Doctor Who: 4.1 "Partners in Crime"
I have a Torchwood post-mortem planned, but every time I sit down to discuss it I end up yelling and frothing incoherently and I have to go sit someplace dark until I calm down again.
First. I don't like the new arrangement of the title theme. I didn't like it in That Damned Voyage but I was hoping it would go away. Obviously it isn't going to. I suppose I'll just have to hope that it will grow on me.
Also. I know Rusty intended the Baby Adipose to be horrifying and macabre. I know they're just ambulatory blobs of human fat (with beady little eyes and cute little fangs!). I don't care. I WANT ONE. Oh my God those things were ridiculously adorable! The waving! The smiling! The cooing and squeaking! It would be the CUTEST PET EVER . . . until it grew up into an adult Adipose, anyway.
Overall, I did like "Partners in Crime." It wasn't perfect -- I thought the bit with the Doctor and Donna and the continual near misses started to drag by the end, and Donna's heart-to-heart with her grandfather just missed the mark with me -- but it was a welcome change from the depresso-fest that was Friday night's Torchwood. It continued the Rusty tradition of starting the new season off with a fun, light episode to ease people back into the swing of things and bring everyone up to speed on the new (or in this case, returning with a revamped personality) characters. A promising start to the season, but -- well, we'll see.
And speaking of returning with a revamped personality characters. I admit that when I heard Catherine Tate was going to be the S4 companion, I was half-excited and half-nervous. After all, this was a character that Rusty himself had described as a shrieking fishwife who got on people's nerves. I was picturing an entire season of "WOT?" and "HUH?" and "WHO'RE YOU?" and cringing. But I did come to like Donna by the end of The Runaway Bride, because she was perfectly willing to give the Doctor a good slapping when he needed it and she could tell him no when he deserved it -- after S2, this was a welcome change. Plus, the ending hinted that there might be more to Donna than just the gossip and the frivolity that Lance derided her for. Upshot is, I was somewhat unsure because I knew they were going to have to give her a personality makeover in order to fit her in as the continuing companion but I was willing to give her a try. Plus, I like Catherine Tate.
For the most part, I think they pulled the Donna revamp off. It took me a while to get to the point where I could buy it, but eventually they made it. Serious Donna being Serious Investigator made me blink a few times until I figured out what was going on. As I mentioned earlier, Donna's pouring out her troubles to her grandfather just felt hollow to me, despite all the talk in the Confidential about how Tate "has a valve to her soul she can open up." I wasn't even sure I believed the whole bit on the roof where she explained why she was going all Sarah Jane. Really, it was Donna's monologue about trying to change, but being disappointed by the fact that she was unable to escape from mundanity that sold it for me. Not completely, as it still feels a little contrived and like Rusty's borrowing from himself (because who else do we know that had a crappy mundane life living at home with her mother, ran into the Doctor, helped to save the world and realized there was more to life than just the everyday, impressed the Doctor enough that he asked her to come along with him, initially turned him down and then eventually went with him to grand adventures?) but you know, I'll go with it. And by Doctor Who standards she's off to a great start as a companion since one of the first things she does is get a woman killed.
Of course, she's not completely changed from the old Donna, because this is Catherine Tate after all and part of her schtick is being loud and obnoxious, so we get the enormous luggage and the "YOU'RE NOT MATING WITH ME, SUNSHINE!" 'comedy' bit. Oh, that Donna! She's not going to be like the last one at all, is she? When she says she's not interested in the Doctor, by golly she means it! Har har har! I suppose this is probably a nice point to segue into my second point:
Martha. Yes, I watched the episode, I know she's not in it, but her presence still hangs over it the way Rose's presence hung over The Runaway Bride and "Smith and Jones." If my feelings on Martha are not clear, I will give you a reminder: I adore Martha. I hesitate to toss around the words "favorite companion ever" when there's so many companions that I haven't even seen yet (plus Ace is a strong contender for the title) but no matter what, Martha is always going to be near the top of my list of favorites. You might also remember, however, that I felt she was rather hard done by last season. I'm not going to rehash my gripes here, if you're interested in re-reading my reactions I've handily tagged all my Doctor Who-related posts with "doctor who", but in particular I was annoyed by the fact that Martha continually sacrificed on the Doctor's behalf and received only minimal acknowledgement and gratitude in return. I don't really participate in greater Who fandom, but I know enough to know that I really wasn't the only person who was upset or outraged by the way Martha was treated. And although I can never prove it and for all I know I may just be reading too much into things, it felt to me like the mentions of Martha were the production office acknowledging the failings of last season and attempting to sort of Band-Aid them over. I didn't really discuss her episodes on Torchwood, but her appearance over there kind of felt like Step 1 in "Appease the Crazy Internet People." She was confident, she was unbelievably competent, she was happy and she'd been hired by UNIT, possibly helped by a recommendation from the Doctor. Definitely had more than a hint of "Look! Martha is EVEN MORE AWESOME now! And the Doctor helped her get a SUPER AWESOME JOB! See, he's sorry for how he treated her and he's trying to make amends!"
