Diary of a Doctor Who newbie

Revival Series 1, Episode 3: The Unquiet Dead

After a long wait, here’s the third episode!

We open in a 1800’s era funeral home, while a young man mourns his aunt.  Suddenly, she wakes up , and starts on a rampage, knocking the director and the nephew out cold.  She leaves the building with a terrifying yell.

We then find the Doctor and Rose having some sort of issue on the TARDIS, but it gets cleared up quickly as the doctor decides to go to 1860.  Rose asks why, and he’s like: “I dunno, let’s find out!”

We cut back to the funeral home, where the director calls his houseclerk to help him find the walking dead woman.

The TARDIS touches down, and before the exit, the Doctor tells Rose she has to change, seeing as you don’t want to get thrown in jail for being indecent, now do you?  He gives her crazy directions involving no less than six turns, but she figures it out, and comes dressed in a very fancy 19^th century gown.

Back with the director and houseclerk, we learn that the houseclerk has an ability: she has some sort of telepathy, and the director, Mr. Sneed, tells her to use it to find out where the old woman went.  Turns out, she wanted to go see a special reading at the theater of A Christmas Carol, read by none other than…

Charles Dickens!  Who is terrible depressed at this point, since he is old, and has no more ideas, or some such thing.  He sucks it up and goes on stage anyway, though.

The Doctor starts to walk out, but Rose calls him back.  She’s going out first, going to enjoy the amazingness that is Christmas in 1860.  The go, arm in arm, to explore the new area.  Unfortunately, the Doctor realizes they aren’t exactly where he expected, and are instead in Cardiff in 1869, but Rose doesn’t care.

We then see Charles Dickens reading his story, and suddenly!  The old woman makes herself known, and she starts howling like a banshee.  The theater-goers start screaming as well, and the Doctor and Rose are right outside the door, ready to jump into action.  Mr. Sneed and his houseclerk, Gwyneth, are there as well, and take the woman out, with Rose in hot pursuit.  They forcefully take Rose, and the Doctor figures out that the possession of the dead is make of gas.

He runs out to tell Rose, and sees her being taken by Mr. Sneed, and commanders Charles Dickens’ carriage to give chase.  Dickens jumps in as well, and the Doctor has a slight fangasm that he’s in with Charles Dickens, but soon they focus on catching up with Rose.

Diary of a Doctor Who newbie

Revival Series 1, Episode 2-The End of the World

And I’m back with the second episode of the series!

We start with Rose and The Doctor talking in the TARDIS, with Rose wanting to know what that sucker can do.

She first asks to go 100 years into the future, but that is small potatoes for The Doctor, so he brings them 10,000 years forward.  Rose lays the smackdown, and tries to knock some of that cockiness out of him, so The Doctor takes them 5 billion years into the future.

Rose is wondering why they went there, and The Doctor informs her that the earth is ending.  Sucks for humans, I guess.  We see a menagerie of different alien species, all aboard the observation station to watch the destruction of a planet.

There are standard meet and greets, until the last human comes on board, and boy, is she ugly.  As Rose would later describe her, she looks like a giant trampoline with a mouth. 

It’s soon after, and we have our conflict for the evening:  spider-bots are attempting to sabotage the observation ship.  First, it get really hot, then the sun filters go up, and finally, the solar shields go down, threatening the entire ship, and all it’s passengers.

The Doctor manages to figure everything out on his own with no assist from Rose tonight, though he did have help from a sentient tree named Jabe.  Unfortunately, the spider-bots were not the culprit, only the executioner. 

When The Doctor goes to find out who was really in charge of the takeover, he find it out to the Cassandra, the last human, and it was all for the money.  Of course.  She teleports away, and The Doctor and Jabe go to fix the mainframe before Earth is destroyed, destroying the ship with it.

They together manage to find the manual override, but in doing so, Jabe, who is composed fully of wood, gets blasted with extreme heat, and burns completely away.  This leaves us with a PO’d Doctor.

He returns to the rest of the guests, and knows exactly what to do.  He finds the transmitter, and recalls Cassandra back, without her precious team of moisturizers, and without whom she dries out and disintegrates in a matter of a couple of minutes.

Danger completely taken care of, The Doctor discusses, and Rose laments, the fact that the earth is gone, and no one was watching.  He brings her back to present time, giving her the option to stay there, but Rose puts on a cheeky grin, and says she’ll stay, if The Doctor will get her some chips.

I liked this episode.  The action was fast paced, but spread through the entire show, The various aliens had many different forms, though most did stick with the standard bipedal hominid, and I’m beginning to see the dynamic I’m assuming the show will go with for The Doctor and his companion. 

