Sarah Jane Adventures - The Lost Boy (part 1)

Gah. The "Sarah Jane Adventures" are a strange mix. Ok, so it's even more obviously a kiddie show than the current Doctor Who, which is good and bad. At least they don't have the lame juvenile sexual innuendo of RTD's DW, but then they have to do the idiot kid show things (skateboards! "Girls?!"!!! Family Issues!!! Silly All-knowing Computer!)...but that's ok.

Just PLEASE stop with the damn Slitheen! I don't like the Slitheen. They're not as clever as you think they are. They don't look as good as you think they look. Yeah, yeah, an evil alien clan that specializes in hiding inside human suits. Keep them inside...they'd look scarier. At least they stopped with the fart jokes this time.

I really liked the first part of this episode. It's very daring in some ways that nuWho didn't manage to be. It hit Sarah Jane in two (three?) vulnerable spots, which we were lulled into thinking were "safe" by genre convention. First they finally let Maria's dad in on the Cool Secret Stuff. Threatened to take Maria away. So we're set up when they actually DO take Luke away. I was thinking at the time "I hope this isn't a trick by some alien to kidnap Luke"...

...and it was, and about that time the story started going downhill. Even worse with the "Oh, it's the Slitheen again" reveal...bratty Slitheen kid is ok (as a human. Just looked silly in the alien costume)...stupid Slitheen...

But then they hit Sarah Jane at the other "assumed safe" bit: Mr. Smith is in on the plot! That's like the TARDIS turning evil (which they haven't done in nuWho yet). Wow.

...so I suppose we'll hit a reset at the end... but I hope not. Get Luke back, but Maria's dad still knows what he knows. And maybe lose Mr. Smith. Stupid looking alien computer anyway...find out where it came from (I'd been assuming the Doctor had something to do with it), dump it. Get K-9 back (ok, not likely...I just like the silly tin dog a lot better than Mr. Smith.)

Doctor Who - Children in Need 2007

Just watched the 2007 Doctor Who mini-episode ("Time Crash") for "Children in Need". Doctor #5! Peter Davison! Possibly my favorite! Yay! Written by Stephen Moffat. Yay!

David Tennant!... Ugh. WHY did they have to make him such a ridiculous fanboy? At least Doc 5 calls him on it. It was still excruciatingly painful to watch. Maybe I won't mind as much next time. It was a bit like School Reunion (where he meets Sarah Jane Smith again) except a hundred times worse. It's a "real" ("canonical") episode, so please please please don't DO that. "The Curse of Fatal Death" was much better (and funnier) and it wasn't even a canonical episode.

Peter Davison is awesome, of course. Normally I like David Tennant as the Doctor (when he's not being over hyper or playing Tinkerbell) but this...ow. I know it's only seven minutes long, but if they used the seven minutes for an actual story (instead of Ten playing fanboy) it might have been good.

Doctor Who: Human Nature/Family of Blood

Eh. Very well executed (in parts), but still irritating. Creepy scarecrows, forsooth. We've had the robots, the cyborgs, the pepperpots, the clowns, the tentacled faces, the animated shop dummies, etc. So why not scarecrows? At least they can do a better job of scaring humans than scaring crows. And there's a psychic boy, and an evil little girl. There's always an evil child, isn't there?

Not a very original plot (see also Harlan Ellison's Outer Limits story "Demon with a Glass Hand" Peter S. Beagle's "The Last Unicorn", Diana Wynne Jones's "Dogsbody", to name three off the top of my head) but still entertaining, and we haven't seen it done onscreen with the Doctor before. This was written by Paul Cornell based on his New Adventure "Human Nature", adapted for the tenth Doctor and Martha. Probably an improvement (for one thing, David Tennant pulls it off much better than Sylvester McCoy would have.) There were lots of great scenes in this two-parter. It benefited tremendously from having the luxury of time for some character development.

But it's still a cliche. (And full of plot holes.)

"Every single time! I tell them, 'Don't fall in love with a human.' Rule one. Don't fall in love with a human!"

Real humans go to ridiculous lengths to find the right person to fall in love with, but every time these transformed folks find True Love. It just falls on them. Even if the immortal turns into a freaking DOG ("Dogsbody" by Diana Wynne Jones) they STILL fall in love.

