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Old 07-02-2007, 09:59 AM
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Zeke Zeke is offline
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I know this will come as a huge shock to everyone, but I loved it. Sure it was a sort of deus ex machina, but it made more sense than Rose the Time Goddess. One advantage Doctor Who has over Star Trek is that nothing in the series stands up to complete scrutiny, so all the writers need to do is give a good nudge in the direction of sense. We don't know the mechanics of the Doctor working himself into the psychic network or harnessing the human race's collective will, but we know there are mechanics; it's not an Earthbound/MegaMan Battle Network sort of thing where everybody praying gives you energy all by itself.

There's too much good stuff here to let the silly parts get in the way. The paradox machine concept lived up to the coolness of its name. The identity of the Toclafane was perfect: not Daleks or Time Lords (both of which I was worried about), and like the solution to a good detective story, something we had all the clues to figure out. I'm a sucker for RTD's technique of drawing together seemingly unimportant elements of past episodes. (Farscape had the same habit.)

Two moments particularly stood out for me. One was the creepy, effective intro. (Who was sending that warning about the Earth's "terminal extinction", anyway? Do we know?) The other was the climax. It was a given that the Master would die, and once the anti-Time-Lord weapon was introduced, I assumed it would be used on him. (It's almost too bad it wasn't real -- the concept was certainly plausible.) What I didn't predict was the Master letting himself die just to hurt the Doctor. Now that's a dedicated villain.

On the other hand, I don't like the revelation about Jack. It's clever, I admit (almost too clever), but there are two problems. One is that if the Face were Jack, it wouldn't have told the Doctor he wasn't alone as if that were a good thing. He saw firsthand that finding the Master would only hurt the Doctor. The other is that I just don't like this fate for Jack. It'll hang like a shadow over the character now whenever we see him. I want him to get his cure someday and have a normal death. Since RTD was apparently vague about this in the podcast, and since everything else we know about the Face makes less sense if he was originally human, I'm going to assume for now that Jack was just messing with the Doctor's head. He brought it up out of nowhere, after all.

So yeah, overall I thought this was great. Certainly very far from the disaster you guys are talking about. One of these days I should try agreeing with the majority about some show, just as a change of pace....
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Last edited by Zeke; 07-02-2007 at 10:22 AM.
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