Monday, April 26, 2010

Doctor Who review: on why 'The Time of Angels' needs to be watched again in the dark...


Scary wasn't it?

On one level I was grateful for the light outside the hotel window streaming in (HLW and I were getting a night away for silly conversations even if we got no further than a classy 4-star hotel in Nottingham city centre). But this should so have been airing in the autumn / winter... Curtains drawn, heating on, darkness outside...

Oh well. Balmy spring it is.

Won't stop me pulling this story out come the autumn when I can snuggle under the flicker of artificial light and the darkness of external streets peeping through the closed curtains.

So, anyway. River Song is back: with her 'meeting the Doctors out of sequence'; with her lack of foreknowledge about what Ten, and thus Eleven, know about her future ("spoilers")[1]; with her great bloody dress and shoes; with her 'prison' history; with her brilliant fending of Amy's questions on behalf of us[2]: it is indeed far more complicated than the simple answer.


Oooh....

Things I loved:

  • the 'sweetie' boxed message crossing 12,000 years
  • the explanation of the infamous 'voorp, vroop' noise that the TARDIS makes as it wheezily lands (and Eleven's impression!)
  • the Church as military
  • the realisation about the two-headed residents had single-headed statues... uh-oh...
  • what an image of an angel can become... [someone has been watching 'Ringu'!]
  • Amy's post-Angel encounter hallucinations: freaky FREAKY!
  • Scared/sacred Bob
  • River Song's Christian Louboutin shoes (ably spotted by HLW within split seconds. And I thought I was the one who liked shoes...)

As usual:
Telegraph - Gavin Fuller
MediumRob
Marie
Rev/Views
Behind the Sofa: Stuart Ian Burns
Behind the Sofa: Frank Collins
Behind the Sofa -> Two Minute Time Lord Podcast: Neil Perryman


[1] Stuart Ian Burns nails this:

When he [the Doctor] re-greets River we see the implications in his eyes, it’s as though Tenth is still in there somewhere looking out and remembering her fate and knowing that for all the history of his future she has literally in her hand, he sees her final end each time he looks at her but mustn’t offer any spoilers.
Just a beautiful description.

[2] Again, SIB nails it when he describes Moffat "effectively turn[ing] Pond into a sort of walking Gallifrey Base, voicing our ideas of who River Song is..."

3 comments:

JoeinVegas said...

Oh, so nice to have you ahead of us, alerting what we can look forward to. Any US shows that get delayed there that you are interested in?

rashbre said...

Yep. I agree, although I found it scary enough even in the Spring.

I loved the handbrake moment. A joke that resonates through 30 or more years.

A bit like the vandalising of the Blue Peter Garden n Ashes to Ashes.

Lisa Rullsenberg said...

Joe: I'm always wary that I'm spoilering things for viewers elsewhere, and I get so out of kilter with US shows that I think I'd be confused trying to 'catch-up'! But thanks for the offer!

As an example of getting out of kilter, over here in the UK they're just airing on terrestrial TV (channel Five) a 'new' season of Grey's Anatomy, complete with trailers about Izzie and George.

It took me ages to work out why this seemed weirdly impossible: then I realised that with stateside travels and occasional 'guest' channels on digital TV, I'd already seen bits from the following season...

Rashbre: I think I'd have been bricking myself watching Angels in the dark, but maybe that is as it should be!