The plot goes the same way every single time. Every single time! The temporary mortal has to turn back into a supernatural being in order to save lives (which wouldn't have been in danger if the supernatural being hadn't gone there in the first place). Someone who knew the person both as an immortal and as a mortal observes and shakes head in exasperation and knowing. Someone is sad. The immortal can't or won't turn back into a mortal once the crisis is past. Whee.

And he did it to be kind?! Since when was Mr. "No Second Chances" Doctor that nice? Well, I suppose the scene where he says "Don't come after me. Consider yourself warned." is just implied.

The Doctor should just admit to his human fetish already. He wanted to be a human, and this was just a convenient excuse. The ending shows he could easily handled things without going to so much trouble to turn into a human.

I miss the old days when the Doctor was an alien wanderer, not a god. But I suppose once they slap the "Last of " label on someone, the mythical factor goes up.

But I like David Tennant's Doctor a lot more this season. Maybe it's that his performance has improved, or just that the Rose character is gone. Lovely portrayal of a human "John Smith". And this Doctor seems to have a talent for acting (unlike, say, the seventh Doctor).

Doctor Who, deja vu (spoilers)

I wasn't going to watch it yet, but I succumbed to tempation. So now I've seen the first five episodes of season three, and... it's the first season (of "new" Who) all over again.

"Smith and Jones": here we go with a new companion, Martha. So far she doesn't seem as heartless as Rose, but she's fallen into the making goo-goo eyes at the Doctor thing all too soon. Look, the Sontarans have gone in for a bit of cosmetic makeover and hired out as galactic police thugs! Oh, they're "Judoon". Riiiight. Not that bad, overall. I enjoyed it while I was watching it.

"Shakespeare Code": and here's our trip of a few hundred years back into British history, meeting with a literary genius while foiling the attempt of some quasi-magical aliens to break into our world. Yay. I actually liked this much better than "Unquiet Dead". This Shakespeare was more fun than that Dickens (despite a few lame jokes...some were amusing.)

"Gridlock": and here's our trip to the far future. Where once again, I'm reminded that Russell T. Davies has a sadly limited imagination. I don't think he can truly grasp just how long ten thousand years is, let alone five BILLION years. Only about 15 New New Yorks in that time? That's an average of one only every 67 million years. Please. RTD, do you even know how long ONE million years is? And we get the cat-headed people from the second season "future" episode again. And look, it's the Face of Boe again! Come on, if you have some big secret, why wait until you're on your dying breath to spill it? What was the big deal that he couldn't tell the Doctor before? It makes it look dumber, not more dramatic. But I did like it better than "New Earth" from the second season. First of all, Rose wasn't in it, so it wasn't so insufferably smug. Second, there weren't stupid disease zombies running around. Saving the last human/catfolk population of the planet by having them drive around in circles for years was an interesting concept (ultimately full of holes, but not as badly as the concepts behind "New Earth".)

"Daleks in Manhattan"/"Evolution of Daleks": The Dalek AND the pig-person and aliens invading Earth story for season 3. Didn't we already have the last Dalek? And the last Daleks again? No, wait, this time it's really truly I mean it the very last Dalek in the universe. Oh, Daleks "tainted" with human DNA (thus making them emotionally unstable yadda yadda yadda) again. Why am I watching this? I can't stop myself! The Doctor makes one of his rare trips to
to America, landing in New York in 1930.

Quit mentioning Rose every damn episode! GAHHH! Gah!!!! No, she's NOT your one speshul twue wuv, dammit.

The real romance story is between the Doctor and the Daleks. They've known each other for hundreds of years. A very INTENSE relationship, considering all the times they've nearly killed each other (I count the Daleks more or less as one entity, with a few mutations and Davroses here and there). Now they're both the last of their races. And no matter who the Doctor kisses, and no matter how many humans flirt with him, it's only the Daleks that he's actually mixed his genes with to create new life forms (on screen, anyway.) Poor kids. Killed within ten minutes of their introduction. Very tragic.

So, enough with the emergency time shifts. Clearly the last of the Daleks should team up with the last of the Timelords as companions. As the show girlsaid, "There's someone out there for everyone", even, presumably, Daleks.