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sir_guinglain Apr. 27th, 2013 07:17 pm)
sir_guinglain Apr. 27th, 2013 07:17 pm)From a Pertwee-esque fourth episode we move on to a fifth episode which takes some cues from the fourth Doctor's era. "All these corridors look the same," said Tegan in Logopolis, as if objecting to a fannish crowd-pleasing idea which reacted against the use of a disused hospital for the TARDIS interior in The Invasion of Time. Yet it's there that ideas such as the TARDIS swimming pool have their birth - and I did wonder whether one of the potion-filled shelves against which Clara hid from her own time-degraded future self was the successor to the medicine cabinet which I think Chris Parsons was sent to find in Shada.
From the point where Clara chided the Doctor for breaking the first rule of basic storytelling, I wondered whether the episode might have one eye on the readers of TV Tropes. It was Steven Moffat who imported the concept of "Spoilers!" (at least as said in a flirtatious tone by River Song) and now his acolyte Steve Thompson brings us the Big Friendly Button, as hot and red as Clara's dress is probably meant to be, and allowing us to have things both ways. One wonders whether the return of the crack in time from series 5 is meant to have significance; the Doctor recalls going through it once before, but this time he doesn't seem to do so completely presumably avoiding a greater paradox than already exists.
Having been a madwoman in eighteenth-century dress in The Doctor's Wife, the TARDIS is now more ambivalent: deathtrap, protective friend, self-preserving entity and imaginary landscape in one. I did wonder how the apparently easily-dismantled console of this episode can be reconciled with that of the 2005 series, which takes a chain and a breakdown truck to open it. Time here isn't light, but remembered sound, specifically past conversations about the TARDIS. Memory is restated as a theme of the season, and while the Doctor accepts that Clara has no idea about the Claras/Oswins he has already met, the TARDIS remembers the future as well as the past.
Oddly for an episode which emphasises Clara's normality and humanity, her dress and demeanour here are at their most doll-like, leading one to ponder the Barbie in the Doctor's pocket in Cold War. The non-naturalism of costume and characterisation in Doctor Who has yet to reach the levels of the 1980s, but I find that while the early Russell T Davies period offered a heightened, stylised version of aspirational domestic drama, Moffat's period feeds off a Doctor Who that is sui generis, and I wonder how long this can last.
I was strangely unmoved by the visit to the Eye of Harmony and really miss the absence of roundels on the walls, but that probably just shows my age...
From the point where Clara chided the Doctor for breaking the first rule of basic storytelling, I wondered whether the episode might have one eye on the readers of TV Tropes. It was Steven Moffat who imported the concept of "Spoilers!" (at least as said in a flirtatious tone by River Song) and now his acolyte Steve Thompson brings us the Big Friendly Button, as hot and red as Clara's dress is probably meant to be, and allowing us to have things both ways. One wonders whether the return of the crack in time from series 5 is meant to have significance; the Doctor recalls going through it once before, but this time he doesn't seem to do so completely presumably avoiding a greater paradox than already exists.
Having been a madwoman in eighteenth-century dress in The Doctor's Wife, the TARDIS is now more ambivalent: deathtrap, protective friend, self-preserving entity and imaginary landscape in one. I did wonder how the apparently easily-dismantled console of this episode can be reconciled with that of the 2005 series, which takes a chain and a breakdown truck to open it. Time here isn't light, but remembered sound, specifically past conversations about the TARDIS. Memory is restated as a theme of the season, and while the Doctor accepts that Clara has no idea about the Claras/Oswins he has already met, the TARDIS remembers the future as well as the past.
Oddly for an episode which emphasises Clara's normality and humanity, her dress and demeanour here are at their most doll-like, leading one to ponder the Barbie in the Doctor's pocket in Cold War. The non-naturalism of costume and characterisation in Doctor Who has yet to reach the levels of the 1980s, but I find that while the early Russell T Davies period offered a heightened, stylised version of aspirational domestic drama, Moffat's period feeds off a Doctor Who that is sui generis, and I wonder how long this can last.
I was strangely unmoved by the visit to the Eye of Harmony and really miss the absence of roundels on the walls, but that probably just shows my age...
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