Doctor Who 2x10
Jun. 18th, 2006 11:56 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alixtiiI liked the way Billie's hair was done for this episode.
OMGSquee! for Ursula Blake. And IMDb tells me that Shirley Henderson plays Moaning Myrtle, which is just. And also that she played Gail in Trainspotting. Can anyone tell me who that is--I don't really have the characters from that movie matched up in my head with their names.
Anyway, Ursula for the win. Now how can I come up with an excuse for Ursula/Nancy/Reinette as a cross-temporal threesome?
There's a lot of people on my flist comparing this ep to Buffy's "Storyteller." Now the latter episode is one of my favorites, so it's no fault of this episode that in my opinion it fell short of the greatness of BtVS 7x16. I mean, Jane Espenson wasn't writing it.
I think one of the reasons "Storyteller" worked better for me was that Andrew's narration was embedded within the "reality" of the show, where in this ep it was vice versa. Whereas on Buffy we always knew where reality ended and Andrew's fantasies began, here I was never sure how much I could trust. Obviously the scene in the beginning with the doors couldn't have literally happened, but all the other flashbacks seem to have been presenting themselves to us as reliable, so I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what "really" happened from the perspective of the Doctor and Rose.
Plus Andrew, who had just enough knowledge to be funny, is a more interesting character than Elton. And Andrew's perspective was useful as a perspective on the Scoobies and Slayerettes, while Elton's perspective mostly just gave us information about new characters most of whom I didn't even care about. The exception being obviously Ursula--if they wanted to devote an entire episode to her, I would have been down with that. And I wish almost that they had, because I like the idea of an episode where Rose and the Doctor are almost entirely absent. But they have to provide us with characters about whom we care, and Elton just didn't accomplish that for me like Ursula could have. (I admit at the forefront that the difference in gender may be biasing me.) Perhaps best would have been to go with a semi-recurring character in whom we were already somewhat invested--Jackie, Capt. Jack, that Adam guy, or (best of all) Harriet Jones. Of course than we wouldn't have gotten the interesting insights on how people who've never really seen the Doctor see him (so to speak).
But the only really interesting thing about Elton was his crush on Ursula (and can I say again OMGSquee?), and that wasn't enough to carry the episode for me. Especially since Elton didn't make a good point of insertion for me (he orders her around WTF?) and the episode didn't really support a reading of their relationship as a Great Romance so much as "Geek Love is Funny."
I'm also wondering about how exactly a relationship with a brick would work. I imagine it wouldn't be pretty, especially when the (mobile) guy has already shown himself to be domineering, but Ursula Blake has to be pretty awesome even as a brick.
Because, I mean, she's Ursula Blake.
OMGSquee!
OMGSquee! for Ursula Blake. And IMDb tells me that Shirley Henderson plays Moaning Myrtle, which is just. And also that she played Gail in Trainspotting. Can anyone tell me who that is--I don't really have the characters from that movie matched up in my head with their names.
Anyway, Ursula for the win. Now how can I come up with an excuse for Ursula/Nancy/Reinette as a cross-temporal threesome?
There's a lot of people on my flist comparing this ep to Buffy's "Storyteller." Now the latter episode is one of my favorites, so it's no fault of this episode that in my opinion it fell short of the greatness of BtVS 7x16. I mean, Jane Espenson wasn't writing it.
I think one of the reasons "Storyteller" worked better for me was that Andrew's narration was embedded within the "reality" of the show, where in this ep it was vice versa. Whereas on Buffy we always knew where reality ended and Andrew's fantasies began, here I was never sure how much I could trust. Obviously the scene in the beginning with the doors couldn't have literally happened, but all the other flashbacks seem to have been presenting themselves to us as reliable, so I'm scratching my head trying to figure out what "really" happened from the perspective of the Doctor and Rose.
Plus Andrew, who had just enough knowledge to be funny, is a more interesting character than Elton. And Andrew's perspective was useful as a perspective on the Scoobies and Slayerettes, while Elton's perspective mostly just gave us information about new characters most of whom I didn't even care about. The exception being obviously Ursula--if they wanted to devote an entire episode to her, I would have been down with that. And I wish almost that they had, because I like the idea of an episode where Rose and the Doctor are almost entirely absent. But they have to provide us with characters about whom we care, and Elton just didn't accomplish that for me like Ursula could have. (I admit at the forefront that the difference in gender may be biasing me.) Perhaps best would have been to go with a semi-recurring character in whom we were already somewhat invested--Jackie, Capt. Jack, that Adam guy, or (best of all) Harriet Jones. Of course than we wouldn't have gotten the interesting insights on how people who've never really seen the Doctor see him (so to speak).
But the only really interesting thing about Elton was his crush on Ursula (and can I say again OMGSquee?), and that wasn't enough to carry the episode for me. Especially since Elton didn't make a good point of insertion for me (he orders her around WTF?) and the episode didn't really support a reading of their relationship as a Great Romance so much as "Geek Love is Funny."
I'm also wondering about how exactly a relationship with a brick would work. I imagine it wouldn't be pretty, especially when the (mobile) guy has already shown himself to be domineering, but Ursula Blake has to be pretty awesome even as a brick.
Because, I mean, she's Ursula Blake.
OMGSquee!