Doctor Who, "Human Nature", very short review

[mmcirvin]

After a string of mid-season clunkers, the show has suddenly sprouted the best episode since Season 1, apparently adapted from a Virgin New Adventures novel by Paul Cornell. Here's hoping the second half holds up.

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Agreed. I think unfortunately they're focusing so hard on getting to the season-ending "Saxon" arc, that they sort of went "eh, whatever" in the middle.

I do feel that anchoring themselves back in present-day London, seeing more of Martha's family, is what they need to do. The reason we came to love Rose is that we came to love her mother as well, and Mickey. Until we can understand Martha in the same way, things won't gel.

Meanwhile, though, this was a simply fantastic episode. The scary head tilts of the taken-over humans were really well-done, and I love the young actor who was in "About a Boy" (the boy who has the watch).

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I saw the first few episodes of Torchwood, and didn't like it very much. They seemed to be trying so hard to emphasize the ADULT!!! RAUNCHY!!! nature of the show that the characters' motivations didn't make any sense.

[aderack.livejournal.com]

The final few episodes are actually half-decent. Watch the Cath Tregana ones, and imagine with the series would have been like if she, rather than Chibnall, were in charge. A series like Torchwood really does need a female perspective, I think.

Also, the two-part finale introduces a pretty spiffy nemesis for the team.

42 was well-done for what it was; the biggest problem is that it was disposable, rather like the late-season episodes last year. It's a little weird that Human Nature implies that they just escaped from a pretty important, unseen adventure, when the previous week was filler. Why not, oh, show an adventure laced with hints that someone is after the Doctor, graced with a second ending that forces them to duck into the TARDIS to escape?

The only really sour note, in and of itself, has been the Dalek two-parter. What confuses me is that with series one the only person Davies handed a two-parter was Moffat, as he's the only person he felt could handle it. Then for each of series two and three he threw the first big two-parter to someone who had never written for the series before, and indeed had little TV writing experience. And both kind of sucked, in different ways and to different degrees.

The problem with both this and last year is that the first two-parter helps to set the tone, momentum, and expectations for the rest of the series. And in both cases they first leave a sour note in the air then quickly sink into one-off irrelevancy. The Lazarus Experiment helps a little. Sitting where it does, though, between a yuck and a yawn place, it's easy to dismiss.

One thing I gotta say: I love the new directors they've brought in this year. The guy who directed episodes one and two and the Human Nature two-parter brings a fantastic matter-of-fact tone that the show has needed ever since Tennant came on board. The Gridlock/Lazarus guy also does a good job balancing the tone: underplayed and lucid when serious, larger-than-life when loopy.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Don't dismiss Lazarus, because then you'd be dismissing the brilliance of Mark Gatiss! I prefer to see him working from his own material, but even in a seriousish role, he's a restrained ham who can get away with, say, geniune evil laughter, if he feels like it.

He's written two good (IMO) episodes so far, I hope he writes more, and hey, if he has to star in them, no complaints.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

It wasn't Gatiss's fault, but I disliked "Lazarus" as well, mostly for the writing. The premise was bad Edmond Hamilton crossed with bad Brannon Braga and the execution was an utterly by-the-numbers monster stomp. And "42", as Jake said, was remarkably like the A-plot of "Heat Vision and Jack" only taken seriously.

The Dalek two-parter had promise, and some nice moments, but to me its depiction of 1930s America just seemed distractingly off, mostly because racism was hardly even dealt with in situations where it would really have been a glaring intrusion--which in a Dalek story is particularly bizarre. I don't ask for authorial preaching, but there might have been some neat irony in the Cult of Skaro having progressed beyond racist notions that were still hobbling the humans.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

"42" was weird for me-- I found the whole "falling into the sun" peril much more interesting to me than the "Heat Vision and Jack" peril (the connection didn't occur, but I last saw HV&J about a year ago and didn't watch it again when our Arizona friend broght it up lately). The roaming alien murderer seemed to me like a re-tread of the Devil in the Ood (sp) from last season.

And man, the fucking doors. Seriously, Matt, they really need to talk to SF nerds instead of TV writers before they go about designing spaceships. Not that there shouldn't be a time and a place where one's bar-trivia skills will be called upon to save life as we know it, but this was just aggravating. Oh, and there's always a 20th/21st century expert around when you need one.

You're right about Lazarus: Gatiss was great, and the episode blew. Nevermind even more "it's a small world" with the Jones family. I just finished his book today, "The Vesuvius Club." Quite brilliant. Wilde is the obvious comparison, but only because it's comedic; it's not super-satiric. At times it felt a little like Ray Chandler, only soft-boiled, not hard-, and I think HG Wells is closer to the mark than James Bond. But a fun read, and well-envisioned.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The one bright spot in "42" was the way Martha connected with that guy who was not the Doctor. More of that, please.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I do agree about the directing, though. The first three episodes of S3 were all well-done and had something of the feel of big-budget popcorn movies, in a good way--especially "Gridlock", which, despite being another shot of nonsensical Russell T. Davies crack, came across as really good crack, with a weird central idea that we really hadn't ever seen before--something I deeply admire. They also did a good job of introducing Martha, a much better foil for the Tenth Doctor than Rose was.

