The Probulator

What I suspected has now been offically released by the BBC.  David Tennant is leaving Doctor Who at the end of the 2009 Specials.  I’m guessing that this news is the reason that the Doctor Who Forum is experiencing major difficulties in delivering its content.   I thought David made an excellent Doctor.  His incredible level of energy and sense of fun made the show more entertaining than at time in its long history.  His three years with the show allowed him to develop and evolve the 10th Doctor’s personality.  Christopher Eccleston’s 9th Doctor didn’t quite get that chance.  (Yes, I know it was Eccleston’s choice to leave the role.)  Although, too much of the whole “immortal with eternal survivor’s guilt” thing would probably have gotten old very quickly. I find it interesting that the “serious” 9th Doctor had less serious stories than the “fun” 10th Doctor.  Russell T. Davies may not be the greatest of writers, but I think this shows an understated genius in his running the show.

I imagine the news will disappoint a good number of fans who expected their favorite Doctor to have a run of Tom Baker endurance.  While I certainly enjoyed Tennant’s run immensely, I find myself welcoming this news. Ever since William Hartnell was forced out bowed out of the role, it’s been designed to be handed down from actor to actor, allowing the show to evolve in a way that no other show can.  When the original series was canceled in 1989, Sylvester McCoy was determined to hand the role over to his successor at some point.  He had that opportunity to do so in the 1996 TV movie.  Yes, the movie was sub-par, but at least he was able to do so.  Now we’ll get to see it passed on again right at the time a new team takes over the production.  I think we’ll see a fresh start and some great originality.  (Hopefully part of that includes giving the Daleks a rest.  They need to bow out for a few years at least.)  A new Doctor is always a fun ride.  My only hope is Stephen Moffett allows the show to keep its gay sensibility.

I will stay out of any speculation on who should/will inherit the role.  It’s a British Institution and I’m not British.  There will be plenty of others posting their ideas all over the internet until the successor is announced.  Until then, there will be five more specials for us to appeciate Doctor Number 10.

Tags: British, Doctor Who, Drama, Entertainment, Science Fiction, Television, gay by Dean
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Actually there are two.  THE Doctor meets Dr. Elizabeth Corday Greene, widow of Dr. Mark Greene, who’s previous experience with action was watching the emergency room at County General get shot up every other week.  The weeks it wasn’t getting shot up, the doctors were either screwing each other (metaphorically and literally), improperly diagnosing most of their patients, or getting kidnapped.  Of course, this isn’t actually the good Dr. Corday.  Rather, the lovely Alex Kingston portrays Professor River Song, an archeologist.  Not only does Professor Song lack the ten foot pole up her ass that plagues Dr. Daniel Goodman of Bones first season, but she appears more confident and is obviously enjoying herself at least a thousand times more than as Dr. Corday.  Kudos to you Ms. Kingston.  You go girl!

When viewed as a whole, this is a rather trippy and somewhat sinister episode.  After all, this silent library seems to exist in the mind of a young girl.  Not just any young girl, but one undergoing therapy.  On top of all that her creepy therapist tells her that the nightmares are real and the real world is just a dream.  Assuming team Davies/Moffett don’t come up with something lame in part two, this could be interesting.  Did The Doctor land inside someone’s head, kind of like his landing inside an electronic device wasy back when during the Perwee adventure “Carnival of Monsters”?  Is the little girl actually a sentient security camera?  Why am I so sure the explanation will be much lamer than this?

There’s even an attempt at explaining everyone’s fear of the dark.  And it’s that apparently microscopic pirannah like things inhabit the shadows ready to strip the flesh off your bones in a microsecond.  A functional plot device, even if it poorly rips off the premise of the Jeffrey Combs tour de force “From Beyond”.  It does keep everyone on their toes, although the animated corpse repeating the same phrase over and over again (”Hey, who turned out the lights?”) is an obvious recycling of the “Are you my mummy?” child from the first season’s “The Empty Child”.  It does give David Tennant his usual chance to display his enormous… energy supply.

