctor figured. Last words "there should have been another way".

I like it.

different and slightly greedier meme

Tell me one thing about Giles&Ethan and I'll tell you one thing back

Templates and breaking the mold

I been reading a book on TV writing, and it says the basic trick is to deliver on the template every week. The template is the stuff that the audience is there to see. If they don't get it, they don't watch.

So every week we watch the core characters, and we want to see them again next week, and if they aren't there we get annoyed.

But I reckon there's ways to make it so even without presence of character we get story about character, we get something that illuminates or comments on them, and so we get our character-fix for the week, sort of.

But then it had a section about breaking the mold, and chose a bunch of award winning episodes. Buffy-Hush, DS9-the one where they're all writers. Hush worked for me, DS9 really didn't. The thing is with Hush you lost the witty banter - mostly - but you had all the core characters in a situation rather like they're in every week, facing the same challenges and such. DS9... was about a bunch of writers imagining DS9. Their challenges were different. Their characters were different. And it wasn't the show about politics in deep space that I was wanting to watch. So I got bored of it. And yet other people chose it as their favourite, I guess because it stands out and has a theme and message and stuff. And, okay, yeah, but how is it DS9?

So Doctor Who and Torchwood both had episodes that somewhat lacked the core cast and only partially fit the template. Doctorless Who had one that didn't work for me at all and one that really did. Blink had bits of the Doctor all through it, a time travel story, jeopardy on a slightly smaller scale than most weeks but still serious and obvious and ongoing, and some really good lines. The other one... didn't.
Torchwood had one episode where there was that random bloke and Gwen. Just Gwen. And a few lines from the others around the ends. Since Gwen was mostly doing Plot and not Character she wasn't very interesting, only digging up facts that we wouldn't need to know later. And everyone else wasn't there. And did it have the usual levels of jeopardy?

... well 'usual' is a bit tricky to define on Torchwood. Someone apparently decided that what the viewer wants is an entirely different kind of story every week. And it took me a while to even slightly agree. It's kind of like I like the stories seperately but have to turn around a bit for each one and liking them all at once is... tricky. And I can't like Random Shoes if I try.


The other thing it said was that a good story is one that can only be told in that TV show.
So stories where character X has a dying father and speeds across country to meet him could happen all over the place... but ones where she comes back from the dead to do so are somewhat more difficult to manage.
But once you get down to stories that can only happen in-genre, what makes something distinctively a *Torchwood* story, and not just a horror/SF one?

... well it happening to those particular characters, obviously ...
... but then the characters are, er, possibly a little inconsistent between episodes.

I mean there's bits in the one with the fairies that bounce me right to writer level reasons because character level just sounds all wrong.



I'm trying to get back in the habit of reading stuff for class and applying it to interesting shows. This book is not on the reading list for class, but it has lots of references to Buffy and Angel and stuff that I've watched, so I start small and build.


I'm kind of really bored and feeling like my life is unproductive, and the solution to that is to do something. So I start with reading and thinking about writing. I shall eventually get to actually writing. Really. I'm sure.

Doctor Who: The Awakening

big old church with the face of woe!
... okay, I just thought of that. That's probably only funny in my head.

Er, this is the one where we're supposed to be scared of the Malice, which is a big grinning face in a church wall.

Are there any churches that aren't full of Ancient (vaguely devil looking) Evil?
Use of the church in Father's Day retroactively annoys me less cause it's about time there was a nice church. Quite a lot of churches are nice. Many of them house nothing scarier than some old ladies that want to sell you cake. And any number of English villages never have practiced human sacrifice and probably don't want to start now.

But not the ones the Doctor visits, obviously.

It's hard being family of the Doctor's companions. (Was the word used for them in this one? Think it was...) Tegan's aunt got shrunk to doll size, her cousin got possessed by an anti matter Time Lord, and now her grandfather's village got caught up in ancient psychic evil.

And wargame reenactments.

When they first get there Tegan thinks they're in the wrong century but actually they're in 1984 with people dressed up like the wrong century. This is clearly amusing on a meta level. Because, you know, yes.

Her dress gets no better with repeat exposure. Quite the reverse.

The Doctor spent a lot of the episodes Explaining Things, which isn't terribly interesting. But then he turned out to be wrong and Will was actually from a different century when the Doctor thought he was a psychic projection, which must be vaguely embarrassing really. Getting mixed up if someone is an actual person or not.

I kind of liked it when the Malice was in the TARDIS cause they didn't shut the door or possibly because it was psychic and the TARDIS didn't keep that stuff out. Probably the door thing. You'd think they'd be more careful.


Overall... It was only a two parter and not exactly stellar.

I think I eat some more breakfast and then watch another one.