This weeks's Who and recs
Jun. 3rd, 2007 04:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hazelkI’d been looking forward to the conclusion of Human Nature, which was wonderful in so many ways.
Making the Doctor human seemed to be cashing in on all the references to his alien nature this season, the flashback structure was just twisty enough to add spice without appearing flashy, the evocation of the time period warts and all satisfyingly authentic. They even managed to avoid the smugness that so often creeps into stories about our heroes travelling to less enlightened eras with the scene that had John Smith trying to ‘explain’ Martha as culturally different, a very modern way of being patronising that I was so glad she slapped him for. Martha, as ever, was smart and also funny “some gravy with your tea?” but not infallible while on the villains side the Family were creepily intriguing. Even the scarecrows were actually scary despite being essentially classic Who monsters, slow moving, stiff and CGI light.
Family of Blood, I don’t know. At the end of it my first reaction was basically nonplussed. It had some really powerful sequences, Martha taking charge of the hostage taking, the siege of the school with the boy soldiers finding things no longer a game but still with no idea of how real it was soon to become. It worked but it worked very much from a modern omniscient point of view. So much so that the later resolution with Tim finding the courage to fight and the poppy scene at the end felt off. Historically, it didn’t end happily with a war worth fighting and the idea that Tim’s vison enabling him to avoid the one shell that would have killed him and the other boy somehow made it so? There was always more than one shell.
Still I think my bigger problem has always been with the Doctor. John Smith not wanting to give up his existence to stop the carnage was one thing but why did the real Doctor leave it so long? The Family were so easy to defeat in the end that the delay felt gratuitous and their punishment an act of vengeance for hubris in the original sense of the word. Which I think is my long-standing problem with Who. A “Time Lord” with such a specific interest in humanity and not one of the thousands of other species that are supposed to exist makes no sense as sf. The Doctor only works if seen as some kind of guardian angel and that’s a concept that’s never made any emotional sense. Supernatural evil is entropy writ large, supernatural good has no scientific equivalent.
Paradoxically I love fannish productions that draw on the subtext of the sinister fae alien,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lordshiva’s Seven Minutes in Heaven fic or or laurashapiro’s Lonely People vid but when the subtext becomes text it feels wrong.
Making the Doctor human seemed to be cashing in on all the references to his alien nature this season, the flashback structure was just twisty enough to add spice without appearing flashy, the evocation of the time period warts and all satisfyingly authentic. They even managed to avoid the smugness that so often creeps into stories about our heroes travelling to less enlightened eras with the scene that had John Smith trying to ‘explain’ Martha as culturally different, a very modern way of being patronising that I was so glad she slapped him for. Martha, as ever, was smart and also funny “some gravy with your tea?” but not infallible while on the villains side the Family were creepily intriguing. Even the scarecrows were actually scary despite being essentially classic Who monsters, slow moving, stiff and CGI light.
Family of Blood, I don’t know. At the end of it my first reaction was basically nonplussed. It had some really powerful sequences, Martha taking charge of the hostage taking, the siege of the school with the boy soldiers finding things no longer a game but still with no idea of how real it was soon to become. It worked but it worked very much from a modern omniscient point of view. So much so that the later resolution with Tim finding the courage to fight and the poppy scene at the end felt off. Historically, it didn’t end happily with a war worth fighting and the idea that Tim’s vison enabling him to avoid the one shell that would have killed him and the other boy somehow made it so? There was always more than one shell.
Still I think my bigger problem has always been with the Doctor. John Smith not wanting to give up his existence to stop the carnage was one thing but why did the real Doctor leave it so long? The Family were so easy to defeat in the end that the delay felt gratuitous and their punishment an act of vengeance for hubris in the original sense of the word. Which I think is my long-standing problem with Who. A “Time Lord” with such a specific interest in humanity and not one of the thousands of other species that are supposed to exist makes no sense as sf. The Doctor only works if seen as some kind of guardian angel and that’s a concept that’s never made any emotional sense. Supernatural evil is entropy writ large, supernatural good has no scientific equivalent.
Paradoxically I love fannish productions that draw on the subtext of the sinister fae alien,
lordshiva’s Seven Minutes in Heaven fic or or laurashapiro’s Lonely People vid but when the subtext becomes text it feels wrong.