Things I watched over the Christmas period
Jan. 5th, 2016 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daibhidcYeah, okay, so it's just all going in one big post. As ever, spoilers ahead. Lets do this.
This was really fun. I loved the feel that this was an episode of River Song that the Doctor happened to be guest-starring in, rather than the reverse. I'm unsure of the characterisation of a Doctorless River as utterly amoral, but I suppose it does explain why she's the one who makes Daleks beg for mercy. And she was, after all, raised to be an assassin.
The sonic trowel was brilliant. I don't know if it's intentional that it works twice, but it does: a) She's an archaeologist, obviously. b) She's the granddaughter of Brian Williams, Also brilliant was the Doctor realising he was going to get to say "It's bigger on the inside", and doing it "properly".
The actual story was mostly a caper movie with a talking McGuffin, and Moffatt managed the difficult balancing act between "This guy is funny and ridiculous" and "But that doesn't stop him being extremely dangerous". The reveal that River's buyers worked for him was neat, especially the way it played off her insistence that she didn't need to know anything about the buyers.
And the final scene was nicely sad. I suppose that's it for corporeal River, although stored-in-the-Library River can certainly reappear, the way she did in "Name of the Doctor". (Speaking of which, that doesn't feel like it follows on from this and River thinks she's just waiting until she runs out of time, does it? Still, worrying about that is like worrying why Twelfth gave her a Tenth-style sonic screwdriver...)
I was expecting this to be pretty good, but probably appealing more to dedicated Star Wars fans like my nephew. But actually I enjoyed it a lot more than that. It may be the first Star Wars film I've seen in a cinema, although I wouldn't swear to it (I have very hazy memories that I may have seen Return of the Jedi, but nothing clear enough that I'm sure I didn't imagine it. I know I didn't pay money for the prequels.)
So, anyway, this was fantastic. There was a moment early on when I was worried it was going into "eternal homage" mode, ("The person who put the holoplans on the astromech droid needs rescued!") but the fact Male Leia's rescue happened before Female Luke found Spherical R2, and he then disappeared from most of the rest of the story convinced me they weren't doing that. In fact, I'd largely stopped thinking of the characters like that by that point. (Except Moody Vader. But then, the whole point of the character is that he's a sad Darth Vader wannabe.) I thought Rey and Finn were great characters, and I hope they get fleshed out more in later installments.
Galactic politics remain completely impenetrable to me, but I deal with that by not worrying about it too much. Who are the First Order, why do they have Stormtroopers, and what if anything is their connection to the collapsed Empire? Doesn't matter, they're the bad guys, that's all I need to know.
The Original Trilogy characters didn't overshadow anything. Han was brilliant as someone who was getting too old for this, and more or less directly passed the torch on to Rey; General Leia was also fantastic, but it's a position that makes her more of a background character; and Luke, of course, appears for approximately three seconds. I wasn't expecting Han to actually get killed, though, although I realised shortly before it happened that he was inadvertently doing a great job in talking Ren into it. And he's not even a Jedi, so no Force Ghost for him!
Criticism? Well, Finn as the Stormtrooper Who Said No made me even more uncertain than usual about the Faceless Mooks approach to Stormtroopers. On the one hand, it drives home that Stormtroopers are actually people and their casual deaths are not the same as say, the combat droids in Phantom Menace (although, having said that, whether Star Wars droids are actually people is another wobbly point). On the other, the case could be made that if Finn could Say No, so could the others and therefore they chose to serve the Order. And, I mean, I'm not criticising that this sort of thing comes up; if anything I'm criticising the fact it doesn't, really.
Five episodes in and this has been very enjoyable. The basic conceit of "What if all of Charles Dickens's characters lived in the same area of London?" is a neat one, and even if I'm not entirely familiar with all these people's stories, I know enough to get the gist, and they're all entertaining characters. Making the main plot a murder mystery is a smart move, it gives us a reason to delve into the characterisation, and of course the victim is Jacob Marley, a character who is a) dead to begin with and b) has plenty of reasons for people to hate him. In fact, Dickensian manages to portray Marley as much worse than Scrooge. (I'm reminded of an interesting article I read last week pointing out that gleefully cruel film Scrooges are wrong; Scrooge is cruel out of (what he considers) necessity, he doesn't enjoy it, or anything else. That's how Ned Dennehy plays him, and it contrasts notably with the downright sadistic Marley.)
