Sunday, May 15, 2011

Who's Going On?

I can't wait to see what Rol says about last night's Doctor Who; he's made his dislike of Neil Gaiman's work very obvious in the past, but I had very few complaints -- and those minor -- about the episode. In fact, my only real complaint was that the "old" console room was just the previous one, as I would have liked to have seen one of the proper old consoles make a one-off return.

There wasn't much of the metaplot this episode, beyond an obvious reference to River Song, but there were some loose ends and notes that may yet prove significant.

I'm still convinced that the Future Doctor is from a rotten timeline and it's our Doctor who kills him off in order to stop the rot spreading to other realities. I also think that Phill may be on to something with his theory about parallel universes, and not only because it ties in neatly with my own.

Speaking of The Rubbish Pirate Episode, in that story a character went missing between scenes; the general opinion at the time was that this was bad writing, bad editing, and further evidence of Steven Moffat's destruction of the Who franchise. In Gaiman's episode, another -- more prominent this time -- character disappears, and there's a bit of handwaving to explain his absence, so I'm beginning to wonder if there's something going on there. Probably not -- I suspect I'm being something of an apologist -- but watch out for disappearing characters in future episodes.

6 comments:

  1. Who disappeared last night without explanation?

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  2. I thought it was excellent. Gaiman doing what he does best - loving deconstruction... with none of what he does worse (pretentious disappearing up his own anus while contemplating "the nature of stories").

    My wv is "Moffill".

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  3. Flea, I'm referring to the Ood. We did get an explanation, but it wasn't very convincing!

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  4. I thought it was very convincing actually, never gave it a second thought!

    Don't see that people can compare it to the (probably) shoddy editing of last week's story.

    I think that's Moff-fans clutching at straws to find sub-plots where there are none. But then, that's just me ;)

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  5. See, they set it up by the Doctor announcing that whoever is in the way when him and the Tardis-woman materialise in the control room will be vapourised. And when they materialised, the Ood was obviously in the way and got vaporised. And because of the excitement no-one noticed until later. I thought it was neat storytelling.

    Cetighorn

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  6. Ah, I missed the first bit, so the second bit seemed a bit half-hearted. That would explain it.

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