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I'm so glad this is the only active thread on this board now, because the lack of a quote button sticks out like a sore thumb when you regularly spend your online time elsewhere.
I think you've got a tendancy to get caught on the little bits of annoyance and let them spoil your good times.
That's fair comment - it's something others have picked up on before and it's something I'm painfully aware of. I think when I go into something that I'm hoping / have been led to believe is going to be excellent, I can't just switch off and get sucked into it. There's also an element, though, of stupid things sticking out like sore thumbs when they're surrounded by lots of amazing things, and that's very much been the case with this season.
Ultimately, I think Smith's acting - and Gillen's, to a lesser extent (still significantly better than series 2 & 3 Piper, and Agyeman, mind) - and Moffat's ideas and scripts deserved better than the direction, budget and music that made them into a television show. And the scripts by certain other writers. Amy's Choice was pretty poor, all told, and I've gone from cautiously looking forwards to a new Gatiss episode to dreading the thought of another one.
It's also depressing, if inevitable, that a lot of the legacy elements of RTD's time as script editor remains in place.
Cybus Cybermen are and always were rubbish - it's to be hoped that the old-school fist pump performed by the one at the end of The Pandorica Opens is an indication that we're returning to the loopy megalomaniacs of the old show, although the fact that he kept the "delete" catchphrase suggests otherwise. Just make them say "excellent" again and I'll be able to live with the idea.
The constant use of present day Earth as the location for stories and plots that are primarily about the Doctor or his companions, rather than the Doctor and his companions flitting around the universe solving *other* people's troubles, really *are* just a lazy way to present with a sci fi/fantasy show. Moffat's ideas have been great, on the whole, but he's set a standard that the other writers blatnatly failed to live up to.
Ah. This wasn't going to be another rant. I just think it needs either new people beyond the cast and script editor - new directors, a new composer, new writers - or Moffat needs to take a tighter hold on the parts of the show that he's probably been slightly hands-off with. He at least needs to give the other existing writers more direction than just the basic idea of, say, "Daleks in WWII" or whatever, because they simply don't appear to be able to pack as much into an episode as he can.
Back to the last episode, I think I came away from it slightly less blown away than I had been while watching because the final scene struck a bum note, played out like none of the events prior to it had taken place. There were other bits when the pace was lost, too - when the Doctor sends his final 'geronimo', the excitement and sadness of the moment leaked away by having the camera look at Amy looking towards the sky, apparently emotionless, when we should have cut straight back to the Doctor in the Pandorica.
See? Little things. I don't think they ruined it for me - I've just come back from watching the second half of the series with somebody who'd recorded them and not got around to seeing them until today, and I had a blast - but I can't watch New Who and think of it as more than an unusually decent BBC TV show.
Whereas with something like, say, Deadwood, or Mad Men, I'm completely subsumed by the events on the screen, to the extent that there's effectively no screen between me and those events. It's like the difference between a good book - entertaining, but easy to get distracted by other things while reading - and a great book, where the words on the page disappear, bypass your eyes and paint their pictures directly on your brain.
That's what I want Who to do. British television hasn't been able to do that for fucking years, so I don't think it's too much to ask of it now. Especially when it comes close, but falls due to the traditional ineptitude or amateurishness of a few involved parties. |
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