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The Next Doctor
I just watched the Christmas Special--and it really felt like one. :-D
I did enjoy that. It felt much more Christmassy than most specials, especially the rather nasty one last year with its predictably doomed ship and companion, many deaths, and offensive fat jokes which will prevent me ever watching it again. This one was fun: steampunk Doctor Who! So good it made up for it being Cybermen again.
Actually I think David Morrissey would have made a good Doctor, but I did guess who he was a bit before the Doctor did. I liked Jackson Lake and Rosita very much, and Dervla Kirwan (Dervla Kirwan, yay!) made a wonderful villain as Miss Hartigan. Someone said that Kirwan would play Servalan well, and she certainly could.
And what were those black hairy Cyberthings? I first thought they were dogs, then children, but they wouldn't have the strength to pull both men up the side of a building. I know! Were-Cybers!
Oh and the sonic screwdriver: hee! And extra points for hot-air balloons along with the steampunk. :-D
I thought Lake's son had been partially cybered at first when I saw him standing up there with staring eyes and spiky black (mascara'd?) lashes, but no: he seemed to be an ordinary child, if creepily silent. But then Victorians expected their children to be.
I loved the story, the Dickensian look, the steampunk, the Cyber King robotic ship, Miss Hartigan taking her revenge on all those stuffed-shirt Victorian men, and Jackson Lake being brave and tragic at once, but there were three things that concerned me:
- If Miss Hartigan's mind was so brilliant and powerful, why was she reduced to being a screaming cliché when the connection between her mind and the Cybermen was severed? I can imagine her seeing what she had done and being appalled, then destroying the Cybermen herself, but just sitting there screaming with mindless horror?
- Surely the Doctor's been thanked before. It was a nice moment seeing him hear the applause and cheers though.
- So the brave and resourceful Rosita is just going to be a nursemaid now? Feh. I know that Jackson Lake would have been sexist and racist because his society was, but he had a lot of the Doctor's memories, and he'd seen Rosita's courage and strength. Why didn't the Doctor say something? :-( I hope Rosita turns that little offer down and does something more interesting. I know it would be very hard to do in those days, but she's capable of so much more.
That said, this is still the most fun Christmas special so far, with "The Runaway Bride" coming in second. :-)
And yeah, Dervla Kirwan for Servalan!
And now I'm off to bed.
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Totally agree with Dervla Kirwan for Servalan. I loved her, but I didn't like the way her character was dealt with...had a bit of a grumble about RTD's portrayal of women in my journal, lol. Intellectually brilliant women seem to equal evil in RTD's universe. 'Good' female characters are plucky, adventurous, and canny, but never cerebral, it seems, unless I'm having memory failure. New Who is full of she-Jamies, but precious few Romanas! They missed some potential there with Martha. If she was brainy, as all the advertising seemed to be implying, it was much underused :/
Maybe I was watching through Rosita-tinted spectacles, but I did hope that 'nursemaid' was basically a euphemism for 'Jackson's new wife', which she presumably couldn't be officially...nursemaid as far as society was concerned, but maybe they had a secret marriage and went off for adventures together in a hot air balloon :) I hope so!
Loved the steampunkiness of it!
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I shall have to read what you had to say, but you're right about RTD (and many other writers). He does like his woman to serve too, be trusty sidekicks rather than take leadership roles. I did love Donna so though and an still angry about what he did to her.
Actually there's a pervasive fear of intelligent people, and they're often portrayed as geeks, absent-minded comic relief, or evil geniuses. Brilliant woman only get to be the latter, it seems, and they're almost always feminised by the end. I remember being disgusted as a kid when I watched some comedy program that had a tough Russian woman general (would that they really had them) who ended up learning how much more fun it was to dress up and wear make-up. [headdesk] I like make-up, but wearing it doesn't change who I am, damn it. She went all fluffy and silly.
I like that idea, that they decided to explore Africa or South America (so many things still to do back then) in their hot-air TARDIS. I know he probably couldn't marry her, but I wish they'd just left that line out and the story more open.
Steampunk is always good. :-D
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