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Yep, beyond that one wonderful scene of Martha's escape pod falling silently away from the ship, 42 is just dull and unremarkable in every way. Oh yeah, and God is Francine annoying as hell in this and the blindingly, sneeringly obvious "WE ARE THE BAD GUYS!" vibe that Saxon's people give off makes her look like an utter idiot for taking them at their word. It's especially an overreaction when you consider that from her point of view Martha's life is continuing completely as normal - it's only been a couple of days (earth's time) since Martha met the Doctor and during that time they've been back and attended a function with Francine, Tish and Leo so it's not even like the situation with Rose where she was gone for a year and everybody thought Mickey had killed her.
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Sep 21, 2014 04:57
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Toxxupation posted:
Yeah, it's tough to comment on the evil goatees aspect just yet. I didn't even remember the Saxon stuff being particularly prominent in 42, I just remember the strange quiz game and some kind of possession.
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Sep 21, 2014 04:59
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It took me until "low rent Cyclops in a helmet" to even remember what episode was being discussed. So forgettable.
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Sep 21, 2014 05:02
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It was kind of a dull one. I enjoyed it at the time, but I don't remember much except some of the quiz show stuff (I remember Elvis vs. the Beatles, actually, and some sort of recreational math problem, and that's it). In my opinion, you're over the hump for Series 3 and it's all good from here on, but of course no two people agree on everything. Hopefully you enjoy the next few.
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Sep 21, 2014 05:13
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Doctor Who "42" Series 3, Episode 7 And so we arrive at "42," or as most Doctor Who fans call it, "What?" If the last episode was forgettable, this one is downright phantasmal; it lingers in the memory for about thirty minutes after viewing and then falls apart at the seams. It's also, perhaps not coincidentally, one of the most action-focused episodes of Season 3, with much of the cast's time being spent running around and shouting orders at each other. Since the action sequences in Doctor Who are essentially just filler, this is an episode as light and fluffy as a hydrogen atom, with only a few slivers of memorably good ideas and not even any memorably bad ones. So, I hope understandably, any writeups I do on this one will be a little sparse. At this point I think the Doctor should just turn right the hell back around whenever he steps out of the TARDIS and into a derelict spaceship, because it seems determined to land in the most inconvenient spot possible every time. "42" comes across in many ways as a compressed version of "The Impossible Planet" with all the interesting bits removed - we get a rickety space vessel, a disaster that separates the Doctor from his ship, and large cast of crew members who are reduced to a fifth of their original number in the first half-hour. Except that instead of a whole space-station, we're now on a sun-scooper with the world's worst security system, and instead of the Devil, we're faced with the Angry Sun from Super Mario Bros. 3. This may be scarier, depending on your childhood. I actually like the design of the sun scooper's sets, if nothing else. Whereas the station of "The Impossible Planet" was all cold gray corridors and sparse decoration, the scooper looks like a mobile junkyard, with rat's nests of tools, wiring, and machinery scattered all over every room, with a sweltering orange filter over the screen as a constant reminder of the encroaching sun. It gives the viewer a solid impression of how hosed things have gotten on this ship and how woefully unprepared the crew were for the disaster, not in the least because of, again, their security system. 29 vacuum-sealed doors, all with randomized trivia for passwords, and if you get one wrong the entire system freezes and has to be rebooted? What, did they get their security in a free package from McAfee or something? The Trivial Pursuit aspect of the plot is ridiculous and could have at least elevated "42" to memorably bad if the script had stuck with it, but instead the whole thing is dropped when Martha goes on her little magic escape-pod ride to the sun. That's "42" in a nutshell, really, and why it's so forgettable - it's always playing things safe, sticking to rote action-movie beats without giving its truly weird concepts any time to grow or even to fester. The sentient sun is a neat idea, but glossed over too quickly. The sun-zombies are unremarkable in both visuals and killing method, save for the fact that their helmets appear to be spray-painted Stormtrooper headpieces. The crew members are flat and their interactions unsurprising. The subplots are annoying but not insufferably so. The resolutions make little sense in retrospect but are totally inoffensive at the time. I'm getting sleepy just typing about it all. Tennant, to his credit, appeared to recognize the mediocrity with which he'd been surrounded on this script and cranks up the Ham dial to dangerously high levels in the final act. His shrieking, desperate agony as the sun possesses him is almost uncomfortable to watch, and definitely more than this episode deserved. Ten's fear is understandable - if the sun hollowed him out and used his corpse as a two-legged flamethrower, he wouldn't even be able to regenerate, and while Ten may wistfully philosophize about how nice it must be to die after a mere 75 years or so, he probably doesn't want his toasty cadaver picking off Martha in the process - but that's the kind of performance best deserved for when a Dalek