I love Moffat, but...

 I’m re-watching Sherlock. And I thought I might just share one of the things about season two that annoyed me:

In ‘Hounds of the Baskervilles’, Sherlock somehow can’t find the cigarettes… despite the fact they are hidden in the most obvious place in the room. Bar none. Seriously. They were in the skull.

For a man who can figure out the home town of a dead woman in an abandoned house in London based on nothing more than a damp coat and a few speckles of mud on the back of her tights… that’s just shameful.

(This is by far my favourite Sherlock episode, but it is also probably the one of the ones I have the most problems with. Go figure.)

I feel like creating a tag...

...for ‘overthinking things and getting annoyed’ just so I can write about things I didn’t like in episodes that I otherwise loved. 

Featured on that tag today, it’s Doctor Who with The Bells of St John’s…

Am I the only one frustrated by the fact that the Doctor uses a laptop to save Clara in this episode?I don’t like the way he treats technology in this episode at all actually. He’s a time traveller from an advanced alien race, he’s meant to take one look at 21st century technology and call it backward. He’s not meant to pick it up and treat it seriously.

I mean… why did the Doctor use a laptop to find out about the Spoonhead? It made about as much sense as him choosing to use a gyroscope to find his longitude in the 1700s because it was the height of technological advancement at the time. Surely there was something better on the Tardis?

And — at the climax of the episode — he’s certainly not meant to look at a piece of 21st century code that’s stealing someone’s soul and go ‘two can play at that game’ — he’s meant to look at the game and say ‘well that’s all good enough for you primitive apes, but look what I can do,’ before pulling a miracle save with a teaspoon and an open mind.

So yes, when it comes to the Doctor and his interactions with technology I have mixed feelings. 

Random Teen Wolf Review

 Reasons why Teen Wolf, Season 3, Episode 19, failed to capture me. An arbitrary list, filled with subjective views:

Short response: the plot basically consisted of Stiles turning Scott into a glorified battery with no reasonable explanation. Also: lack of Stiles. 

For the long response, see below:

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Doctor Who: Deep Breath

 Was that awesome? Or was that awesome?

I am determined not to have my glee over this episode plunged into sadness by reading other people's less happy opinions (... I've already failed in that once by accidentally clicking on the meta of someone who I normally trust to have the same taste as me... in this case, I don't think we were even watching the same show...)

Still, my decision not to read other people's meta doesn't extend to not writing my own, so my thoughts are under the cut for anyone interested in reading them. Head's up: They're gleeful. So much glee.

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Narrative Climaxes

 So… I hate narrative climaxes. Mainly because, by the time you reach them you know exactly where they’re going, and they basically devolve into running and shouting (especially in genre shows, which are sort of my thing).

So… I’ve been telling people I don’t like climaxes for awhile. I’m pretty staunchly about the first half of anything. By the time you hit the running and screaming, I’m yawning and ready to fast forward to the end.

But… I just realised that I absolutely hate the opposite as well.

A story without a climax is basically a biography because in a biography no climax is really the climax because life doesn’t work like that, and if you were to claim there was a climax then it would probably be the persons death and how depressing is that.

So… I’ve realised I am a fan of climaxes. In a sort of roundabout kind of way. 

I love the structure they give a story, and the natural high that they create, which sort of hides the fact that all stories are, in the end biographies, and that at some point that person is going to die and this moment isn’t going to mean much in the long run…

So… here’s to climaxes. (Even the shouty, runny, fighty, actiony, boring, predictable ones).

Mad theory time...

1.

Missy is short for Mistress.

Aka: the Master decided to regenerate as a woman and has embarked on some strange, possessive ego trip.

Problems with this: how is she dragging those dead souls to ‘The Promised Land’ (…which is obviously anything but).

2. 

Missy is the TARDIS gone ever so slightly mad, and she’s ‘saving’ the people who sacrifice themselves for the Doctor (in the same way CAL in the library was ‘saving’ people). 

Problems with this: Missy has been implied to be the one who wants Clara and the Doctor travelling together, but doesn’t the TARDIS dislike Clara on some fundamental level (or is that not a thing any more?)

Also… the TARDIS can’t be evil. I would cry.

 

 

(no subject)

 So… colour seems to be a theme when naming characters this season. It might be a coincidence, but the honest truth is that, with Moffat, almost nothing is a coincidence…

So… it seems peculiar that you are introduced to both a ‘Pink’

 

and a ‘Blue’

 

 

in the same episode.

(You’re also introduced to a Scarlett in the 3rd episode, but I am willing to write *that one* off as coincidence. Mostly.)