The other plots (I hesitate to say "subplots", since it's clear this is running on soap opera structure) are also well done. I particularly like Arthur Havisham as the living embodiment of white male privilege; in the present day he'd have a blog where he called his sister a fake brewer girl. And in his sad entitlement, he seems to have hitched his star to someone a lot more dangerous than he is, but he won't be able to admit that maybe he was wrong about any of this...
(I think I'm right in saying some dates have been fudged here? If we're shortly before Christmas Carol, we surely can't be that far before Great Expectations? Come to think of it, Martha Cratchett isn't married in A Christmas Carol, so unless that's going to go horribly wrong as well...)
Yeah, so speaking of 19th century London...
This was brilliant. I didn't bother keeping track of Canon references, although obviously the story is based on the Untold Case of "Ricolletti of the clubfoot and his abominable wife" from "The Musgrave Ritual", and I recognised the "Come at once if convenient" telegram from "The Adventure of the Creeping Man". (I spent far too long trying to remember where I'd seen the "shadows that define our every sunny day" speech before, because I knew it was familiar, until I remembered it had been in the trailer.)
London was nicely realised (I laughed at "Speedwell's Restaurant and Tea Rooms"), and Martin Freeman did an excellent job playing a more stuffy Victorian figure, who was still recognisably the same person as John. (Cumberbatch, of course, simply continued to play Sherlock Holmes, equally out of place in any century, although I did think I detected an occasional hint of Jeremy Bret.) The references to The Strand were fun; I know a lot of works have run with the single mention in the books of Watson publishing Holmes's cases, but I don't recall any exploring what that would actually be like for the other people involved.
Pretty much as soon as the Bride made her suicide my own impeccable mental skills deduced that the similarity to Jim Moriarty's death was not a coincidence. I had mixed feelings about the reveal; on the one hand I would have been quite happy to see a Victorian Sherlock with no explanation, on the other I admit that after we've been waiting all this time, running a story that has nothing to do with the cliffhanger would have been a bit of a hard sell.
(Actually, you know what I was reminded of? The Murdoch Mysteries webseries The Murdoch Effect. It also featured the main character jumping between the Victorian era and the present day, solving a very similar but distinct case in both of them. Since Murdoch Mysteries is basically an experiment in setting a modern cop show in the 1900s, it could even be argued that The Murdoch Effect also has the conceit of returning the character to the period he originates from.)
But the reveal was the reveal, and led to what I think is the first time it's been directly stated that Sherlock has a drug problem. (It's been suggested very blatantly, mostly by Mycroft, and of course there was the opening scene of "His Last Vow", but mostly they seem to leave that side of things to Elementary.)
And so we get the explanation that Sherlock has been hallucinating himself into the Victorian era, trying to solve a case with similarities to the return of Moriarty, in the hope that this might help him solve the return of Moriarty. One of the things I like about Sherlock is that even when the mystery is clearly the last thing the writers are interested in (cough "The Sign of Three"), they still take the time to do it properly. Really, all Sherlock needs here is "she didn't come back to life, therefore he didn't either", but that wouldn't actually solve the case of the Abominable Bride until he knew what was actually going on, so we get the full explanaton of How and Why.
As to what's actually going on in the Moriarty case, well, I've a feeling the repeated description of Jim as a computer virus must be significant. He's dead, but something he created is still out there with his face.
This was really fun. I loved the feel that this was an episode of River Song that the Doctor happened to be guest-starring in, rather than the reverse. I'm unsure of the characterisation of a Doctorless River as utterly amoral, but I suppose it does explain why she's the one who makes Daleks beg for mercy. And she was, after all, raised to be an assassin.
The sonic trowel was brilliant. I don't know if it's intentional that it works twice, but it does: a) She's an archaeologist, obviously. b) She's the granddaughter of Brian Williams, Also brilliant was the Doctor realising he was going to get to say "It's bigger on the inside", and doing it "properly".
