Doctor Who 12.07
Feb. 18th, 2020 04:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
selenakI'm RL swamped, and quite exhausted, hence not mucih in the way of fannish existence. (Also, even while the impeachment came to its predictable ending, there in fact politicians in Germany competing with US Republicans in spinelessness and lack of ethics as well as common sense. I might make a separate entry on what happened in Thuringia and is still ongoing, if ever I find the time.) But the latest DW episode was great fun, and thus I briefly resurface to say so.
Not least because I actually was dissatisfied with Big Finish's take on Mary Shelley; this was one of the rare cases where I really prefer the tv version. And while the other times when a genre tv show tackles the Haunted Summer, I had the impression they were confusing watching Ken Russell's movie Gothic with research (looking at you, Highlander), this time the scriptwriter clearly had actually read up on what was happening on those rainy days in 1816. The original quotes worked in weren't just the poetry but from letters. (Mind you, I could quibble with some artistic liberties, beyond, err, the general premise of this being a Doctor Who episode with monsters, but I could see the point of them and they were minor. Including the one where Byron in rl had a deformed foot and thus would have been unable to dance. (There was a reason why he was majorly into swimming.) (As opposed to poor Shelley.)
( To wit: Claire wouldn't have to wonder about Byron's intentions, because they were crystal clear from the beginning, as in, he didn't have any beyond taking what she offered. He never pretended to love her, he never invited her, and he never tried to charm her; she'd been the pursuer throughout. Since everyone involved was avidly letter writing, this is pretty well documented. This being said, I get the impulse of wanting Claire to get to ditch a still at least sexually interested in her Byron instead of getting pregnant and having to live with the fact that the father of your child makes it very clear that he can't stand you anymore and might be willing to take responsibility for the kid but isn't even ready to talk to you other than through intermediaries. And then the child dies far away from Claire. She survived all the other participants of that summer, including Mary who had a very ambigous relationship with her - at times close, at other times hostile, with Mary writing "Clara Absentia" in her diary as her fondest wish in the early 1820s -; certainly getting disenchanted with Byron earlier than she did would have made for an easier life. Also it made for a good scene with Yaz.)
"Famous work of literature inspired by RL event" can get obnoxious if it's, say, Jane Austen meeting a RL Mr. Darcy. So what DW did re: Mary and Frankenstein was a delightful surprise for me. The scene between Mary and Ashad the Cyberman was just right, and wonderfully acted to boot. My second favourite scene uniting fantastic character work with creepiness was the Doctor's method of getting the Cyberium out of Shelley, not least because Shelley drowning (in the bay of La Spezia) is one of those factoids I do have in the back of my brain. And the episode was a continuity feast, too, what with the Doctor having very much Bill's fate in mind when wanting the fam far away from anything Cyber. (And within season continuity - the Doctor mentioning to Byron she's met his daughter Ada. Btw, the third canto of Childe Harold, the one the Doctor wasn't interested in, starts with a salutation to Ada.)
Graham as the only one seeing actual ghosts (possibly): You know, this better not be foreshadowing for his death. If it's not, it was the kind of whimsy aside that DW thrives on, and I am amused he enjoyed his ghost-served dinner regardless.
Extra points for: Mary not being presented as brooding and withdrawn from the get go but gleefully into the whole frightening each other business early on. She'll go through a great deal of trauma as the years go by, including all of her children dying except for one, but for now, she's 19 and anything could still happen.
The various quotes - from Frankenstein, from Shelley's and Byron's poetry - were all well placed and flowed with the narrative, and I do love that they ended with Darkness, which is one of the most unsettling things Byron wrote, and fitted with the Doctor and friends aware that she might just have condemned to the universe to this if she can't fix it. That she did go for the saving the individual now, saving the universe later was very her, of course, including the optimistic/hubristic conviction she can save it, and interesting that it was Ryan who got to present the counter argument, not, say, Yaz, who as a police officer at least in theory should have been preparing herself for scenarios where she has to choose prioritizing whether to save the many or the few.
Fletcher better not be actually dead, just knocked out. I always liked Fletcher, who started to work for Byron when Byron was 16, kept working for him till Byron died (at age 36, in Greece), through all the scandals, exile, war in Greece, and Byron's death by doctors more than by malaria - seriously, they kept bleeding him and that probably killed him, not the swamp fever) and got memorably played by Philip Glenister in the two parter about Byron starring Jonny Lee Miller.
