Feels Different

After much thought I have decided to close this blog down and continue posting in my other blog www.adammstone.wordpress.com.

The reason for this is that I feel that I have been neglecting this blog and I have decided it might be easier to just have the one blog and be done with it.

So from now on if there is anyone subscribing to this then please change your bookmarks to www.adammstone.wordpress.com for more of the same, with other stuff as well.

Thanks to everyone who has been reading this blog for the past four years. I hope you continue to follow me on my other blog.

Thanks

Adam

Texting and Scones

Doctor Who : The Wedding of River Song

The Wedding of River Song made my head hurt when I first watched it, but once I had watched it all the way through for a second time it all made perfect sense. The whole thing with the Doctor who died on the banks of Lake Silencio actually being the Tesellecta disguised as the Doctor was a bit of a copout really, but it was about the only way that they could have made the whole thing work, as the Doctor had to be seen to die and by doing this he made sure that that happened as it always must.

The only other possible way they could have gotten away with it would have been to bring the ganger Doctor back for this episode but that seems to have been forgotten about and I guess that the mentions of the Tesellecta in the pre title sequence was also a bit of a hint as to how they were going to solve the problem.

A few people have said that wasn’t right as the Doctor on the beach was seen to start to regenerate but you can argue that the Tesellecta would be more than capable of faking that as well, which is exactly what they did, which makes the whole idea very plausible indeed.

Well, it was a thrill a minute to be honest and it looked really great. I in particular liked the hot air balloons carrying cars and the all of the steam trains that sped around on huge rail tracks in the sky. That was a really great spectacle and must have used a good portion of the effects budget up on its own.

Matt Smith really gave us a tour-de-force performance as the Doctor, and he is getting better episode by episode he really is, and he was at his peerless best in this episode from start to finish here. It was nice to River as we are used to seeing her in this episode after we met her for the first time (from her point of view at least) in Let’s Kill Hitler when she was very different indeed.

Versions of Amy and Rory also featured in this episodes with Amy being more like the one we all know, with Rory being totally clueless about anything (some might say that that’s quite normal for Rory though) until at the end of the episode when we saw them as they were just after they were left in Closing Time and they were told the truth about what happened at Like Silencio, despite the Doctor’s express instructions that River was to tell no-one although if she couldn’t tell her parents the truth, then who could she?

This could either mean that Amy and Rory and River’s story are all told but it does also mean that any of them could appear again in future episodes. We will have to wait and see on that one.

There some really good ideas in this episode and some interesting places that the Doctor has visited such as the bar when the Doctor found the cleric who worked for the Silence (which seemed to come straight out of 2000AD and the 1995 Judge Dredd film) and the whole notion of Live Chess which may never be explored again, which would be a great shame if you ask me.

I am also glad that we finally found out that River is actually the Doctor’s wife as that has always been my take on the situation since her first appearance in the series and I am glad that it has been confirmed. I also loved Amy’s reaction at being the Doctor’s mother-in-law, her face was a picture.

The Wedding of River Song was a good ending to the series but was at times just as frustrating as it was brilliant with its twisty-turny timey-wimey plot which is always worth the effort when watched a few times, and all of the pieces fall together. They are always there; they just need to be put in the right order for it to make perfect sense, which it usually does in the end.

The Miracle Revealed

Miracle Day Episode 9 & 10

Episodes nine and ten bring Miracle Day to a close and they were amongst the best episodes in the series. In episode 9 they finally start looking for The Blessing and they find out the names of three families who were the three people who Jack saw discussing him when he was being bled back in the 1920s and they start to look into it, but it isn’t made any easier for them as it turns out that there is a member of one of the families in the CIA itself and they have been feeding misinformation to the agency from the word go.

They work out who the mole is in the final episode but it becomes clear in the penultimate episode who the mole is and I must say that I was surprised at the identity of the mole and wouldn’t have thought that it was that person that it turned out to be at all, in fact I was rather disappointed to be honest!

Things move up a gear in this episode as we learn what the blessing is, but it isn’t really explained that well and I am still not entirely sure what it is but we also find out the location of the Blessing which is where Rex, Esther, Jack and Gwen head armed with Jack’s blood.

In the penultimate episode we find out what the blessing wants, well we sort of find out what it wants anyway as drops of Jack’s blood seem to be drawn to a specific location when spilled which means that they were right to go there.

In the final episode we learn the true meaning of the miracle and how it works and we also learn how the miracle can be reversed which is by Captain Jack dying and giving him his mortal blood which will counteract with the immortal blood of Jack that they had been feeding into the blessing for years and years. That is quandary in the final episode of Miracle Day – does Captain Jack sacrifice himself for the good of the human race, or does he let the human race suffer so that he can finally die?

By the end of the story we do know a little bit more about the miracle and about why it happened and, of course, how it was all reset to normal but we still know very little about the three families apart from their names and also that they are very persistent and are going to bide their time. Does this mean that if there is another series of Torchwood that the families will reappear and try something else?

