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I hated last week, but I thought this was perfectly fine. It probably helped I didn't try and watch it straight after an episode of True Detective this week. Whilst I'm sure the plot stood up to no scrutiny whatsoever, and it gave us nothing new thematically, it flowed nicely and I loved Ben Wheatley's direction. I've only seen Sightseers out of his films, but he seems really good at doing dreamscape stuff and the fact that the central conceit of this episode was kind of dumb meant it was suited to lots of trippy slow-mo Daleks. I wonder if he had any input into the score because I also enjoyed that, it had an excellent surreal edge, almost like the olden days. If it wasn't a great Doctor Who episode it was at least a visually fascinating bit of television and I'm cool with that. I enjoyed Capaldi, and Clara actually felt like a character and was written for! The new theme is growing on me, I just don't like the tremolo in the melody. I like the heavy synth bass which seems like a nod to the Howell theme, although I think that was already in last season's. edit: the Twelfth Doctor is too grimdark but so was Ten sometimes, at least this guy might be consistent Psybro fucked around with this message at 01:58 on Sep 1, 2014 |
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Sep 1, 2014 01:56
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Going back to the cancellation thing from a while back, I have to admit to being somewhat worried because the show's been back on the air for 9 years now. For a drama series in the current era, that's a long time. Soap operas and sitcoms can obviously run and run still, but that's a different set of circumstances; static sets, template characters that rookie writers can come in and write for, and so on. You can't compare it to the original run because for much of that there were only two or three channels, and you could put on an episode you'd made for five bob each week because people would watch it anyway. I don't think it's a coincidence that cancellation coincided with the exponential growth of channels and VHS releases. If you look at insanely popular shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Lost, they were all brought to an end when it was felt they'd reached a natural shelf life. Admittedly those are bad examples because Doctor Who has an open-ended narrative that none of them do. But I think if the BBC feels that it has lost creative impetus, they won't hesitate to say 'Hey, it had a great run', because it has. In this respect I feel like the biggest danger to the programme is Moffat either failing to step aside or dial down the number of scripts he writes in the near future; perceived staleness will be what kills the programme, not a loss of popularity. I'm not really clear on how BBC Worldwide's profits fund the Corporation generally, but I seem to remember that it's nowhere near as straightforward as a standard commercial network either. Besides which, Star Trek is surely as big as franchises come globally, and they didn't have any hesitation in canning Enterprise when it wasn't panning out. I guess what I'm saying is that we should all pray that Doctor Who remains good and we'll all be fine.
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Sep 4, 2014 18:31
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