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Last two episodes just repeated on BBC Three (which, icnidentally, no longer has any other decent reason for existing). Things that struck me on a second viewing:
The Satan Pit has one over on every other episode of this series by including music that works tpo the advantage of the storyline, rather than feeling intrusive. Said music also includes a recurring theme which is *far* less annoying than the 'Lonely God' theme that's nearly managed to bugger up every scene it's appeared in to date.
Enormous plot hole (unless I missed the explanation) right slap-bang in the middle, which - as usual - will only bother you if you dwell on it, so you might want to skip the rest of this paragraph if you've not noticed it yet. The Beast, yeah? Finally beaten and caged by a long-dead race. Long-dead race set up a system by which any passing traveller could ensure the Beast's destruction should it show signs of escaping. Begs the question: why the fuck didn't the long-dead race chuck the Beast into the black hole themselves?
Silly fire-from-mouth effect on Toby just as he's ranting and raving in the (no longer) escaping rocket. I don't get why they felt the need to do that.
Tennant's mugging for the camera: this complaint is way unfair, imo. Doesn't matter how decent an actor you are, how understated you want to play it, you're going to end up looking like a performing monkey if you're working with a director who decides to jump to a different camera angle with every single line you deliver. If the director had trusted Tennant to be able to do that scene on his own without interfering with it in this way, nobody would have thought of it as gurning.
Love and Monsters. Much better second time around. As far as I can tell, the negative comments about Kay's performance are coming from a general dislike of the man himself rather than anything he did on screen during this forty-five minutes.
Paving slab girlfriend is still utterly wrong - raises some horrible thoughts about power balances in sexual relationships and stuff like that.
First scene of the episode does the rest a disservice by messing up the joke/drama balance (this wasn't the Keystone Cops moment that made me laugh, btw - that was the Elton/Absorbalof chase) and by containing a particularly poorly-written joke that I'd imagine is unintelligable unless you've heard RTD explaining it on DWConfidential. Certain sections of the script later on in the ep do the regular RTD trick of smacking you about the face with The Point.
I do like it still, though. The performances make it.
Right, other stuff. Somebody upthread (sorry, forget who) mentioned how The Satan Pit did a great job of communicating a sense of age, of a place and a time that was ancient and important, and the comment hit home for me, finally allowed me to nail my big problem with the rest of this series so far. Nothing feels old - none of the other worlds that we've visited have felt lived-in or like they've got their own history. Basically, they may as well have popped into existence the very second that the Tardis appeared on them. That's very un-Who, in my experience and it's a problem that's compounded by the way that Ten has been written. He never seems to think very much. There's not much going on in his head, apart from those moments when the camera's going fucking loopy and showing us his face from a million different angles a second while he goes "Wait! No.. hang on... YES! No.. think about it... OF COURSE! Or maybe not... hmm... OH YES!... no".
I'm not saying I want every episode to be The Satan Pit, but the version of Ten we got there was so far removed from the one we've had elsewhere that they may as well be different reincarnations. I'm hoping that this episode will prove to mark a turning point in the characterisation - it's impossible to tell from the last one, because he gets all of five minutes of screen time.
This is also possibly something to do with the fact that the only period of adjustment that both Rose and Ten needed after the reincarnation happened within the space of a single episode - and a one-off special, at that - before they were running about giddy as schoolgirls again. And how Rose has been a total waste of space for most of the series, up until the point where Ten gives us the "if there's one thing I believe in, I believe in her" line (which did leave me thinking to myself, dude, why?).
But yeah. Age. Or, if not age, then at least the sense that these places they're visiting are persistent worlds that do have their own histories and futures, even if we're not going to hear about them. |
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