Then here, there was the scene with the Doctor starting the technobabble monologue, and then the UNMISSABLE GRAND SWEEPING DRAMATIC SHOT of him alone in his TARDIS, as if Rusty was saying "Look! He really does miss her! He's lonely without Martha! SEE? SEE??" Then there was the admission that "I had this friend Martha Jones. She was brilliant. And I destroyed half her life. -- It got complicated. And it was all my fault." FINALLY some acknowledgement that yes, she suffered because of him and yes, her family suffered because of him, now could he tell HER that? (Of course since we know she's coming back this season, I'll bet the odds are that he does try to say something like that to her and she immediately rebuts him, talking about how she's happy and has a SUPER AWESOME JOB and yeah, that year sucked but she learned a lot about herself and her life is so much better now since she's known him, and then he can go on his way confident in the belief that it doesn't matter how he treats the little humans as long as in the end, they come away better, because he's the Doctor, he makes people better -- as the Master perceptively observed -- and I may end up tossing a brick through Rusty's window anyway.)
And THEN Rusty goes and pisses me off again with the whole crack about "She fancied me." To be fair, it's kind of a retroactive pissed-off, because it's just stirring up my anger about the cheap shot the Doctor took at Martha in "The Sound of Drums": "It's like when you fancy someone and they don't even know you exist." Oh, boy. Last time I was hacked off about it because Rusty was like "Oh I PROMISE the whole 'Martha has a crush on the Doctor' thing is going somewhere, it's going to be significant" and then really it wasn't, it was just another hammer used to beat Martha over the head with, just a source of punchlines. And while I wasn't willing to cut Rusty any slack about the line, I was willing to cut the Doctor a bit of slack on it -- it's canon that he can be an insensitive clod where feelings are concerned, and maybe he was just being thoughtless. But the fact that here, again, her falling in love with him is treated as the punchline to a joke, I think slides the earlier crack over the line from 'thoughtlessly cruel' to 'deliberately cruel'. Insensitive clod or not, making a joke about unrequited crushes to someone you know has an unrequited crush on you is just a really dickish thing to do. And, maybe I'm just overreacting, but I think treating someone's feelings as the punchline to a joke as he does here with the "She fancied me" line is pretty dickish too. Oh that Martha! She was brilliant! She was great! She did me a lot of good even though I ruined her life! But she fell in love with me, can you believe it? Har har har! These silly alien womens! [Alternately, the line could be meant as him bragging to Donna -- Martha was all that and a bag of chips and she picked me to have a crush on -- which is still a dickwaddish thing to do. 'Look at me, I'm so awesome that awesome women fall in love with me, take that Miss Deeply-Unimpressed-Yet-Running-After-Me.' Gaak.]
Hmm. That was rather a lot of upset for an episode I said I liked. Which I really did, I just get stirred up when it comes to Martha. Perhaps I'll feel better when she actually reappears later on and is awesome.
Bullet points time!
- Is it just me, or did Donna mention investigating all that funny stuff in Cardiff? I thought I heard a line about that the first time I watched the episode but couldn't find it when I rewatched for this review.
- Speaking of, Catherine Tate did get some nicely funny stuff in. The whole mime conversation was great, and I have to give both Tennant and Tate kudos because ordinarily I can't read lips but I was able to make out everything they said up until Donna's big paragraph of mime -- and by then reading her lips wasn't the joke anyway. It probably helped, though, that the Confidential showed the script for almost that entire bit. Also, her delivery on the rooftop speech was great, particularly the lines about the bees disappearing and the rumors about the Titanic buzzing Buckingham Palace.
