Sunday 1 May 2005

Pretty much everyone is wrong.

Finally saw an episode of this new Doctor Who that everyone thinks is so good tonight. Well, anyone who says it's any good at all is utterly, utterly wrong.

I know for a fact that Christopher Eccleston can be a good actor. Tonight, I watched him attempt to disprove that. At what point did he decide that Doctor Who was a melodrama? And what has he done to the Doctor? Are we supposed to believe that this is the same man who bluffed his way out of a fatally tight spot with a jelly baby? The Doctor used to be calm in the face of danger. All he does now is shout, panic, and sweat. Billie Piper acted him off the screen, frankly.

The script was no good, either. Is suspension of disbelief really so much to ask for? The Doctor's reaction to one disabled Dalek was the reaction of a man who could never, ever have survived a single encounter with any of their kind. And owning the Internet? Please. I like a bit of pseudo-scientific bollocks as much as the next sci-fi fan, but make it good pseudo-scientific bollocks; force me to think for more than a nanosecond about the pseudo-science before noticing that it's bollocks.

The infamous Paul McGann one-off episode is better than the shite I sat through this evening. And it weren't good.

They've done a nice job with the theme tune, though.


Update:

And another thing. What's with all the surprise at meeting a Dalek when he thought they'd all been killed? He's a Timelord. He must bump into extinct species all the time. Is that what the Doctor does when he sees a dodo or a Tasmanian wolf? "No! No! It can't be! They were all destroyed! Nooooooooo!"

Same goes for all this nonsense about being all alone in the universe now all the other Timelords are dead. Bollocks: he can meet any other Timelord, including himself, whenever he wants. That's pretty much the definition of a Timelord. Why have the BBC hired people who can't get their heads round the idea of time travel to write the script for a series about a time traveller?

Oh, and broadband being based on alien technology? Of all the amazing inventions the human race have come up with since the Fifties, that's what these writers pick as the one nicked from aliens? Tracer bullets, electronic ink, quantum ratchets, genetic modification, lightweight bullet-proof plastics, and blindness-curing cybernetic implants all on the menu, and they pick broadband? Feh.
 

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