TV stuffs

[kingandy]

I've now watched this week's Doctor Who (Father's Day) - it's an excellent story, as long as you don't get hung up on the temporal mechanics.

I've been looking forward to Paul Cornell's episode since I heard he was on the list, so I saw the ending from a reasonable way off.  Cornell is an unapologetically soppy writer (which comes through in elements such as Mr Tyler instinctively trusting his future daughter, giving her his car keys without a moment's thought) and doesn't much care for letting the underlying science get in the way of a thumping good story.  And a thumping good story it is too, with very real and human emotions flying back and forth.  I have not a word of complaint on the subject of dialogue and character, it was all good.

As to the mechanics of it though.  Oh, where to begin.  I don't think it's possible to do a really thorough analysis of the whole shebang at this time of night, and anyway to do so would be to miss the point.  (My main problem is that I don't see why people would forget the preceding events when Pete died.  I have issue that changing history would cause monsters to appear and eat people, but the Doctor did mention that their double presence had complicated things, so I will allow it.)

Despite the somewhat confused nature of the whole timeline thing - and it is the sort of thing my Mum would pick apart and frown at, as we used to do with Quantum Leap - Cornell has somewhat artfully skirted the issue.  No time is wasted on clumsy technobabble exposition, spelling out exactly what happened and why; instead of making excuses, the dialogue simply lays out the way things are, demonstrating what has changed through flashbacks to Rose's youth.  Fans can argue the exact whys and wherefores until the cows come home, and I'm sure they will.

For stsquad's reference: The Chronovores I mentioned were from The Time Monster.  They have been featured in Cornell's Who work before; previously they've appeared in humanoid form.  If this is a reappearance they've certainly undergone some cosmetic changes, or at least stopped bothering to pretend, but they're certainly "time eaters that would swallow a life as quickly as a boa constrictor can swallow a rabbit."  Again, I'm sure there are fans out there already speculating.

And, lo!  There are.


We (stsquad and myself) also watched the penultimate Enterprise episode.  Between the heartfelt wouldn't-it-be-nice-if-everyone-was-nice speech at the end, and the scene where further drama only occurred because the starfleet personnell suddenly forgot they were holding magic space guns that can instantly and harmlessly render somebody unconscious (leading to a tense standoff where they had guns and the bad men didn't and the situation could only have been improved by the bad men being knocked out), I remain utterly unbothered that there is only one more episode before cancellation.

Comments

[kingandy]

I kept telling myself here that in the Who universe there is a thing called Biodata which may or may not be "the biological link between a living organism and the Time Vortex, which maps out an individual’s effect on history", so tampering with events may have extreme consequences (and temporally duplicating yourself, as the Doctor and Rose did at the start, could easily exacerbate things by tangling the biodata or something).

So yeah, basically, good story, don't think about the mechanics.