Doctor Who: I seriously want to break into tears.

[beccatoria]

So...yeah. I wanted to break into tears twice this episode. The first time was for good reasons. The second, not so much. Beware the bitter.

I watch it for the first time in ages. And I'm commenting to my boyfriend that...holy shit, this is kind of awesome. Look, it even looks like an abandoned quarry!

Look! It's Jack! And...the Doctor's being an ass to him, but that's par for the course and it's an interesting thing to delve into - the paradox and prejudice and all that time-related jazz.

And there's continuity with Rose and that's also interesting.

And oh, my heart there's Jack quoting Eccleston's doctor because survival is fantastic.

And Cadfael is acting his heart out and it's a brilliantly compelling story even before I knew how it would end. And then there's the pocketwatch (from an episode I missed) and I'm thinking - they can't, they wouldn't, OH MY GOD THEY ARE! - and Cadfael again just pwning with his mad acting skillz. The heartbreak of his story, such a good man, such an amazing guy, the worst thing that could happen to him, being a time lord - and what does that say, subtextually about this whole mess? About the doctor too?

And my boy, who REALLY hasn't been enjoying New Who, is GLUED TO THE SCREEN TOO. And I say, "If this isn't the Master, I shall hate this episode forever. If it is they are REDEEMED IN EVERY WAY!"

AND THEN IT IS THE MASTER!

And, for serious, I want to cry from happiness.

And then, for some reason, he decides that he has to regenerate younger and "stronger" (since when did the Timelords care about that? They're cranky old men!) and I'm thinking, well, okay, even though I'm also mourning the loss of Cadfael.

And then...it's John Simm. And I'm still thinking, well, all right, he's a good actor.

AND THEN:

WHAT THE ALMIGHTY FUCK?!

DAVID TENNANT'S A GOOD ACTOR TOO YOU LAME GITS, AND LOOK AT HOW OBNOXIOUS YOU'VE MADE HIM! WHY DID YOU HAVE TO GO AND DO THE SAME THING TO JOHN SIMM?!

I mean, seriously! What happened to, oh, EVERY PIECE OF CHARACTERIZATION THE MASTER EVER HAD?!

Where's his unending respect for the Doctor? Where his mustache twirling that DOESN'T DESCEND INTO COMEDY DOCTOR-LIKE THUMBS-UP SARCASM?

Some might say I'm over reacting based on two minutes of footage and the preview for next week. But FOR SERIOUS what else am I supposed to do when they give me EVERYTHING I WANTED FUCKING WRAPPED UP IN AN AMAZINGLY-ACTED CADFAEL SHAPED BOX AND THEN TAKE IT AWAY BY TURNING IT INTO A DUMBASS CLONE OF THE 10TH DOCTOR?!

RTD: Acting "zany" makes you neither likeable, inherently timelordy, a good actor, nor menacing. What it in fact makes you is "zany".

Who here ever thought the fucking MASTER was zany.

Oh god. My heart. It's broken. EVERYTHING I WANTED destroyed by two minutes of footage.

EVERYTHING I WANTED, RUSTY! AND YOU WRECKED IT!

How can someone write something so beautiful and then fuck it up so supremely?

Oh god, I want to break into tears. Tears of utter grief.

I know, television shouldn't affect me so much. But I think a beautiful and utterly wasted opportunity in the middle of a story should. It was so, so squandered.

Comments

[asta77.livejournal.com]

EVERYTHING I WANTED FUCKING WRAPPED UP IN AN AMAZINGLY-ACTED CADFAEL SHAPED BOX AND THEN TAKE IT AWAY BY TURNING IT INTO A DUMBASS CLONE OF THE 10TH DOCTOR?!

I only have a very, very vague idea of who the Master is and his relationship with the Doctor, but after having Derek Jacobi for an episode who was AWESOME and then have him suddenly ripped away from us I was heartbroken. And I hadn't thought about it until reading your post, but the regenerated version of the Master is far too much like the current incarnation of the Doctor. So, are we to believe that the Tardis makes the man and that it has one blueprint? I shouldn't judge until I see next weeks ep and where they are going with this, but I fear we will be having a scenery chewing competition going on.

On the bright side, Jack's back! The Jack we know and love and not whoever that was hanging out at Torchwood.

[(Anonymous)]

After Torchwood I kept expecting Jack to start speaking only to be BEEPED out by a Tardis generated anti swear field :P

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

o_O

Huh. Really good point. That's going to be really distracting now...