- One really trivial thing that annoyed me about the episode was the amount of music reuse. C'mon, Murray, it's a new season, let's get some new tracks! Okay, so you gave "Donna's Theme" a nice new arrangement, points, but NUL POINTS for dumping "After the Chase" in as the BGM for the scene with Donna and her grandfather on the hill, and DOUBLE NUL POINTS for the bit where, when the cut was over, you just repeated it from the beginning! Particularly because the Confidential focused on the filming of that bit and dropped in another piece of music that was far more effective. Not that I can identify what it was. "The Doctor Forever" made an appearance in what I think was its "Gridlock" form when the Doctor was catching Miss Foster's sonic pen, and the music from the scene where the Doctor tells Donna "it's a funny old life aboard the TARDIS" is a reuse that is driving me crazy because I know it's a lift and I can't place where it's coming from. (Is it from the last scene of TRB? Them in the snow and "come with me" and "you need someone to stop you"?)
- This episode did manage to get a few squeals out of me, to its credit. Most particularly when Donna stops to speak to a Mysterious Blonde who very conspiciously keeps her face turned away from the camera, and then the Mysterious Blonde turns, and it's Rose bloody Tyler . . . or at least, someone that looks like Rose. I don't care that she was played by Billie Piper and credited as Rose Tyler, in this universe, just because something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck don't mean it's a duck. There are too many people who have run around in disguise for me to automatically go "ZOMG IT'S ROSE!" If it is really really Rose, though, and not, say, the Rani masquerading as Rose or Romana in another eerily familiar regeneration, I am DYING to hear Rusty's explanation for what's going on there. Because I know it's going to be a doozy, given all the time they spent on SHE'S GONE FOREVER, UNIVERSES ARE CLOSED, HOLE IN THE VOID IS SEALED, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY ONE-HUNDRED PERCENT NO WAY THROUGH.
Specs count: HURRAY THE SPECS ARE BACK
Saxon count: OLD MEME
Rose count: 1
Next week: And once again we're following the template laid out by S2 by heading back in time for a historical. Rose went to the Victorian era, Martha went to the Elizabethan era, but Donna is going to top them all by going to Volcano Day! If they don't run into Jack I'll be sad.
First. I don't like the new arrangement of the title theme. I didn't like it in That Damned Voyage but I was hoping it would go away. Obviously it isn't going to. I suppose I'll just have to hope that it will grow on me.
Also. I know Rusty intended the Baby Adipose to be horrifying and macabre. I know they're just ambulatory blobs of human fat (with beady little eyes and cute little fangs!). I don't care. I WANT ONE. Oh my God those things were ridiculously adorable! The waving! The smiling! The cooing and squeaking! It would be the CUTEST PET EVER . . . until it grew up into an adult Adipose, anyway.
Overall, I did like "Partners in Crime." It wasn't perfect -- I thought the bit with the Doctor and Donna and the continual near misses started to drag by the end, and Donna's heart-to-heart with her grandfather just missed the mark with me -- but it was a welcome change from the depresso-fest that was Friday night's Torchwood. It continued the Rusty tradition of starting the new season off with a fun, light episode to ease people back into the swing of things and bring everyone up to speed on the new (or in this case, returning with a revamped personality) characters. A promising start to the season, but -- well, we'll see.
And speaking of returning with a revamped personality characters. I admit that when I heard Catherine Tate was going to be the S4 companion, I was half-excited and half-nervous. After all, this was a character that Rusty himself had described as a shrieking fishwife who got on people's nerves. I was picturing an entire season of "WOT?" and "HUH?" and "WHO'RE YOU?" and cringing. But I did come to like Donna by the end of The Runaway Bride, because she was perfectly willing to give the Doctor a good slapping when he needed it and she could tell him no when he deserved it -- after S2, this was a welcome change. Plus, the ending hinted that there might be more to Donna than just the gossip and the frivolity that Lance derided her for. Upshot is, I was somewhat unsure because I knew they were going to have to give her a personality makeover in order to fit her in as the continuing companion but I was willing to give her a try. Plus, I like Catherine Tate.