is meaningfully glancing between its plunger and your most sensitive lower parts, not for the most runny-shouty run-shout episode of Who we've seen yet. But then the sun lets him go, and also apparently gives the ship a gentle push out of its gravitational field, and so all is well again. A brief note regarding the enigmatic Mr. Saxon: as I said in my last writeup, Francine's furious paranoia over the Doctor was originally justifiable, given that she's still neurotically preoccupied with her own unfaithful husband, but it gets a little hard to swallow when you're inviting the MiB in to trace your calls. The plotline definitely feels rushed here compared to, say, Bad Wolf or Torchwood, and I get the impression that Davies eventually felt he needed to have these little recurring phrases or elements in each series, sometimes to his detriment. But the Saxon interlude in "42," like everything else in the episode, is brief and quickly forgotten, folded into Martha's excellent little scene of trying to tell her mother goodbye without actually saying the word. Oh, and Martha finally gets her TARDIS key. Long overdue, if you ask me. There, one relevant moment in 45 minutes. So long, sunshine.
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Sep 21, 2014 05:38
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Yeah, like Jerusalem said, the one moment that I actually sort of dug was between Tennant and Martha as they stare at each other after the escape pod detaches, and Tennant's gurny shouting of "I'LL SAVE YOU!!" is silent through the vacuum of space.
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Sep 21, 2014 05:49
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I really can't say much about the Saxon stuff at this point beyond that you're right that it isn't handled very well in this episode. I think letting it just be background color would have been better since it's so intrusive and awkward here.
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Sep 21, 2014 05:58
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Yeah, the Sun-Man thing was just not within the budget of the show at this time. This kind of premise might be alright in Moffat's Who, but it didn't work here. He reminded me of The Shockmaster, a pro wrestling character is only known for having fallen on his face while bursting through a wall like the Kool-Aid Man in his debut.
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Sep 21, 2014 06:29
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I totally forgot that the Saxon stuff appeared in this one. But I forgot everything about this one except "burn with me" and the Beatles quiz anyway so WELP
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Sep 21, 2014 06:31
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I can't remember this episode and it has only been 2 years since I watched it. Must've been a good one.
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Sep 21, 2014 07:45
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Oxxidation posted:A brief note regarding the enigmatic Mr. Saxon: as I said in my last writeup, Francine's furious paranoia over the Doctor was originally justifiable, given that she's still neurotically preoccupied with her own unfaithful husband, but it gets a little hard to swallow when you're inviting the MiB in to trace your calls. The plotline definitely feels rushed here compared to, say, Bad Wolf or Torchwood, and I get the impression that Davies eventually felt he needed to have these little recurring phrases or elements in each series, sometimes to his detriment. But the Saxon interlude in "42," like everything else in the episode, is brief and quickly forgotten, folded into Martha's excellent little scene of trying to tell her mother goodbye without actually saying the word. I think a big part of this has to do with Buffy's influence over RTD in conceiving NuWho back in 2005. It's no secret that he deliberately looked to many aspects of Buffy when designing NuWho like snappy dialogue and interludes of pathos amidst genre madness, and among those aspects was Buffy's tradition of having a "Big Bad" antagonist every season that would (usually) start out as a C-plot and/or red herring and would gradually evolve to dominate the back half of the season leading to a final showdown with the heroes. Every season of Buffy is a good example of this; it was an area where the show definitively excelled. NuWho never went for the exact same approach, but RTD did seem really keen on having some form of narrative arc running through the season that would climax in the finale and that tradition has continued to this day. The problem is that for the most part they've never really gotten the hang of it. Bad Wolf as we've all noted was notoriously poor--just two completely random words that sporadically appear throughout the season before a literal deus ex machina escalation/explanation in the finale. Torchwood in was much better--as Oxx noted--as it followed Buffy's (usual) pattern of evolving the plotline at least a little bit with each appearance until the finale where it all crested, although I'd say it still fell very short of the standard Buffy progression. That's ok though, even Buffy's surprisingly good spin-off Angel was poo poo at doing "Big Bad"s as well as Buffy. I can't talk further on the subject because well, spoilers, but I will say that even though this move was still considered rather experimental for a genre show back in 2005, it proved really really popular in Seasons 1 and especially 2 and that's why RTD seems so obliged to include the Saxon stuff. mind the walrus fucked around with this message at 07:48 on Sep 21, 2014 |
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Sep 21, 2014 07:46
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gently caress, was Buffy popular in the UK? That show didn't even crack top tier network cable in the States, though it was popular as a show could get while being on the American equivalent of BBC Three.
