Oh, and

[mmcirvin]

If you're in the US, have cable, and haven't yet seen the highly enjoyable revival of Doctor Who, it starts playing on the Sci-Fi Channel tomorrow night at 9, with the first two episodes back to back.

There's a lot to like in the first two episodes, which do a good job of introducing the characters and premise as well as providing the necessary "not your father's Doctor Who" kick, but they do have some loose plotting and cheesy elements; on the whole they're fairly characteristic of the writing of series producer Russell T. Davies. If you're still uncertain after seeing those, I'd recommend hanging on through the excellent third episode that airs next week, Mark Gatiss's "The Unquiet Dead".

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, there's no case in which I've seen both the movie and the serial, unfortunately, so I can't say. I get the impression from others' reviews that the first two movie adaptations are generally held to be worse than the serials, but the third (Quatermass and the Pit/Five Million Years to Earth) may actually be better than the serial. Everyone seems to like it, at least.

The stories are scarier and much more adult than the Cushing Dalek movies. The first story is sort of like a Fifties atomic-monster flick with the horror dialed up just a tad higher; the second is a larger-scale alien-conspiracy story, comparable to the better Pertwee-era Doctor Who serials. Then the third hits a deeper archetypical vein somehow, with a weird combination of supernatural and science-fiction elements, and an implication of dark undercurrents in human nature; I find it genuinely unnerving, even in the original B&W TV serial form. The final one from 1979 has more of a cynical social-criticism angle.