Comments | baron_scarpia: Doctor Who - The Stolen Earth / Journey's End

baron_scarpia

Doctor Who - The Stolen Earth / Journey's End

Nov 20, 2009 08:17

The Doctor lands on Earth, which promptly vanishes. The TARDIS is in the right location, but the planet isn’t. It’s been taken, nowhere to be found in the universe, and nobody knows what’s going on. UNIT, including Martha Jones, will be working overtime, as will Torchwood, headed by Jack Harkness. More informally, the journalist Sarah Jane Smith is ( Read more... )

film reviews, doctor who

Comments 6

The Stolen Earth/Journey's End ext_110243 November 23 2009, 21:05:06 UTC

Baron,

Excellent stuff, as ever - any disagreements I may have are certainly nothing to do with your own analysis...

The Doctor lands on Earth, which promptly vanishes. The TARDIS is in the right location, but the planet isn’t.

And a good thing too, since much of the rest of the episode is about him getting back to the Earth! :-)

It’s the Daleks, which is such bad news that I think curling up into a foetal position and drinking oneself into a coma would be a pretty good idea at this point.

Indeed. I’m sure there are perfectly good commercial reasons for it, but I liked it better in the Davison to McCoy eras when the Daleks appeared once per Doctor, not once per series...

The Stolen Earth is a great episode.

Argh, I still need to be convinced...

There’s the pleasure of seeing old faces, one of which is truly surprising. Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister, makes a return.

This would have been truly surprising, if only the Big British Castle hadn’t put in an “also starring Penelope Wilton” credit within seconds of the ( ... )

Re: The Stolen Earth/Journey's End baron_scarpia January 2 2010, 10:40:46 UTC

Um... actually I liked the return of the Daleks. When I referred to 'bad news', I'm afraid I was talking about the end of the world.

Yeah, they're a bit overused. But try teling that to William Hartnell.

Davros ext_110243 November 23 2009, 22:57:46 UTC

It’s great to have Davros back again. I was pleased to see he’s the same as ever; vacillating between quiet confidence and monomaniacal hysteria. He isn’t allowed to overshadow his creations, either, meaning that the Daleks remain threatening in their own right. They aren’t just footsoldiers, which is made very clear when the Doctor works out that Davros is actually a prisoner of his creations, not their master. When Davros replies ‘We have… an arrangement’, his reading of the line speaks volumes about that arrangement and his view of it.

(This is a nice touch in another way - Davros’s relationship with his creations has always been ambivalent at best. The only time we get to see him as undisputed master of a group of Daleks is in Remembrance of the Daleks, and even then the Daleks are fighting a vicious civil war with each other. He just happens to be leading the technologically superior contingent.)I think you're (as so often) absolutely spot on, here. I've always more or less subscribed to the view that, amongst the Doctor's arch ( ... )

Re: Davros baron_scarpia November 23 2009, 23:02:00 UTC

And on that note, you should take a look at my season three reviews as well...

Re: Davros ext_110243 November 23 2009, 23:25:01 UTC

I shall do so at once...

I'm on a roll, now!

:-)

Mark_W

And Another Thing! ext_110243 November 23 2009, 23:23:31 UTC

It seems that whenever Davies attempts something like this it usually fails miserably.I’ve taken this comment out of context a bit, and taken the “like this” to mean “season finales”. I yield to no-one in my admiration of RTD, and think his “small” Doctor Who scripts (“Gridlock”, “Love and Monsters”, Midnight”, “Smith and Jones”, even “Tooth and Claw”, and, at a stretch, (in terms of ‘small’ not ‘splendidness’) “Utopia” ) are among the most marvellous of the new run (and indeed, of all runs), but one thing I remain to be convinced about is story “arcs”. These can make good sense when you have a totally ‘mundane’ series (like “House”) or a fantasy series that is constrained to a particular time and place (like “Buffy”), but, it seems to me, it can only be a bad thing with Doctor Who...(Especially if the finale involves a great big effects “battle” (RTD has never done a proper or convincing “war” in Doctor Who) that ultimately has no lasting effect, as in “Doomsday”, “Last of The Reset Buttons”, or “Journey’s End ( ... )