I'd gotten a bit frustrated with S2 toward the end, and those first three episodes of S3 did a lot to redeem the show for me, which made the subsequent doldrums all the more frustrating.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I liked Season 1 Rose. In S2, there was something off about the Rose/Doctor dynamic--they seemed a little too cozy, like a couple of smug kids putting one over on the rest of us. Except for "The Girl in the Fireplace", where the relationship was written completely differently to make the romance plot work.

Martha's crush is irritating--the character doesn't really need it; she'd be an almost perfect companion otherwise.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

Tennant is dating the Grown Woman in the Fireplace, lucky bastard. They really had superb chemistry on screen, so I can only imagine real life.

HEY, SPOILERS FOR BOTH PARTS BE HERE, ABANDON ALL HOPE &C.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

I'm posting a week later because, upon learning this was a two-parter, I decided to wait for the second half to come out. I watched both today, and liked them very much. I was glad to see Jessica Hynes (neé Stephenson), who acts in an eccentric orbit around Simon Pegg's works, and fits Doctor Who very well. The Pegg-related stuff she did (co-wrote Spaced) that I've seen made me expect a wink and a nod at any point from her, but instead she played a really great character.

I think I laughed at the head-tilt, though. Other than that, they were suitably terrible.

I had a few problems with it; I don't know if schoolboys were actually trained to use Maxim guns against asagai-bearing Zulus in real-life 1913, but their weird retreat and total lack of self-preservation reminded me of the sad dismissal of that idea for years after the Great War.

Also, I don't mind anti-war sentiments in TV shows, nor even transparent symbolism related to our current war; it just baffles me that they'd create as the enemy a real, acute, palpable, confirmed, and total unignorable threat to humankind, and they won't fight it because it's wrong to hurt something if it seems human at a glance. (Shooting the straw men was cute, but.. no, just cute-- I'm surprised they died, since plunging one's had clean through one had no damaging effect.)

It wasn't the shouting, plotting aliens that I found frightening. It was the Matron's knowing deduction that the girl's house is empty, because of course she would vaporized the residents. But no, it was wrong to shoot at the girl 5 minutes before that, because shooting is wrong! (Actually, this extends to a larger beef about the gunplay in Who and Torchwood, which IMO is pretty poor, or at least incredibly cliched by American TV standards.)

Re: HEY, SPOILERS FOR BOTH PARTS BE HERE, ABANDON ALL HOPE &C.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I interpreted the unwillingness to shoot at the girl as more a knee-jerk emotional reaction--with a certain amount of 1913 sexism involved: after all, some of those boys behind the guns didn't look much older than the girl did.

Then the Doctor behaves like a truly cold bastard when he doles out the comeuppance to all of them at the end--eternal punishment for villains who, all told, weren't really worse than the average megalomaniac murderer the Doctor runs across; he's been kinder to Daleks--and he's still presented as the hero. This story was, as I said, apparently adapted from a New Adventures Seventh Doctor novel. Sam tells me the ending wasn't the same; nevertheless, that behavior strikes me as more characteristic of the New Adventures Seventh Doctor, an elaboration of the Sylvester McCoy TV Doctor who often flips from harmless clown to sociopathic chessplayer without warning, and also seems to have vast unexplained godlike powers from time to time.

All told, this was the strongest Tennant story yet, but a few jarring character notes did keep it from quite reaching the heights of "The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances". I do think it stands alongside the very best of the original series.

Re: HEY, SPOILERS FOR BOTH PARTS BE HERE, ABANDON ALL HOPE &C.

[sunburn.livejournal.com]

The commuppance was particularly fitting since their short lifespan was the reason for the deception in the first place.

I guess the reason I didn't like John Smith's retreat from the girl is that the writer let it be just a little too ambiguous as John Smith, being told that his dreamtime Doctor persona is the real him, became something in between, or Smith with a tendency to slip into Doctor at unguarded times-- when you do that, it's not clear who's in retreat from the girl. (On second viewing, I think perhaps the kid had better awareness of the Doctor at the time than Smith had.)

Anyway, everything I know about the British psyche pre-WWI is literally from one source, so it's not likely I can peel back the layers of that onion.

Re: HEY, SPOILERS FOR BOTH PARTS BE HERE, ABANDON ALL HOPE &C.

[(Anonymous)]

Re: the Doctor's seemingly over-the-top punishment of the Family - he was striking out at them, becuase he had lost a chance at a happy life as a human with no more never-ending-save-the-universe struggles and they had caused death by searching for him. They were not only death dealing sociopaths but had made him deeply unhappy - it was a case of THIS TIME IT'S PERSONAL! The Doctor, after the Timewar, is NOT a nice cuddly person, he doesn't give second chances. And let's face it, it's that iron fist inside the velvert glove that we all love!