[Chancellor Valium]

Originally Posted by Zeke

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....

You seem to think that the programme itself is gibberish, so Runt Q Dawkins' nonsense is excusable anyway. THAT is the fault in your reasoning.

To quote someone on another board:

Originally Posted by Cornelia Africana

I thought this was really awful, quite possibly one of the worst Doctor Who stories ever. It's as though RTD put a collection of ideas into a hat, pulled them out at random and decided to string them together without any concern for whether the plot actually made any sensr or not. For instance, why did aging the Doctor cause him to shrink into a Gollum-like creature? And why did just channelling the thoughts of all the remaining humans through the archangel network reverse the effect, and apparently give him godlike powers to boot? What the hell was all that about? How did Martha manage to traverse the world, and communicate with all the surviving humans in just a year? Did she walk, how did she travel, or what? I could go on and on about plot holes, but by far the worst thing about it was John Simm as the Master. He basically portrayed him as a complete prat, a comic-book parody of his former self. I realise there were always camp, comic-book aspects to the character, but previous actors who played the part could carry this off with a bit of panache. Simm was just embarrassing. This was a very disappointing season finale.

Basic fact is, Zeke, as a piece of science fiction it is execrable. As a piece of television it is dross. As an episode of Doctor Who, it is so far from "good" that no word in the English language quite provides accurate meaning.