Vincent and the Doctor

[vilakins]

I've been commenting, but I should actually post as well. I think this one's my favourite so far.

This was a beautiful and strong story about the nature of art, time, and mental illness, and Curran's performance as Vincent was stunning. I loved the bedroom. I want it. At uni I had that picture on my own bedroom wall (plus another of a bridge) and a chair very like his which I called my van Gogh chair. Looking at them made me very happy back then, and this episode did too. They did a lovely job on the cafe too.

However I think the story was flawed by the monster which felt tacked on as if it was the token science fiction bit whereas time travel is SF enough. I think the story would have been even better had the monster been something van Gogh painted to represent the villagers' hostility or his loneliness, and then painted out after he met Amy and the Doctor and found how much his art was appreciated and loved after his death. Its presence weakened a beautiful and strong story that didn't need it.

The monster was inconsistent anyway: at first described as being from a brutal race, then seen as a pitiful blind frightened creature. And I wasn't impressed that it killed a young woman; far too many victims are young women.

I'm not sure how the Doctor could see it in his mirror (though I liked the steampunk look of his device) but I assume van Gogh could see it due to synaesthesia he showed when he talked about hearing the colours. And the colours were wonderful. This is one I'm definitively watching again.

Van Gogh painted lots of sunflowers BTW, and most before he met Amy. :-) But I can forgive that because it was such a lovely scene. The "greatest artist who ever lived" stuff was OTT too (and wrong) but hey, I like his work.

Comments

[corvuscornix.livejournal.com]

Completely unnecessary alien stomping all over the plot apart, it was indeed a very beautiful episode. It made me a little teary-eyed, more than once. (Beauty does that to me, far more easily than tragedy.) And to me, those lines about the Good and Bad things in life were, in all their simplicity, probably among the most poignant things that the Doctor's ever said.

Funny, somehow I've never thought about synaesthesia in relation to art before, though it seems an obvious connection to make now. Maybe a lot of the art out there is in fact far more "realistic" (well, to the artist, anyway) than we think... :-)

"The greatest artist who ever lived" seems an impossible concept anyway. How would one even define that, and how decide, with so many different styles and moods and subjects?

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

A lot of people I know have been moved by the episode and the depiction of van Gogh's illness. I think it was extremely well done.

It could be! I love the colours he used and I could imagine them shouting at him.

I could accept that as being the the art expert's opinion, but not the Doctor's as he has so much history and alien art to choose from. Hell, he probably knows artists who play with nebulae and solar winds. Certainly there's no objective answer to that one. (And I can't even pick a favourite book or film.)