Overall, easily my favourite episode of the season so far.
Not least because I actually was dissatisfied with Big Finish's take on Mary Shelley; this was one of the rare cases where I really prefer the tv version. And while the other times when a genre tv show tackles the Haunted Summer, I had the impression they were confusing watching Ken Russell's movie Gothic with research (looking at you, Highlander), this time the scriptwriter clearly had actually read up on what was happening on those rainy days in 1816. The original quotes worked in weren't just the poetry but from letters. (Mind you, I could quibble with some artistic liberties, beyond, err, the general premise of this being a Doctor Who episode with monsters, but I could see the point of them and they were minor. Including the one where Byron in rl had a deformed foot and thus would have been unable to dance. (There was a reason why he was majorly into swimming.) (As opposed to poor Shelley.)
( To wit: Claire wouldn't have to wonder about Byron's intentions, because they were crystal clear from the beginning, as in, he didn't have any beyond taking what she offered. He never pretended to love her, he never invited her, and he never tried to charm her; she'd been the pursuer throughout. Since everyone involved was avidly letter writing, this is pretty well documented. This being said, I get the impulse of wanting Claire to get to ditch a still at least sexually interested in her Byron instead of getting pregnant and having to live with the fact that the father of your child makes it very clear that he can't stand you anymore and might be willing to take responsibility for the kid but isn't even ready to talk to you other than through intermediaries. And then the child dies far away from Claire. She survived all the other participants of that summer, including Mary who had a very ambigous relationship with her - at times close, at other times hostile, with Mary writing "Clara Absentia" in her diary as her fondest wish in the early 1820s -; certainly getting disenchanted with Byron earlier than she did would have made for an easier life. Also it made for a good scene with Yaz.)
"Famous work of literature inspired by RL event" can get obnoxious if it's, say, Jane Austen meeting a RL Mr. Darcy. So what DW did re: Mary and Frankenstein was a delightful surprise for me. The scene between Mary and Ashad the Cyberman was just right, and wonderfully acted to boot. My second favourite scene uniting fantastic character work with creepiness was the Doctor's method of getting the Cyberium out of Shelley, not least because Shelley drowning (in the bay of La Spezia) is one of those factoids I do have in the back of my brain. And the episode was a continuity feast, too, what with the Doctor having very much Bill's fate in mind when wanting the fam far away from anything Cyber. (And within season continuity - the Doctor mentioning to Byron she's met his daughter Ada. Btw, the third canto of Childe Harold, the one the Doctor wasn't interested in, starts with a salutation to Ada.)
Graham as the only one seeing actual ghosts (possibly): You know, this better not be foreshadowing for his death. If it's not, it was the kind of whimsy aside that DW thrives on, and I am amused he enjoyed his ghost-served dinner regardless.
Extra points for: Mary not being presented as brooding and withdrawn from the get go but gleefully into the whole frightening each other business early on. She'll go through a great deal of trauma as the years go by, including all of her children dying except for one, but for now, she's 19 and anything could still happen.
The various quotes - from Frankenstein, from Shelley's and Byron's poetry - were all well placed and flowed with the narrative, and I do love that they ended with Darkness, which is one of the most unsettling things Byron wrote, and fitted with the Doctor and friends aware that she might just have condemned to the universe to this if she can't fix it. That she did go for the saving the individual now, saving the universe later was very her, of course, including the optimistic/hubristic conviction she can save it, and interesting that it was Ryan who got to present the counter argument, not, say, Yaz, who as a police officer at least in theory should have been preparing herself for scenarios where she has to choose prioritizing whether to save the many or the few.
Fletcher better not be actually dead, just knocked out. I always liked Fletcher, who started to work for Byron when Byron was 16, kept working for him till Byron died (at age 36, in Greece), through all the scandals, exile, war in Greece, and Byron's death by doctors more than by malaria - seriously, they kept bleeding him and that probably killed him, not the swamp fever) and got memorably played by Philip Glenister in the two parter about Byron starring Jonny Lee Miller.
Overall, easily my favourite episode of the season so far.