For the most part, I think they pulled the Donna revamp off. It took me a while to get to the point where I could buy it, but eventually they made it. Serious Donna being Serious Investigator made me blink a few times until I figured out what was going on. As I mentioned earlier, Donna's pouring out her troubles to her grandfather just felt hollow to me, despite all the talk in the Confidential about how Tate "has a valve to her soul she can open up." I wasn't even sure I believed the whole bit on the roof where she explained why she was going all Sarah Jane. Really, it was Donna's monologue about trying to change, but being disappointed by the fact that she was unable to escape from mundanity that sold it for me. Not completely, as it still feels a little contrived and like Rusty's borrowing from himself (because who else do we know that had a crappy mundane life living at home with her mother, ran into the Doctor, helped to save the world and realized there was more to life than just the everyday, impressed the Doctor enough that he asked her to come along with him, initially turned him down and then eventually went with him to grand adventures?) but you know, I'll go with it. And by Doctor Who standards she's off to a great start as a companion since one of the first things she does is get a woman killed.
Of course, she's not completely changed from the old Donna, because this is Catherine Tate after all and part of her schtick is being loud and obnoxious, so we get the enormous luggage and the "YOU'RE NOT MATING WITH ME, SUNSHINE!" 'comedy' bit. Oh, that Donna! She's not going to be like the last one at all, is she? When she says she's not interested in the Doctor, by golly she means it! Har har har! I suppose this is probably a nice point to segue into my second point:
Martha. Yes, I watched the episode, I know she's not in it, but her presence still hangs over it the way Rose's presence hung over The Runaway Bride and "Smith and Jones." If my feelings on Martha are not clear, I will give you a reminder: I adore Martha. I hesitate to toss around the words "favorite companion ever" when there's so many companions that I haven't even seen yet (plus Ace is a strong contender for the title) but no matter what, Martha is always going to be near the top of my list of favorites. You might also remember, however, that I felt she was rather hard done by last season. I'm not going to rehash my gripes here, if you're interested in re-reading my reactions I've handily tagged all my Doctor Who-related posts with "doctor who", but in particular I was annoyed by the fact that Martha continually sacrificed on the Doctor's behalf and received only minimal acknowledgement and gratitude in return. I don't really participate in greater Who fandom, but I know enough to know that I really wasn't the only person who was upset or outraged by the way Martha was treated. And although I can never prove it and for all I know I may just be reading too much into things, it felt to me like the mentions of Martha were the production office acknowledging the failings of last season and attempting to sort of Band-Aid them over. I didn't really discuss her episodes on Torchwood, but her appearance over there kind of felt like Step 1 in "Appease the Crazy Internet People." She was confident, she was unbelievably competent, she was happy and she'd been hired by UNIT, possibly helped by a recommendation from the Doctor. Definitely had more than a hint of "Look! Martha is EVEN MORE AWESOME now! And the Doctor helped her get a SUPER AWESOME JOB! See, he's sorry for how he treated her and he's trying to make amends!"
Then here, there was the scene with the Doctor starting the technobabble monologue, and then the UNMISSABLE GRAND SWEEPING DRAMATIC SHOT of him alone in his TARDIS, as if Rusty was saying "Look! He really does miss her! He's lonely without Martha! SEE? SEE??" Then there was the admission that "I had this friend Martha Jones. She was brilliant. And I destroyed half her life. -- It got complicated. And it was all my fault." FINALLY some acknowledgement that yes, she suffered because of him and yes, her family suffered because of him, now could he tell HER that? (Of course since we know she's coming back this season, I'll bet the odds are that he does try to say something like that to her and she immediately rebuts him, talking about how she's happy and has a SUPER AWESOME JOB and yeah, that year sucked but she learned a lot about herself and her life is so much better now since she's known him, and then he can go on his way confident in the belief that it doesn't matter how he treats the little humans as long as in the end, they come away better, because he's the Doctor, he makes people better -- as the Master perceptively observed -- and I may end up tossing a brick through Rusty's window anyway.)
