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I'm a bit confused why the zeppelins irk you so much, Randy. Why zeppelins? Well, why cat people? Why clockwork robot baddies? Why a blue police box*? Why anything?
The cat people were aliens, though. They need to be aliens - there's a good reason for them, plot-wise. There's not a good reason for them to be cat people as opposed to, say, snot people, but they need to be aliens of some form.
The clockwork robots are completely fitting for the period of the episode that they're in, as well as working within the framework of the story - their ship's named after Madame Pumparump, there's an old oil painting of her hanging up in it, it's reasonable to presume that this is how that culture's technology functions. Most importantly, it's consistent with that episode's internal logic - I totally buy into the idea of beautiful clockwork robots when they're part of a ship that can keep itself functioning by splicing human organs to itself.
It used whatever it could find at the time to stay alive, so its limbs are made out of junk, but it knows about gorgeous, intricate clockwork mechanisms because it holds information about 18th century France within its memory banks and believes that its entire existence relies on somebody from that period, so it makes that junk look stunning. And we're tapping into the whole artifical life thing that was popular at that time - mechanical ducks and mannequins that could play chess.
There's none of that with the zeppelins. They're a visual shortcut that has no link with anything else in this alternate Earth. If they're a symbol of wealth, how come there's not anything in the Tyler mansion that relates to them or reflects their design? There's no way that a rich Jackie would pass up the opportunity to boast about her status through possessions. How come nothing else in the world even hints at being based on the same technology? How is it that all other tools being used in the alternate London are either the same as we've got now, or else based on things we recognise from our own world and time? You don't get a world that continues to use zeppelins as a mode of transport without having that feed back into other aspects of day to day existence, especially not when they're as much of a presence as they were in the skies of the first of these two episodes.
It's careless and thoughtless. That's why it irks me. Noel Whatsits was on DW Confidential last night, banging on about how great the art guys on the show are because they'd included a jokey instructions sticker on the big fire extinguisher guns from the clockwork robots episode. They must have had a totally different art team on these two, because they lacked the kind of internal consitency (set dressing, art direction, whatever) of that one.
Even the Cybermen. Trigger spends all day, every day inside his big hot air balloon, and yet he creates something that has absolutely no visual or technological links with his surroundings. I don't buy it. |
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