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Oh god, yes, definitely. I had forgotten about that, but yes, Jack, the proper Jack, the real Jack, not that godawful PoS guy they wrote in Torchwood. That was my big hope for the return of Jack to Who, that somebody would remember how to write him again. And lo and behold.

[asta77.livejournal.com]

I really wish the Doctor could keep him. Damn the BBC for renewing 'Torchwood'!

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Yep.

God I hated Torchwood. I mean. A lot.

[asta77.livejournal.com]

I won't go into too much detail of my history with the show since I think my brain has tried to expunge as much of it as possible from memory.

I watched the first two eps and quit. I was at a loss as to how the writers/producers thought the show and characters were going to be perceived. I love flawed heroes, my two big fandoms have been 'Buffy' and 'Battlestar Galactica', but there is a huge difference between being flawed and barely registering as a human being. Who the hell thought Owen was a good idea? He's one of the most unlikeable TV characters to ever be on my (computer) screen. Even if I could have somehow dealt with his horrid personality, when it's discovered he's using a magic mist stolen from Torchwood in order to drug women to get them into bed and we're suppose to find this amusing...NO. But this is a show that thought if they threw in a lot of gratuitous violence and sex (and I fully support sex on TV, but there should be a good reason for it) then they could forget about actually developing a story or characters or dialog.

Becka's posts did convince me to give the show another try and I have to admit I liked 'They Keep Killing Suzy' quite a bit. Then again, Suzy was the only character besides Jack I liked in the pilot and then they had to make her evil and suicidal. :/

After that I ended up watching the finale and it was just so, so, soooo bad. They seriously expected us to believe that in 1941 London two men, one an officer, could dance together and kiss in public, surrounded by dozens of people who would think it's romantic. WHAT?! They'd both be beaten to a bloody pulp in the alley out back. Ack.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

Owen was bizarrely interesting. That opening episode seemed to split people into two camps. The Geezus Fucking Christ What The Hell Are They Doing They've Made A Show In Which One Of The Lead 'Heroes' Is A Self-Confessed Rapist (and they've played it for laughs!) This Is Disgusting And Makes Me Deeply Uncomfortable Camp. And the Oh Get Over It He's Not That Bad Camp.

I was never able to forgive them for the way they handled Owen. He was disgusting and repellant, and the politics of it/him reviled me. I spent all of my time rooting for the monsters, hoping that the Torchwood team were going to get killed off horribly and painfully.

[asta77.livejournal.com]

Well, I know which camp I'd be in. ;) Stargate: Atlantis ran into the same problem. The only thing I think that saved the show from people tuning out in droves was that it was a guest character (one they inexplicably brought back for another guest outing). But it was the same idea - the guy used an herb to make the women of the village find him irresistible. And we were suppose to laugh at how funny it was that this unattractive schmuck was bedding three women at a time. My blood boils just thinking about it. Sci-Fi series really need more female staff writers because the guys seem to fail to see how offensive stories such as these are.

Putting aside the rape = funny idea, Owen was just a repellent ass who also made some incredibly stupid choices that put his team in harms way. I missed the eps where he had an affair with the lead female character, but when I heard about it I was dumbstruck.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

They were all incompetant. That's what really annoyed me. Owen was a pathetic rapist who should have been locked up. Ianto nearly destroyed the entire planet because he wanted his cyberbabe back, which okay, maybe he was upset. But he should have been fired after that. Pulling a gun on your boss because you're in love with a robot and he says no you can't destroy the planet? Sorry, that's a sackable offense in my book. And they were all just... useless.

*flails*

Oh god, watching Gwen and Owen doing it. That was horrible. Just. Horrible.

And yes, that genuinely disturbs me, the herb thing. It does tend to suggest that many people would find it acceptable, because the other person consented, and isn't it just the same as getting a girl really drunk so her standards are lowered and she says yes?

Okay. I can see how it might be a hazy subject. But Owen was a rapist.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

CAMP ONE! I'M IN CAMP ONE!

Oh god I LOATHE Owen. My hatred for him has no fucking bounds.

That episode where he was fighting those Weevils? Apart from being a total rip-off of Fight Club (and a BAD one that totally MISSES THE POINT at that), it just...oh god how much LESS COULD I CARE?

I mean, seriously, NEVER has a TV character wound me up this severely that I have to grip things until my knuckles are white because he's being a selfish shit AGAIN!

And at the end of the finale (in which he was...just...oh, I haven't the words) when Jack hugs him and forgives him I just... That was an interesting moment because the moment actually played very real to me. And I thought, oh. Okay. He's got the emotional maturity of a 2 year old with none of the justifications or attempts at self-improvement that say STARBUCK has, and he really is just throwing one big epic temper tantrum and wants Jack to throw down some boundries and make him grow the fuck up. And you know what else?