Many of the two parters have a great first episode and a fairly big letdown in the conclusion.  I’m hoping this doesn’t happen here.  

Tags: British, Doctor Who, Entertainment, Science Fiction, Television by Dean
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So, The Doctor met his daughter.  It’s really just a cheat.  Everyone was expecting some insight into The Doctor’s family. Except for a few glib references, the only evidence of family was Susan, the even more mysterious granddaughter.  The companion exists as a proxy for the audience to ask all those questions we’d otherwise be shouting at the screen.  Susan was made The Doctor’s granddaughter to alleviate any implications that the somewhat elderly William Hartnell was a dirty old man traveling the universe with a fifteen year old bit of crumpet.  As it turns out, daughter Jenny is not Susan’s mother.

Enough about that.  How was the episode?  To be honest, it was average.  The second half brought back memories of “The Invasion of Time” with the group running through endless corridors and even running into the previously kidnapped companion.  The alien antagonists, the Hath, are one dimensional, mostly unexplained and not overly imaginative.  I wonder if the human colonists are referred to as the Hath-Not.  Even the colonists aren’t fleshed out except for the leader played fairly well by the uniquely voiced Nigel Terry.  The accent was triggering a feeling of deja-vu.  Then I realized, this is a much older King Arthur from the excellent “Excalibur“.  While effectively acted, the character is the typical selfish bastard, jerk that colonists from about 1,000 years in the future in the Doctor Who universe are.  There’s even a sly reference to "The Keeper of Traken" with the plot device of The Source. 

Now Georgia Moffett, who really is The Doctor’s Daughter, puts on a spectacular performance and she’s obviously loving it.  While the bright spot of this episode, she reveals the casting error done in the first two series by giving the role of Rose to the dreary Billie Piper instead of this dynamo.  We could have been spared twenty-seven episodes of Tammy Faye makeup and inaudible diction.   She worked incredibly well with David Tennant even with an overwrought death scene in the mix.  Fortunately, it turns out, she has enough in common that she doesn’t really die.  (Why she managed to revive herself instead of regenerating into someone else will hopefully be explained in a future episode.) She really does need to be seen again as Jenny.

Speaking of companions, Freema Agyeman returns for the third of five episodes this series as Martha Jones. While I absolutely love Martha, Freema seems to have lost some of her enthusiasm for playing her.  Fortunately she gets kidnapped early on and we only she her half assed, phoning it in intermittently.  This leads us to the current companion, Donna Noble, played with a certain panache by comedian Catherine Tate. When Donna first showed up in The Runaway Bride, she was brash, grating and all around annoying.  I don’t believe I was the only one who was not thrilled at the news of her becoming a regular.   The producers gained the wisdom to tone this down and give her a Jiminy Cricket role to someone who is so old, damaged and jaded he can’t really see the little things anymore.  For someone who can point a gun at someone’s head and state “I would never,” The Doctor’s reactions to devastation he is directly responsible for can be disturbingly nonchalant. During their first meeting, Donna told him he needs someone to stop him.  Donna has been fulfilling that role spectacularly.  I am really enjoing a companion who isn’t mushy for the Doc and can act with some objectivity.

One last thing about the good ol’ Doc himself: The survivor’s guilt that plauged the Christopher Eccleston version of the character seems to be returning. He enters, with far too much enthusiasm, every situation that can lead to his demise.  Any mention of a topic that can remind him of his past seems to send him into a combination of anger and depression.  Has spending so much time around humans made him too much like us? Or has Tennant, while certainly brilliant in the role, lost the ability to cast the alien aura the Eccleston was able to so easily project?  Or maybe the writers are at fault…

Tags: British, Doctor Who, Science Fiction, Television by Dean
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A happy birthday to John Barrowman.  The campy, yet talented and too cute for his own good star of Torchwood and Doctor Who and too many other things to name, turns 41 today!

Tags: British, Doctor Who, Science Fiction, Television, Torchwood by Dean
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