And THEN Rusty goes and pisses me off again with the whole crack about "She fancied me." To be fair, it's kind of a retroactive pissed-off, because it's just stirring up my anger about the cheap shot the Doctor took at Martha in "The Sound of Drums": "It's like when you fancy someone and they don't even know you exist." Oh, boy. Last time I was hacked off about it because Rusty was like "Oh I PROMISE the whole 'Martha has a crush on the Doctor' thing is going somewhere, it's going to be significant" and then really it wasn't, it was just another hammer used to beat Martha over the head with, just a source of punchlines. And while I wasn't willing to cut Rusty any slack about the line, I was willing to cut the Doctor a bit of slack on it -- it's canon that he can be an insensitive clod where feelings are concerned, and maybe he was just being thoughtless. But the fact that here, again, her falling in love with him is treated as the punchline to a joke, I think slides the earlier crack over the line from 'thoughtlessly cruel' to 'deliberately cruel'. Insensitive clod or not, making a joke about unrequited crushes to someone you know has an unrequited crush on you is just a really dickish thing to do. And, maybe I'm just overreacting, but I think treating someone's feelings as the punchline to a joke as he does here with the "She fancied me" line is pretty dickish too. Oh that Martha! She was brilliant! She was great! She did me a lot of good even though I ruined her life! But she fell in love with me, can you believe it? Har har har! These silly alien womens! [Alternately, the line could be meant as him bragging to Donna -- Martha was all that and a bag of chips and she picked me to have a crush on -- which is still a dickwaddish thing to do. 'Look at me, I'm so awesome that awesome women fall in love with me, take that Miss Deeply-Unimpressed-Yet-Running-After-Me.' Gaak.]
Hmm. That was rather a lot of upset for an episode I said I liked. Which I really did, I just get stirred up when it comes to Martha. Perhaps I'll feel better when she actually reappears later on and is awesome.
Bullet points time!
- Is it just me, or did Donna mention investigating all that funny stuff in Cardiff? I thought I heard a line about that the first time I watched the episode but couldn't find it when I rewatched for this review.
- Speaking of, Catherine Tate did get some nicely funny stuff in. The whole mime conversation was great, and I have to give both Tennant and Tate kudos because ordinarily I can't read lips but I was able to make out everything they said up until Donna's big paragraph of mime -- and by then reading her lips wasn't the joke anyway. It probably helped, though, that the Confidential showed the script for almost that entire bit. Also, her delivery on the rooftop speech was great, particularly the lines about the bees disappearing and the rumors about the Titanic buzzing Buckingham Palace.
- One really trivial thing that annoyed me about the episode was the amount of music reuse. C'mon, Murray, it's a new season, let's get some new tracks! Okay, so you gave "Donna's Theme" a nice new arrangement, points, but NUL POINTS for dumping "After the Chase" in as the BGM for the scene with Donna and her grandfather on the hill, and DOUBLE NUL POINTS for the bit where, when the cut was over, you just repeated it from the beginning! Particularly because the Confidential focused on the filming of that bit and dropped in another piece of music that was far more effective. Not that I can identify what it was. "The Doctor Forever" made an appearance in what I think was its "Gridlock" form when the Doctor was catching Miss Foster's sonic pen, and the music from the scene where the Doctor tells Donna "it's a funny old life aboard the TARDIS" is a reuse that is driving me crazy because I know it's a lift and I can't place where it's coming from. (Is it from the last scene of TRB? Them in the snow and "come with me" and "you need someone to stop you"?)
- This episode did manage to get a few squeals out of me, to its credit. Most particularly when Donna stops to speak to a Mysterious Blonde who very conspiciously keeps her face turned away from the camera, and then the Mysterious Blonde turns, and it's Rose bloody Tyler . . . or at least, someone that looks like Rose. I don't care that she was played by Billie Piper and credited as Rose Tyler, in this universe, just because something walks like a duck and quacks like a duck don't mean it's a duck. There are too many people who have run around in disguise for me to automatically go "ZOMG IT'S ROSE!" If it is really really Rose, though, and not, say, the Rani masquerading as Rose or Romana in another eerily familiar regeneration, I am DYING to hear Rusty's explanation for what's going on there. Because I know it's going to be a doozy, given all the time they spent on SHE'S GONE FOREVER, UNIVERSES ARE CLOSED, HOLE IN THE VOID IS SEALED, THERE IS ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY ONE-HUNDRED PERCENT NO WAY THROUGH.
Specs count: HURRAY THE SPECS ARE BACK
Saxon count: OLD MEME
Rose count: 1
Next week: And once again we're following the template laid out by S2 by heading back in time for a historical. Rose went to the Victorian era, Martha went to the Elizabethan era, but Donna is going to top them all by going to Volcano Day! If they don't run into Jack I'll be sad.