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Sep 21, 2014 07:58
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Buffy was an enormously (relatively) popular show that for better and almost entirely for worse because joss whedon is a gimmicky as gently caress writer influenced nearly every genre show moving forward from it If I were to be honest that's probably why I dislike genre as much as I do, is that for a very long time it was the joss whedonification of genre television, and if it's not that it's the LOSTification of genre television, and even though I love LOST I don't want to watch a copy of it, since I already saw it I wonder what genre show will be the next major thing that every genre show after it incessantly copies. probably game of thrones, since the walking dead is too singular to copy
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Sep 21, 2014 08:08
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Aw, I liked the season 3 arc except now that I look at an episode list, I realize that I've only ever rewatched Gridlock and every episode after 42...
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Sep 21, 2014 08:35
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Toxxupation posted:I wonder what genre show will be the next major thing that every genre show after it incessantly copies. probably game of thrones, since the walking dead is too singular to copy
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Sep 21, 2014 08:44
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One cool thing (the only cool thing) about this episode is that it takes place in real time much like 24. And it's called 42. That's kinda neat. Why did you go evil, Izzy from Hollyoaks? Was Ben that horrible to you? 
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Sep 21, 2014 09:24
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Rarity posted:One cool thing (the only cool thing) about this episode is that it takes place in real time much like 24. And it's called 42. That's kinda neat. Well that's it. They came up with that idea and then they tried to write an episode around it and never really came up with a good way to exploit it or a good plot to go with it.
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Sep 21, 2014 09:29
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Man, I'm almost of the exact opposite opinion there Toxx. I really love Whedon in spite of his obvious shortcomings (save Agents of SHIELD which is offensively bad) and hate LOST, although I readily admit LOST lasted so long because there was some good poo poo to it and not just an endless string of unsatisfying mysteries. Besides, if it weren't Whedon everyone was aping it'd be someone else, as you obliquely note yourself by wondering what series will be the next big influence, and in most circumstances aping a style just leads to a poor variation the original style and not an evolution into something satisfying in its own right.Doctor Spaceman posted:Superhero / comic-book shows are the next big genre TV craze. DC is trying to repeat the success of Arrow, and Marvel is trying to not repeat the failure of Agents of SHIELD. That strikes me as more of a fad though than a true influence. If DC's proposed "inter-series continuity" via The Flash and Arrow and possibly Gotham takes off that could very well be the next big influence, but even then series crossovers/continuity are hardly a new invention (see the whole St. Elsewhere continuity tree). Then again both Whedon and LOST's biggest contributions to genre television were really just extensions/codifications/evolutions of existing techniques that simply weren't employed the extent Whedon and LOST used them. True genius is rare, after all. Even Game of Thrones is known for simply marrying the kind-of techniques you'd find in The Sopranos and The Wire to a genre that typically doesn't employ them thus making both subversion and endorsements of the genre's typical techniques/tropes feel fresh and deep, although the books' literary qualities actually lend credence to the idea that there's some level of virtuosity at play which the show sadly lacks by the nature of its medium.
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Sep 21, 2014 09:30
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Rarity posted:One cool thing (the only cool thing) about this episode is that it takes place in real time much like 24. And it's called 42. That's kinda neat. That's all I have to say about the episode, I can't really remember anything about it even after reading the reviews.
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Sep 21, 2014 11:23
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Here's a quote from Eccleston about why he left that I haven't seen before: link. It's unattributed but it matches a lot of the talk in this thread, so people might be interested in reading it.
