"The Sontaran Strategem" (noticably lacking in strategy)
All these weeks with no fic ideas, and abruptly I have a deluge. Damn it. If anyone knows where to find a thought transcriber, now would be a really great time to point me toward it. ^^ My thanks to Wendy and that Nine/Rose ficathon over at hearts_in_time for putting Nine back in my head. I missed him.
First, a disclaimer: I was not paying much attention. At all. I'd argue that there were several good reasons for this, but the point still stands. ;)
Loved the sequence wherein Martha meets Donna. Donna was pretty damn awesome there. "Now, don't you two get in a fight." "Oh, you wish." Not to mention the snark on his skinniness and "she's engaged"... Way to go, Donna.
Still, I wasn't too enamoured of the anti-military bent of this one... "You turned her into a soldier?" Sigh. Or the sequence in which she berated the military officers for not having noticed her yet and demanded a salute... And Ten, "I don't like people carrying guns around me"... Must be nice to live in his head. Everything's so damn simple there. Guns are bad! People with guns are bad! Shiny things are good! Whatever I want is good! It's all so easy. Little like living in George W. Bush's head must be. Yeah, I said it. Assuming she's broken, expecting her to be an angel... I wonder if Martha's got the same song as I had in her head now? "Come, doused in mud, soaked in bleach, as I want you to be..." ... "And I swear that I don't have a gun..."
Seriously, at this point I'm starting to think it's canonical that "Ten" is, in fact, some poor random Gallifreyan sod they shoved the Doctor's memories and a horribly flawed approximation of his personality on and transmatted in place of Nine in the end of PotW. No, really, it all makes sense. No wonder poor John Smith was so terrified to go back to that! I take back all the mean things I said about him! (Or, well, most of the mean things I said about him. He's still kind of an asshole.)
That kid is a moron. I'll grant you that genuiuses are rarely geniuses in all fields, but the kid went through school, didn't he? You'd think that would've taught him to recognise when he was being used like a wet paper towel. Trust me, people do want to copy your homework. And notes. Up through university. Eventually you'd notice.
The Doctor and the Jeep's navigation system-- stupid, stupid, stupid. Only an idiot would program it to "do the opposite of what the driver suggests" instead of "accept no input from the driver". Granted, the Sontarans don't seem to be the sharpest crayons in the box, but this is not that difficult a concept to grasp. The latter would be FAR easier to manage. AND, if it were doing the opposite of what he said, what about all those other orders they shouted at it? And wouldn't "You're programmed not to do anything I say, right?" produce no response at all, given that he's asking for a confirmation? If it won't do anything he says, why will it give him an answer? There had to be a better way to do that. Or at least a better way to frame it. "You're programmed not to do anything I say, right? ... Oh, I get it-- Don't answer me!"
And finally, witness the devolution. The Doctor who worked at resonating concrete in TDD (granted, without success, but it was a tough job and he was distracted in the middle) can now not figure out how to resonate a single pane of glass. Way to go, moron. Donna's already piloted your ship, why not relinquish your sonic screwdriver to more capable hands, too?
Somehow, I nearly always find the "average" or "worse" episodes to be a lot more tolerable than the "good" ones. I wonder why that is? I mean, I wasn't thrilled with this episode, but "Fires of Pompeii" and "Planet of the Ood" threw me into an outright fury. "42" was crap, but I didn't much mind "The Lazarus Experiment". It's strange.
[Like the way LJ flips the hell out over a single broken HTML tag. Grr.]
First, a disclaimer: I was not paying much attention. At all. I'd argue that there were several good reasons for this, but the point still stands. ;)
Loved the sequence wherein Martha meets Donna. Donna was pretty damn awesome there. "Now, don't you two get in a fight." "Oh, you wish." Not to mention the snark on his skinniness and "she's engaged"... Way to go, Donna.
Still, I wasn't too enamoured of the anti-military bent of this one... "You turned her into a soldier?" Sigh. Or the sequence in which she berated the military officers for not having noticed her yet and demanded a salute... And Ten, "I don't like people carrying guns around me"... Must be nice to live in his head. Everything's so damn simple there. Guns are bad! People with guns are bad! Shiny things are good! Whatever I want is good! It's all so easy. Little like living in George W. Bush's head must be. Yeah, I said it. Assuming she's broken, expecting her to be an angel... I wonder if Martha's got the same song as I had in her head now? "Come, doused in mud, soaked in bleach, as I want you to be..." ... "And I swear that I don't have a gun..."
Seriously, at this point I'm starting to think it's canonical that "Ten" is, in fact, some poor random Gallifreyan sod they shoved the Doctor's memories and a horribly flawed approximation of his personality on and transmatted in place of Nine in the end of PotW. No, really, it all makes sense. No wonder poor John Smith was so terrified to go back to that! I take back all the mean things I said about him! (Or, well, most of the mean things I said about him. He's still kind of an asshole.)
That kid is a moron. I'll grant you that genuiuses are rarely geniuses in all fields, but the kid went through school, didn't he? You'd think that would've taught him to recognise when he was being used like a wet paper towel. Trust me, people do want to copy your homework. And notes. Up through university. Eventually you'd notice.
The Doctor and the Jeep's navigation system-- stupid, stupid, stupid. Only an idiot would program it to "do the opposite of what the driver suggests" instead of "accept no input from the driver". Granted, the Sontarans don't seem to be the sharpest crayons in the box, but this is not that difficult a concept to grasp. The latter would be FAR easier to manage. AND, if it were doing the opposite of what he said, what about all those other orders they shouted at it? And wouldn't "You're programmed not to do anything I say, right?" produce no response at all, given that he's asking for a confirmation? If it won't do anything he says, why will it give him an answer? There had to be a better way to do that. Or at least a better way to frame it. "You're programmed not to do anything I say, right? ... Oh, I get it-- Don't answer me!"
And finally, witness the devolution. The Doctor who worked at resonating concrete in TDD (granted, without success, but it was a tough job and he was distracted in the middle) can now not figure out how to resonate a single pane of glass. Way to go, moron. Donna's already piloted your ship, why not relinquish your sonic screwdriver to more capable hands, too?
Somehow, I nearly always find the "average" or "worse" episodes to be a lot more tolerable than the "good" ones. I wonder why that is? I mean, I wasn't thrilled with this episode, but "Fires of Pompeii" and "Planet of the Ood" threw me into an outright fury. "42" was crap, but I didn't much mind "The Lazarus Experiment". It's strange.
[Like the way LJ flips the hell out over a single broken HTML tag. Grr.]