The actual story was mostly a caper movie with a talking McGuffin, and Moffatt managed the difficult balancing act between "This guy is funny and ridiculous" and "But that doesn't stop him being extremely dangerous". The reveal that River's buyers worked for him was neat, especially the way it played off her insistence that she didn't need to know anything about the buyers.
And the final scene was nicely sad. I suppose that's it for corporeal River, although stored-in-the-Library River can certainly reappear, the way she did in "Name of the Doctor". (Speaking of which, that doesn't feel like it follows on from this and River thinks she's just waiting until she runs out of time, does it? Still, worrying about that is like worrying why Twelfth gave her a Tenth-style sonic screwdriver...)
I was expecting this to be pretty good, but probably appealing more to dedicated Star Wars fans like my nephew. But actually I enjoyed it a lot more than that. It may be the first Star Wars film I've seen in a cinema, although I wouldn't swear to it (I have very hazy memories that I may have seen Return of the Jedi, but nothing clear enough that I'm sure I didn't imagine it. I know I didn't pay money for the prequels.)
So, anyway, this was fantastic. There was a moment early on when I was worried it was going into "eternal homage" mode, ("The person who put the holoplans on the astromech droid needs rescued!") but the fact Male Leia's rescue happened before Female Luke found Spherical R2, and he then disappeared from most of the rest of the story convinced me they weren't doing that. In fact, I'd largely stopped thinking of the characters like that by that point. (Except Moody Vader. But then, the whole point of the character is that he's a sad Darth Vader wannabe.) I thought Rey and Finn were great characters, and I hope they get fleshed out more in later installments.
Galactic politics remain completely impenetrable to me, but I deal with that by not worrying about it too much. Who are the First Order, why do they have Stormtroopers, and what if anything is their connection to the collapsed Empire? Doesn't matter, they're the bad guys, that's all I need to know.
The Original Trilogy characters didn't overshadow anything. Han was brilliant as someone who was getting too old for this, and more or less directly passed the torch on to Rey; General Leia was also fantastic, but it's a position that makes her more of a background character; and Luke, of course, appears for approximately three seconds. I wasn't expecting Han to actually get killed, though, although I realised shortly before it happened that he was inadvertently doing a great job in talking Ren into it. And he's not even a Jedi, so no Force Ghost for him!
Criticism? Well, Finn as the Stormtrooper Who Said No made me even more uncertain than usual about the Faceless Mooks approach to Stormtroopers. On the one hand, it drives home that Stormtroopers are actually people and their casual deaths are not the same as say, the combat droids in Phantom Menace (although, having said that, whether Star Wars droids are actually people is another wobbly point). On the other, the case could be made that if Finn could Say No, so could the others and therefore they chose to serve the Order. And, I mean, I'm not criticising that this sort of thing comes up; if anything I'm criticising the fact it doesn't, really.
Five episodes in and this has been very enjoyable. The basic conceit of "What if all of Charles Dickens's characters lived in the same area of London?" is a neat one, and even if I'm not entirely familiar with all these people's stories, I know enough to get the gist, and they're all entertaining characters. Making the main plot a murder mystery is a smart move, it gives us a reason to delve into the characterisation, and of course the victim is Jacob Marley, a character who is a) dead to begin with and b) has plenty of reasons for people to hate him. In fact, Dickensian manages to portray Marley as much worse than Scrooge. (I'm reminded of an interesting article I read last week pointing out that gleefully cruel film Scrooges are wrong; Scrooge is cruel out of (what he considers) necessity, he doesn't enjoy it, or anything else. That's how Ned Dennehy plays him, and it contrasts notably with the downright sadistic Marley.)
The other plots (I hesitate to say "subplots", since it's clear this is running on soap opera structure) are also well done. I particularly like Arthur Havisham as the living embodiment of white male privilege; in the present day he'd have a blog where he called his sister a fake brewer girl. And in his sad entitlement, he seems to have hitched his star to someone a lot more dangerous than he is, but he won't be able to admit that maybe he was wrong about any of this...
(I think I'm right in saying some dates have been fudged here? If we're shortly before Christmas Carol, we surely can't be that far before Great Expectations? Come to think of it, Martha Cratchett isn't married in A Christmas Carol, so unless that's going to go horribly wrong as well...)