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Sep 21, 2014 14:51
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Tiggum posted:But what if people stop being born as well? Obviously if population keeps increasing then eventually all the resources will be used and no one will have enough. But what if you have enough resources for as many people as there are now, and you just stay at that number? "Resources" are a finite quantity that are used up over time inherently, not simply through population growth. If people don't even exist all the resources will be used up eventually. Rarity posted:One cool thing (the only cool thing) about this episode is that it takes place in real time much like 24. And it's called 42. That's kinda neat. Trin, poster of the Doctor Who thread proper, did a runthrough of the episode with a stopwatch and found it's dead on except for one bit where it skips 30 seconds or so.
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Sep 21, 2014 16:33
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It's a lovely sentiment Arivia, but I do think there has to be something more than simply "the people behind the curtain weren't nice people." Media production people, especially at the management level, are notoriously lovely people. This shouldn't have come as a surprise to a fairly seasoned actor like Eccleston. Of course it's very possible that they were exceptionally lovely even to his experience, but I've had limited dealings with the media industry and in my experience you do not have to go very far into it at all to meet exceptionally lovely people at every level. I really want to take him at face value but it still just sounds like polite deflection of the real problems.
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Sep 21, 2014 16:43
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mind the walrus posted:It's a lovely sentiment Arivia, but I do think there has to be something more than simply "the people behind the curtain weren't nice people." Media production people, especially at the management level, are notoriously lovely people. This shouldn't have come as a surprise to a fairly seasoned actor like Eccleston. Of course it's very possible that they were exceptionally lovely even to his experience, but I've had limited dealings with the media industry and in my experience you do not have to go very far into it at all to meet exceptionally lovely people at every level. I really want to take him at face value but it still just sounds like polite deflection of the real problems. You think that directly stating that at least one director, and at least another higher-up, on the show is a huge bully who he actively hated because of it was "polite deflection"? (Keith Boak, of Rose and Aliens of London fame being the chap in question)
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Sep 21, 2014 17:20
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MrL_JaKiri posted:Trin, poster of the Doctor Who thread proper, did a runthrough of the episode with a stopwatch and found it's dead on except for one bit where it skips 30 seconds or so. Given that it's the episode's gimmick, I'd assume that the 30 second skip was due to a scene being cut thanks to being unable to complete the effects or something like that.
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Sep 21, 2014 17:35
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The odd thing is that it skips an entirely round number of seconds. Do scenes normally last exactly 30 seconds or whatnot?
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Sep 21, 2014 18:03
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MrL_JaKiri posted:You think that directly stating that at least one director, and at least another higher-up, on the show is a huge bully who he actively hated because of it was "polite deflection"? (Keith Boak, of Rose and Aliens of London fame being the chap in question) Absolutely. It's a red herring. I'm not saying he's lying-- I think he's telling the absolute truth there in fact-- but working alongside bullies is practically the business standard in media production. I find it extremely hard to believe it was his first experience with a director or some other higher-up who treated their underlings like wet garbage. To use such as a reason for his departure is valid, but my gut tells me he's saying it to mollify the people who are insistent to know all the dirty details rather than get into the complex web of reasons for why he left. He's throwing the dogs a bone, so to speak.
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Sep 21, 2014 18:08
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mind the walrus posted:I find it extremely hard to believe it was his first experience with a director or some other higher-up who treated their underlings like wet garbage. He doesn't imply its something new to him, just that he doesn't tolerate it. Him refusing to work with those people after the job is done may well be SOP. And if he wanted an actually polite deflection why wouldn't he just use the invented reason the BBC used that he got pissed off about?
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Sep 21, 2014 18:14
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Because people have hounded him for a decade about why he "really" left because it isn't just me who smells something fishy? You are right that him refusing to work with nasty people may be his personal SOP, and even a reason why he hasn't exactly had a lot of prolific work since Doctor Who, but with that said why was it so bad on Doctor Who that he decided it was worth leaving? He doesn't really elaborate much more beyond a very shopworn story of a director abusing a prop hand, a song as old as the industry itself. I was barely in the industry at all and the poo poo I both saw and personally experienced would make your toes curl and makes Eccleston's story look like an average Tuesday morning. It just smells of a deflection.