My theory?

Journey is the many times great grandchild of Pink and Clara.

I know I’m probably wrong, and we almost certainly won’t see Journey again, but I can’t help feeling this colour naming *means* something. 

Doctor Who: Mad theory - Doctor's Characterisation

 I just read an awesome review of Into the Dalek here. (Seriously check out all of the unaffiliatedcritic's work, they're really good. Especially the ones concerning the Doctor.)

But, in it they had this to say about the Doctor in this season:

what's missing for me in his performance... [is] so far, he doesn't look like he's having fun

Now. I've been thinking about this observation a lot, because it touches on something similar that I've been considering. 

I think it is true. The Doctor is no longer doing exactly what he wants to be doing. He's not so sure that this running around the universe shindig is all it's cracked up to be. And - if the last episode is anything to go by - ghosts, and fears, from his past are coming back to haunt him in a big way. 

For a man who's always, always looked forward and outward - almost exclusively (and sometimes detrimentally) - it says a lot about the new Doctor that he's spending rather a lot of time looking backward and inward.

However, I personally don't find this a problem. It makes sense that the Doctor would, at some point genuinely begin to lose focus.

In fact, I think his monologue in Into the Dalek is very revealing on this point. In it, he emphasises to Rusty that he should take the glory and wonder of the universe and internalise it - make it his reason for doing what he does...

But there's a desperate edge to his tone. And, as we all know, Rusty doesn't get that message at all.

I wonder if there's more to it than Rusty just going 'oh, look at all the Dalek destruction going on here in this brain.' I wonder if Rusty isn't convinced because the person who needs to be entirely convincing can't quite manage it. I wonder if the Doctor is struggling to hold onto his reason for doing what he does... if he's desperately grasping at all the things that once seemed to come so naturally and finding that they're now out of reach. 

In Deep Breath, the Doctor pulls the clockwork man to the window and says that he hates seeing things from a distance, because it's only up close, in the smells and the sights and the sounds that things feel real. 

I wonder if there should have been an 'anymore' tacked onto that sentence. 

I wonder if the Doctor now has difficulty seeing the beauty of the universe, or seeing the relevance of each individual life when he's standing at a distance. What he does is no longer fun. In fact, it no longer comes naturally at all. It's a chore. Something he has to force himself to do. 

This is why he asks Clara 'Am I a good man?'

Not because he's worried that he's bad, but because he needs the motivation. He needs a reason to go on. 

This has huge implications for Capaldi's Doctor. 

It means, for one, that he's no longer going to say 'we're under attack' and then grin as though all his Christmases have come at once. 

I already know that I'll miss those moments if they do disappear. There's a certain comfortable familiarity to them that I'll be loath to lose. 

But - it also means that this Doctor is going to be one of the most interesting, complicated, and intriguing Doctor's of them all. 

What does the Doctor do when he's mislaid his enjoyment at exploring the universe? What does he do when grim purpose and duty are his driving motivators instead of curiosity and a taste for adventure?

I don't know, but I think we're going to find out.

Updated Meta - Doctor's Characterisation

abossycontrolfreak:

I wasn’t convinced by Twelve even last episode, but now I’ve worked out what I think they’re trying to do with him and I love it, and I also think Capaldi is going to be amazing at pulling it off.

They’re stripping him of absolutely everything. It’s why he feels kind of generic-Doctor like, and...

Reading this was like looking into a mirror. Everything was the same, but different. 

In my post here last night, I posited that this behaviour of the Doctor's was because he was growing very old and losing his focus. 

I never, for a moment, thought that it could be because he has, in some ways rebooted to someone... well, young is wrong. But, someone in the midst of a birthing process?

I'm now heavily considering the implications of them both. What does it mean if, instead of finding himself defined by duty as I posited, it's in fact the opposite? The heavy guilt that pushed him to atone for his sins has been stripped way and he's not doing what he does out of 'duty' but instead trying to find out who he is without it...

Hmmm.

I still like my theory, but I'm beginning to think it will probably be proved wrong in the next few episodes. That makes me sad. 

I still want to see the darker, more duty bound Doctor, who does what he does with stark, almost joyless, purpose. 

Maybe I'll have to write him into a fic. 

 

Doctor Who: Time Heist

 I can tell I'm going to be frustrated with Time Heist for awhile...

...because, that should have been a shining jewel of an episode. And it just wasn't.

More thoughts exist under the cut, but I don't want to harsh on anyone's squee, so don't click if you're not happy with a critical review of the episode.

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