Yeah, so speaking of 19th century London...
This was brilliant. I didn't bother keeping track of Canon references, although obviously the story is based on the Untold Case of "Ricolletti of the clubfoot and his abominable wife" from "The Musgrave Ritual", and I recognised the "Come at once if convenient" telegram from "The Adventure of the Creeping Man". (I spent far too long trying to remember where I'd seen the "shadows that define our every sunny day" speech before, because I knew it was familiar, until I remembered it had been in the trailer.)
London was nicely realised (I laughed at "Speedwell's Restaurant and Tea Rooms"), and Martin Freeman did an excellent job playing a more stuffy Victorian figure, who was still recognisably the same person as John. (Cumberbatch, of course, simply continued to play Sherlock Holmes, equally out of place in any century, although I did think I detected an occasional hint of Jeremy Bret.) The references to The Strand were fun; I know a lot of works have run with the single mention in the books of Watson publishing Holmes's cases, but I don't recall any exploring what that would actually be like for the other people involved.
Pretty much as soon as the Bride made her suicide my own impeccable mental skills deduced that the similarity to Jim Moriarty's death was not a coincidence. I had mixed feelings about the reveal; on the one hand I would have been quite happy to see a Victorian Sherlock with no explanation, on the other I admit that after we've been waiting all this time, running a story that has nothing to do with the cliffhanger would have been a bit of a hard sell.
(Actually, you know what I was reminded of? The Murdoch Mysteries webseries The Murdoch Effect. It also featured the main character jumping between the Victorian era and the present day, solving a very similar but distinct case in both of them. Since Murdoch Mysteries is basically an experiment in setting a modern cop show in the 1900s, it could even be argued that The Murdoch Effect also has the conceit of returning the character to the period he originates from.)
But the reveal was the reveal, and led to what I think is the first time it's been directly stated that Sherlock has a drug problem. (It's been suggested very blatantly, mostly by Mycroft, and of course there was the opening scene of "His Last Vow", but mostly they seem to leave that side of things to Elementary.)
And so we get the explanation that Sherlock has been hallucinating himself into the Victorian era, trying to solve a case with similarities to the return of Moriarty, in the hope that this might help him solve the return of Moriarty. One of the things I like about Sherlock is that even when the mystery is clearly the last thing the writers are interested in (cough "The Sign of Three"), they still take the time to do it properly. Really, all Sherlock needs here is "she didn't come back to life, therefore he didn't either", but that wouldn't actually solve the case of the Abominable Bride until he knew what was actually going on, so we get the full explanaton of How and Why.
As to what's actually going on in the Moriarty case, well, I've a feeling the repeated description of Jim as a computer virus must be significant. He's dead, but something he created is still out there with his face.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-07 05:07 am (UTC)When virtual River left at the end of Name of the Doctor was the only time she ever said, "Goodbye, sweetie," so I don't believe she'll ever reappear from later on her timeline than that, at least not from Moffat's pen. I was surprised to see her now, but of course it was just Forrester inevitably coming back around to Hornblower's Trafalgar after all because you can't not. But you're right, River in Silence of the Dead speaks and behaves as if she hasn't any idea that the Singing Towers were going to be their penultimate meet, which meshes poorly with Husbands where River has had it spoiled for her.
As for the screwdriver gift, you can tell from the finger guard that it's one he never used himself because the only other place/time that model has appeared is when River brings it out in the Library. I'm not sure why you characterize it as Doctor Ten's, or one of his.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-07 12:02 pm (UTC)River's sonic screwdriver is clearly unique, with its brass highlights and extra bits, but beneath these enhancements it's basically a Tenth style sonic. Textured cream body, cylindrical metal thing with holes in behind the emitter, black thing on the other end.
The Doylist explanation is of course that this was the only sonic they had at the time. Watsonian explanations I've come up with (yes, after saying it's something one shouldn't worry about) include that he actually created it shortly after "Silence" and was waiting for the right time, or that the TARDIS screwdriver-creation module intentionally went retro so Tenth would recognise it instantly.
no subject
Date: 2016-01-07 12:23 pm (UTC)