Waters of Mars
Nov. 15th, 2009 10:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neadodsMuch of Waters of Mars was much better than I'd expected.
Aside from how weird it is to have the hero basically watching and not acting for much of the episode, the first 3/4 worked for me... probably because it was a retread of Fires of Pompeii, which is a bit of a favorite. The Doctor sees a crux in time and can't do anything about it, and it makes him sick and sorry... but sick and sorry is all he can be.
After CoE, there were several elements to Waters that I was outright relieved by. In a manner uncharacteristic and unprecedented in an RTD script, all the members of the organization acted in a professional, pragmatic manner. They mourned their falling friends, but they didn't piss around either; they knew the stakes and they owned their actions, and they were willing to do what they had to do for the greater good. It was so nice not to see someone being secretly selfish, or so bleeding heart that something else started bleeding.
It was also nice to see the Doctor attempting to comfort Adelaide, however clumsily. I was frankly expecting something along the lines of what Jack had done to Stephen - grabbed a confused person, sacrificed them, and then essentially been all "oh, woe is ME." The Doctor was not (at that point) making it about himself. He was trying to offer the one thing he could give her - the knowledge that it was not, in the end, all in vain.
And when it did become all about him... oh, how I wish that moment had been handled in an arc! It would have been much more powerful to see him going more and more self-centeredly out of control (as he has been, increasingly) but to see his companions noticing it too until we have a Very Special "Kick the Doctor's Ass" episode. A moment this obvious and this deep and this *delayed* should have had far more screen time than to be reached and dropped in roughly 10 minutes.
Mind you, I also saw exactly what I've come to expect out of an RTD script. Screen time wasted on silly modes of travel or discussion of modes of travel. Random daleks. A heaping helping of wangst in the finale. Even someone dying to make a point. (I can sort-of see her sacrificing herself to maintain the timeline the Doctor saw in what looked like museum descriptions to me, but it was not the world's best, much less clearest, way of handling the plot issue.)
Still looking forward to Eleven.
Aside from how weird it is to have the hero basically watching and not acting for much of the episode, the first 3/4 worked for me... probably because it was a retread of Fires of Pompeii, which is a bit of a favorite. The Doctor sees a crux in time and can't do anything about it, and it makes him sick and sorry... but sick and sorry is all he can be.
After CoE, there were several elements to Waters that I was outright relieved by. In a manner uncharacteristic and unprecedented in an RTD script, all the members of the organization acted in a professional, pragmatic manner. They mourned their falling friends, but they didn't piss around either; they knew the stakes and they owned their actions, and they were willing to do what they had to do for the greater good. It was so nice not to see someone being secretly selfish, or so bleeding heart that something else started bleeding.
It was also nice to see the Doctor attempting to comfort Adelaide, however clumsily. I was frankly expecting something along the lines of what Jack had done to Stephen - grabbed a confused person, sacrificed them, and then essentially been all "oh, woe is ME." The Doctor was not (at that point) making it about himself. He was trying to offer the one thing he could give her - the knowledge that it was not, in the end, all in vain.
And when it did become all about him... oh, how I wish that moment had been handled in an arc! It would have been much more powerful to see him going more and more self-centeredly out of control (as he has been, increasingly) but to see his companions noticing it too until we have a Very Special "Kick the Doctor's Ass" episode. A moment this obvious and this deep and this *delayed* should have had far more screen time than to be reached and dropped in roughly 10 minutes.
Mind you, I also saw exactly what I've come to expect out of an RTD script. Screen time wasted on silly modes of travel or discussion of modes of travel. Random daleks. A heaping helping of wangst in the finale. Even someone dying to make a point. (I can sort-of see her sacrificing herself to maintain the timeline the Doctor saw in what looked like museum descriptions to me, but it was not the world's best, much less clearest, way of handling the plot issue.)
Still looking forward to Eleven.
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no subject
Date: 2009-11-18 01:05 am (UTC)In a way, this is the thing that worries me about the finale.
It's not that the Doctor has gone off the rails. It's that history has gone off the rails.
We've seen history off the rails in the first season, all the stuff around the GameStation. (The ninth Doctor says it's wrong at the time.) The tenth Doctor sent Harriet Jones' Golden Age off the rails. The Daleks broke open a "fixed point" to recover Davros, and the Daleks stealing Earth wasn't supposed to happen. And let's not even mention the Master and his Paradox Machine.
History itself is wrong. The entirety of the RTD era has told us this.
It's why I fear the finale, that it's going to end with some sort of reset button that restores history at the cost of the tenth Doctor's life — and at the cost of the past five years worth of stories.
no subject
Date: 2009-11-18 02:50 am (UTC)I do keep wondering about that great and bountiful human empire we seem to keep getting cheated out of.
I don't know if a reset button is really at the "cost" of the stories - just because the timeline changes, that doesn't mean that the timeline is truly erased. Even the year that never was... was.