Rose will be our conduit, our way into this world that we have no way of knowing.  Kind of like Harry in Harry Potter, or Arthur in Hithchiker’s Guide.  If we don’t have a person that can ask our questions for us, the completely foreign world would be utterly inaccessible, so we get Rose.  But that’s not her only function.  She also exists to humanize The Doctor, who would be completely sterile, and subjective in his view if it weren’t for her.  She has already had to call him out several times in terms of him not thinking about the consequence of various actions on her, or those close to her.  I’m hoping/assuming she will continue to do that, and that he will start to get there on his own as well.

The Doctor, on the other hand, is our guide through the galaxy and through time, and with him, Rose, and in extension, we, will learn various things about herself and the universe.

I really enjoyed the campiness of the show as well.  It’s clear they have a budget, but it also seems like something a person could almost do on their own, with enough time an effort.  An example would be the slide through time mechanism:  a spinner set into the dashboard.  Simple, elegant, and awesome for the possibilities it gives to fans to play, cos or otherwise.

As always, feel free to comment below, but please avoid spoilers, thanks!  

Diary of a Doctor Who newbie

So there’s this show called Doctor Who.  It’s made in Britain, and has timey-wimey stuff, I’ve heard.  There have been so many people in my inner circles, and in the periphery of my life that have told me I need to watch this show, I thought I’d start, if only to be able to hold on to my geek card.

I don’t really know a whole lot about this show, beyond the odd spoilers that I read almost purely on accident, so most of this is going to be completely new to me.  From what I understand, this show has a major mythology behind it, so I am fully expecting to be lost and confused for decent chunk, but we’ll see. 

This is going to be a recurring series, but not one on any specific schedule, as I’ll watch the episodes as I can fit them into the five million other things I am attempting to juggle all at the same time.  But anyway, let’s get this party started with the meeting of the newest team.

Revival Series 1, Episode 1-Rose

The very first thing on this show is meeting Rose.  She seems like a typical young adult, working, hanging out with friends, nearly getting killed by plastic come to life.   You know, the normal stuff.  She is saved from the incredibly creepy mannequins come to life by a mysterious stranger who calls himself The Doctor, and this turns out to be the titular Doctor Who. 

He tells her to run while he blows up something on the roof of the department store she works in…unfortunately for Rose, he manages to blow up the whole building, and not just the thing on the roof, so Rose is out of a job. 

The next morning, her mother tries to convince her to go for compensation, which I’m assuming is kind of like suing?  Not 100% on that, but the context seems to confirm.  Rose is hesitant, but the Doctor Who shows up at her cat door, and Rose lets him in.  He is looking for the arm that Rose took the night before, and with good reason: The arm straight up attacks both Rose and The Doctor before he puts it down with a blue light-tipped thing-a-ma-jobby.  In later scenes, he calls it the sonic screwdriver, so I’m just going to go with that from now on.

The Doctor and Rose take a walk and discuss what all just went down, and the fact that there is living plastic around, and how he needs to destroy the consciousness, before The Doctor takes off mysteriously.  Rose does an internet search, and finds a guy who has been studying the various appearances of The Doctor, and has found him as far back as the late 1800’s.  Rose is convinced he’s a nutter, but as she’s talking to him, her boyfriend, who came along for protection, is eaten by a garbage can.   He is replaced by a plastic replicant, but Rose doesn’t seem to notice.

They head to a restaurant, where Rose’s boyfriend acts obviously strange some more, and doesn’t even look like himself.  Honestly, I’m not sure how Rose missed that, but whatever.  The Doctor comes to rescue her again, and they figure out where the living plastic’s consciousness is hidden:  underneath the London Eye. 

It was actually pretty funny how dense The Doctor was for this last third, it was almost completely Rose who did and solved everything, which was pretty cool, actually.  Sci-fi is not really the genre you expect to subvert gender roles, and be so blasé about it.

Anyway, Rose figures out the transmitter is the London Eye, she finds the place where the consciousness is hanging out, and, after The Doctor gets captured trying to reason with it, saves him and destroys the plastic.

Then, we see the group, Rose, her (real) boyfriend, and The Doctor, chatting about what to do next.  The Doctor gives Rose a choice:  stay, and live your life like you expected, or come with him for a life of dangerousness and excitement at every turn.  She turns him down, she has to take care of the lump known as her boyfriend, and her mother.  The Doctor takes off, but reappears moments later, telling her they go through time as well.  Apparently, that was all she needed to hear, and Rose officially joins The Doctor.

So, a very solid first outing, if I do say so myself.  The villain of the week was very creepy.  The mannequins, with their non-eye stare were very menacing, but not too scary to turn off first time viewers such as myself.

Rose seems like a strong, capable woman, and will make a good companion, if the writers don’t ruin her character later on down the road. 

The Doctor was very mysterious, and I rather enjoyed his no-nonsense answers to any question that was thrown his way. 

I gotta say, I think this may be the start of a beautiful TV watching experience!

Feel free to comment below, but avoid spoilers, please!