Posts tagged ‘Doctor Who’

The title for this entry should be read in a Strong Bad kind of voice.

So, City of Angels is finally over. I shall miss it a lot. It’s been absolutely fantastic, and I can only imagine that the number of white suits I get to wear in future will dive dramatically.

It also fuelled my new interest in noir, alongside modern re-interpretations like Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and Veronica Mars. Here’s hoping Doctor Who (April 15, by the way) does a noir episode some day.

You should see a lot more content here soon — now that I can’t avoid my lack of job-finding through musicals, Grapefruit will have to take the brunt of it.

A few random points of TV interest:

• I’ve watched the first two episodes of Battlestar Galactica season one, and they’re awesome. I doubt all the episodes will be this tense — I don’t think I’ve been closer to the edge of my seat since the first season of 24. I’m particularly looking forward to getting to the final five episodes of the season, because there are downloadable commentaries from SciFi.com.
• Speaking of which, there was a downloadable commentary for ‘The Christmas Invasion’ as well, where Russell T. Davies revealed that Doctor Who‘s second season will show us the establishment of ‘Torchwood’. Hopefully, it’ll be an historical episode, just because that would be much cooler. How much cooler would it have been if The X-Files had been set in 1897?
• And while I’m on The X-Files — I’m on a segue-roll here — I’m halfway through season two, and I’ve just seen the two-parter that introduced the shapeshifting alien bounty hunter. Which reminded me just how awesome we all thought face-morphing was in the nineties. We’ve come a long way.

Meanwhile, I’ve spent today wrestling with Word. In a 53 page document, I changed one group of bullets to roman numerals, and went on to find that every other set of bullets in the document had suffered a similar fate, and had to change them all back. Even the ones that were supposed to be roman numerals refused to reset their numbering for different lists, greying out the option to do so. This is tremendously uninteresting, I know, but I’m writing it down as therapy. Just ignore me.

So, we let someone turn our power off today, in order to upgrade something. I’m not sure of the details, they’re not important. What amused me was just how stranded I was without power. But my brain kept trying to make the oddest compromises with my situation.

When there’s no power…

• You can’t use your computer, not even just for offline stuff.
• You can’t cook hot food — not even toasted cheese sandwiches.
• You can’t play Xbox. Not even the free, crappy version of Top Spin you got with it.
• You can’t watch DVDs. No, not even if you don’t want to see any of the special features.
• You can’t make a coffee. Not even instant coffee.
• You can’t vaccuum. Every cloud has a silver lining.

In other news, the rating sticker on my Doctor Who Box Set did come off, but the first disc is damaged and I think I need to take it back. Which is a pain. I think I’m also going to have to spend $120 to get both the Neverwinter Nights expansions for the Mac. I could hack it and spend $40 on the PC versions but I’m uncomfortable with hacks.

This post was initially to only include my mini-review of Doctor Who‘s mini-episode. But then I thought, let’s give this some mass appeal. This teeny episode has made me even more anxious to get new Who, but let us also mention the need for more Stargate SG-1.

When we reached the mid-season hiatus that we’re currently inhabiting, Stargate was ticking along nicely. Which was a shame, because there were a few hints that it could have reached ‘awesome’ level earlier. These were dashed mostly by the departure of Vala Mal Doran, as played by Claudia Black. Well, there’s good news. In Stargate‘s (American) record-breaking tenth season, Vala’s back!

Oh alright, so we all assumed she would be anyhow. But it’s nice to get confirmation.

Now, onto Who — which you can watch for free online in crummy quality. Three and a half minutes doesn’t make for a very satisfying story. It’s basically just a TARDIS scene immediately after ‘The Parting of the Ways’. But as it’s our first sustained look at David Tennant as Doctor Who, it’s pretty interesting nonetheless. I should point out straight away that Billie Piper is still fantastic, and still manages to ground the craziness of any scene she’s in, and is still cute.

The Doctor’s regeneration goes wonky, naturally, but there’s a minute or two of lucidity where he can reassure Rose that it’s actually him. In my favourite moment, Rose accuses him of being a Slitheen, or some other impersonating monster, and he replies “I am not a Slitheen” with a curious sincere blend of sarcasm. I don’t know how he did it.

The manic bits are amusing, but I much preferred his quiet moments. I especially liked it when he reminded Rose and the audience of the first time he met her, complete with the eerie ‘Bad Wolf’ theme playing in the background. Some have disliked the bit where he tries to get Rose to laugh by reminding her of the time they had to “hop for their lives”. These people have obviously never tried to make a joke and watched it die horribly in front of them. Tennant does it perfectly.

So I’m pretty confident about this new Doctor. I’m sure he’ll be just as good as Eccleston, but I’m hoping they find a way to make him markedly different (in personality or methodology, not in fashion sense). I’d say more but it’s ridiculous to write more than a paragraph per minute. I wouldn’t want to follow this rule in a full episode review. Although it would be a good way to review 24.

It’s that time of year again, where I succumb to temptation and start putting up promotional Doctor Who images. Actually, this should be the only one.

What do you think? Some people hate it. Some people love it. As usual on the net. Personally I think it looks pretty cool but it’ll need to be filmed right. I like how they’ve made it a very 60s style robot and haven’t gone all borg-ish on us.

The press release is on the Doctor Who site

Well, knock me over with a feather. I wasn’t expecting this.

An M-rated spin-off from Doctor Who set in the modern day, starring John Barrowman as Captain Jack. A kind of sci-fi crime show soap thing. Written by Russell T. Davies.

That comes to 27 episodes of Who-ish television per year. I just hope Davies doesn’t do too much writing on Torchwood. I don’t want him burning himself out too soon. When the Doctor starts sending people “straight to hell”, or twenty useless brats join the TARDIS crew, we’ll have our clue.

But, wow.