In typically Torchwoodian fashion not all of the main characters made it out of the series alive but in my opinion it was the wrong character that made it through, and that is only because I just don’t like them, and never had since they were introduced this series.

It does beg the question with the reveal in the final episode if we really needed much of the previous nine episodes to get to this point of the story. The answer, quite frankly, is no, and this could have been told in half the time it was, but it was a good ride over the course of the ten weeks, even if at times it did feel as though they were getting nowhere fast.

I did enjoy Miracle Day and it was nice to have the story unfold over a number of weeks, but I do think that it would have worked better if they had shown it over two weeks with five episodes a week and I am going to have to try and watch it in that format to see if my suspicions are correct.

I’m Free

Closing Time is a sequel to the season five episode The Lodger and again features James Cordon as Craig Owens an ordinary man drawn into a very unordinary adventure. Craig now no longer lives in the same house as he did in the lodger and now also has a son named Alfie (or Stormageddon, Dark Lord of All as he likes to be called) but the Doctor is back and that can only mean one thing, that things are not going to be straightforward.

Closing Time is one of those episodes which in parts does not feel like Doctor Who at all but in other parts seems to be very typically Doctor Who. For instance the fact that a lot of the story takes place in a department store seems a little bit odd (but then again there was a story idea called The Big Store back in the sixties that never actually got made, so perhaps it is not as odd as it might initially sound) but the fact that the department store is in fact the starting point for an alien invasion makes it also very typically Doctor Who.

The Cybermen appear in this story, although it could be argued that it really could have been any alien race as they didn’t really do a great deal and they were actually barely in the episode at all (a bit like The Wheel in Space in fact).

The Cybermats made a welcome reappearance in this story and were much better used than they were in Revenge of the Cybermen (and a bit less rubbish looking) and they featured in one of the best scenes in the entire episode when it attacked first the Doctor and then Craig before they despatched it with a frying pan, which is a very funny scene indeed!

Once again James Corden and Matt Smith were great in the double act that is Craig and the Doctor which never fails to amuse and proves that James Corden is more than just Smithy which you never really think about when watching him in this (well I don’t anyway).

If anything the potential invasion by the Cybermen was the b plot to the story with the main story being Craig’s bonding with his son (which is a not very usual Doctor Who storyline) which is where much of the humour and the emotional weight of the story come from.

This is the sort of episode which I think will divide opinion, but it is one that I could watch over and over again and would be an episode that I would choose to watch if I was feeling a little bit down as it would definitely cheer me up.

Hotel Grecian

The God Complex was another interesting episode of Doctor Who as distinct from the other episodes this series as the others have been. Last week we got a far more character based story and this week we have a more traditional Doctor Who romp.

The setting of this story seemed to be a hotel straight of the 1980′s complete with bad decor but it turned out to be nothing of the sort. In its self setting a Doctor Who story in a hotel is not a bad idea, and you wonder why no one had ever done it before as it is just another riff on the base under siege idea with lots of characters stuck in one place with no visible means of escape.

The episode was visually exciting with some really interesting camera angles and shots throughout the episode which is not surprising as the director was Nick Hurran who also provided similarly inventive direction in the previous episode and I definitely want to see him return to the series again.

David Walliams guest starred in the episode as Gibbis the most scared alien in the world from the universe’s most invaded planet who just wants to be told what to do by someone, by anyone in fact and there was no doubting that it was him under that prosthetic work.

The episode was also often plain weird with some very odd scenes such as the clown sat on a bed clutching a balloon to a room full of ventriloquist dummies to a gorilla jumping out of a door to a P.E teacher telling you that you had to do P.E in your pants as you had forgotten your kit (which is one of those things that most people have heard off but doesn’t actually seem to have happened that often).

I liked the reveal of the true nature of the hotel at the end but did think that it was perhaps a little bit too much like Star Trek and also the real nature of the creature that was roaming the corridors of the hotel as well, I certainly didn’t see that coming, or the name checking of a classic Doctor Who monster. When I say classic though, what I really mean is really, really bad.

I think that the way that the creature was used throughout the episode was much more effective by only showing it in shadow or with very low lighting which made it much spookier than if they had shown it in its full glory which I don’t think would have had the same effect. Kudos has to the director for making that decision, unless it was in the original script, in which case the kudos should go to the writer.

I didn’t expect the episode to end it the way that it did either with the Doctor dropping of Amy and Rory in the bluest of blue houses but I am sure they will be back in the final episode of the season as though this is actually a nice thing to do for them you just know that there is something else destined for them (so long as it isn’t the death of one of them) as they can’t very well have a finale with the Doctor companionless, can they? Only time will tell on that score, but for the moment Amy and Rory are safe, which is nice.

The God Complex has quite a lot of stuff in it that really needs multiple viewings to see everything that has been packed into, which is the making of a really good episode than can be watched over and over again without it boring you to tears.