I TOTALLY DIDN'T CARE! I STILL WANT HIM TO DIE HORRIBLY AND PAINFULLY BECAUSE NO ONE GETS TO JUST DECIDE THEY WANT TO BE A SHITTY SELFISH PERSON WITH THE EMOTIONAL MATURITY OF A TWO YEAR OLD DESPITE BEING GIVEN NUMEROUS CHANCES AT DOING BETTER.

(It's capslock day. Oh god, I hate him.)

And that shit about opening the rift because it "took his Captain" - NO YOU FUCKING TOSSER IT TOOK YOUR GIRLFRIEND WHO YOU WERE CHEATING ON YOUR OTHER GIRLFRIEND WITH WHO DIDN'T EVEN LIKE YOU and you don't even have the fucking decency to be honest about it now you're about to destroy the WHOLE FUCKING WORLD.

Ahem.

No wonder my favourite episode was Random Shoes.

[gonzo21.livejournal.com]

There is a third camp actually, now that I think about it. I remember talking to a friend of mine abotu Owen, and they really didn't like what he was/did with the whole rape thing. But then some sort of blindness came over them, because they just refusd to acknowledge it. They didn't like it, so they didn't see it. They just pretended the problem away.

I suspect most of the viewers probably fitted into this camp. And it is arguably the most sinister camp of all.

AND I COMPLETELY AGREE WITH YOU ABOUT ALL OF THAT! I COULD NOT STAND TO WATCH THE LITTLE BASTARD, AS THE SCRIPT KEPT TELLING US WE WERE SUPPOSED TO LIKE THE GREASEBALL SHITBAG MORONIC WANKSTAIN.

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I'd feel somewhat better if the TARDIS made him like the Doctor but that doesn't really hold up because the Doctor's regenerated in the TARDIS before and it doesn't seem to have a bearing on his personality. I may be taking this too seriously, but I can't help it, I'm grasping at straws.

Feel fortunate that you never knew the Old Master! Though I feel quietly vindicated that it disappointed you too, even though didn't really know OldWho.

Forcing myself to concentrate on other aspects of the episode for a second, I was very happy with how they handled Jack.

I know what you mean about his different persona at Torchwood (and I guess a hundred and fifty years of waiting'll do that to a guy) but I found his return to "form" surprisingly believable. Maybe because it smacked of hysterical relief to me - and a sudden shocking lack of responsibility. Hoping that this makes it back to Torchwood somehow (since we know he'll be returning), I wonder if his team will realise quite how quickly he was willing to abandon them.

Also...is there a disconnect between the end of Torchwood where Jack heard the TARDIS inside the HQ, and him running? Or did he hear the TARDIS outside and then when everyone else at TW saw he was gone, he was actually running manically towards said TARDIS? Um...that's a confusing way of saying, in the TW finale, did the TARDIS materialise inside the TW building or did he just hear it outside?

[asta77.livejournal.com]

The ending was kind of a mad scientist moment which was a letdown after the nuanced performance of Derek Jacobi. He gave the ep such gravitas and then it just dissolved into cliche.

Maybe Jack felt he could be himself with the Doctor because he knows as much about him as anybody. And I think their is a mutual understanding that underneath the pleasant exterior there is darkness. They share an understanding that no one else does, not even Rose. With the Torchwood crew I felt he was pretending to be someone else because, for whatever the reasons, there were things about himself that he was eager to protect.

in the TW finale, did the TARDIS materialise inside the TW building or did he just hear it outside?

The way I remember it Jack hears the TARDIS and as he turns toward the noise we see lights and a wind sending paperwork flying in all directions. This clearly tells me that the TARDIS appeared inside the Torchwood facility so I was very confused when we saw him running, with the hand strapped to his back, outside the building.

Oh, OT, but have you heard of the series 'Robot Chicken'? I don't know quite how to explain it. But they did a Star Wars parody (George and Mark Hamil actually voiced their claymation counterparts) that aired last night. Parts of it were very funny, like the Emperor lamenting his credit rating after Darth allows the Death Star to blow up. Other parts were strange and not so funny (George Bush is an idiot jokes are just getting old). Anyway, look for a DL. ;)

[beccatoria.livejournal.com]

Yes - I think you might have a point about Jack and the Doctor - be interesting to see how he handles it now he knows the Doctor doesn't like him very much...

And yes! I know Robot Chicken well! And have seen that sketch before! It's pretty damn awesome!