Doctor Who: The Long Game

[iainjclark]

Well, I liked it quite a bit.

Simon Pegg is a very good actor, but prior to watching the episode I was far from convinced he could pull off a decent performance as a Doctor Who villain. Thankfully he was basically required to play an Evil Simon Pegg. So that worked out very well. :-)

There was some typically unsuble satire, but none of the juvenile humour we've come to fear, and the writing, directing and production were very impressive - particularly the effects work on the alien creature. The setting, which might easily have seemed cartoonish (cf. Paradise Towers) was well realised, and my biggest criticism is that far too much time was devoted to Adam's misguided attempts to make time travel pay - but there was nothing actually wrong with that storyline (except the very last scene).

As always the interplay between Rose and the Doctor sparkled, and Adam actually helped to give them something to play off before wandering off into a different episode entirely. Christopher Eccleston kept the grinning to a minimum and delivered yet another convincing and charismatic performance, and it was particularly nice to see the Doctor spotting something amiss and getting right down to solving it. There was a also a freshness to the story that was missing from some of the early episodes.

More when I'm less tired and less inebriated. Any typos may also be attributed to my sozzled state. :-)

Comments

[pikelet.livejournal.com]

>>I'm interested in who set Max up in his station, and why.

>The Editor implied that it was his consortium of banks etc.

I mean, what is it about this somehow-changed universe that allowed Max to get to where he was? Who owns the banks? Why are they backing Max? What stopped them in the 'proper' version of history?

If you take the view that all of time is someone's history, you could never change anything, surely?

There's some very menky debate on this :) Basically, nobody can change what is 'meant' to happen, unless they're a Time Lord. That seems to be the tacitly accepted basis on which the TV series works. 'Day of the Daleks', for example, is the first expression of predeterminist ideas in the show, and it's not been horrifically contradicted since.

This is why some people suggest that Gallifrey existed in the far past. Not only are the Time Lords exempt from most of the laws of time, but everything that happens in the rest of the universe is in their subjective future, so they're free to fiddle as much as they like. There is, needless to say, absolutely no canonical support for this idea outside of the New Adventures :)

Oi! Spoiler boy!

Oh, psht. I'm avoiding spoilers like the plague, but if Russel Davies writes about it in his DWM column, I pick up on it and regard it as a teaser, not a spoiler :-p

[iainjclark.livejournal.com]

There is, needless to say, absolutely no canonical support for this idea outside of the New Adventures :)

You know, considering that Doctor Who is, like, the longest running SF show ever, it's amazing how much of the accepted continuity consists of fanwankery. :-)

[pikelet.livejournal.com]

Eh. It was created before 'continuity' as a concept was really any kind of concern. It's the continuity of soaps, ie 'what you can remember'. There was absolutely no need for any other kind of continuity until video recorders entered the home, and that wasn't really until the mid-80s. Which, funnily enough, coincides with the most fanwanky stories onscreen.

Retcons are the only way DW is ever going to make any sense at all :)