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Sep 21, 2014 18:31
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mind the walrus posted:You are right that him refusing to work with nasty people may be his personal SOP, and even a reason why he hasn't exactly had a lot of prolific work since Doctor Who, but with that said why was it so bad on Doctor Who that he decided it was worth leaving? He doesn't really elaborate much more beyond a very shopworn story of a director abusing a prop hand, a song as old as the industry itself. I was barely in the industry at all and the poo poo I both saw and personally experienced would make your toes curl and makes Eccleston's story look like an average Tuesday morning. It just smells of a deflection. He left at the end of his contract, it's not like he upped sticks in the middle of shooting. There are rumours of worse things happening on set, by the way.
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Sep 21, 2014 18:36
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MrL_JaKiri posted:He left at the end of his contract, it's not like he upped sticks in the middle of shooting. Like some pompous jackass yelling in a public area that some one else was ERASED from Doctor Who? Not that that could actually happen. To be that cartoonish, you'd have to ACTUALLY be a Who Villain.
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Sep 21, 2014 18:42
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Yeah, Christopher Eccleston just didn't really like the job, for whatever reason. I imagine it left a sour enough taste in his mouth that it would take something that would really appeal to him to get him to come back, even for something like Big Finish or conventions. He did offer some kind words right around the time that the 50th anniversary was coming out and praised some of the other actor's performances. He's entitled to like some jobs better than others. I'm sure the hours are a lot better doing a film every now and then than doing a television show, if nothing else. The "erased from Doctor Who" thing really is bizarre, but it may be best as a discussion for the other thread (not that we haven't had it there before, but I think harping on it a lot may color the perception of the production aspects of future episodes).
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Sep 21, 2014 19:01
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MrL_JaKiri posted:The odd thing is that it skips an entirely round number of seconds. Do scenes normally last exactly 30 seconds or whatnot? If timing has to be that precise, it could be that they filmed it in exact thirty second multiples, for ease of editing. "We have exactly 84 blocks to fill," something like that.
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Sep 21, 2014 19:26
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Whenever people ask Chris about DW he also mentions that he doesn't watch the show. It's a bit upsetting really, to think he doesn't seem to want to come back in any shape or form. Not even for the 50th! Whatever happened it must have been a bit of a thing to Chris. Or he's being a big baby, cos he was in that GI joe movie and Thor as well, and I hear Marvel movies work their actors like dogs
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Sep 21, 2014 20:08
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nuzak posted:Whenever people ask Chris about DW he also mentions that he doesn't watch the show. It's a bit upsetting really, to think he doesn't seem to want to come back in any shape or form. Not even for the 50th! Whatever happened it must have been a bit of a thing to Chris. He was up for coming back in the 50th. He just had some terms, those terms weren't agreed upon, both parties went their own way.
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Sep 21, 2014 20:15
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Some people have a bad experience with a job and don't want to interact with it anymore. It wouldn't matter if his excuse for not going to back to Doctor Who (even for the 50th!) were "I was going through a rough patch with my girlfriend at the time and I just don't feel like remembering that year of my life." It's a job, he finished it and moved on to other jobs, and he only has to go back if they offer him something he wants to do, which so far, they obviously haven't. It has nothing to do with him being a "baby."
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Sep 21, 2014 20:26
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Yeah, sometimes people can be odd about Eccleston not wanting to do the show any more. Obviously it'd be cool if he did, but it's not indicative of some kind of moral failing that he's not interested in further interaction with Doctor Who.
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Sep 21, 2014 20:30
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It's embarrassing that people care so much really.
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Sep 21, 2014 20:30
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Kurtofan posted:It's embarrassing that people care so much really. Fandom still hasn't recovered from the scars of Tom Baker refusing to appear in The Five Doctors (or almost any other Who stuff until late 2011).
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Sep 21, 2014 20:37
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To be fair to Baker he had only recently left the role, a role he had performed for nearly as long as everyone else put together.
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Sep 21, 2014 20:44
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DoctorWhat posted:Fandom still hasn't recovered from the scars of Tom Baker refusing to appear in The Five Doctors (or almost any other Who stuff until late 2011). I don't know what you're talking about. He's right there in the middle.  
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Sep 21, 2014 20:59
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