Post by Storm on Jul 1, 2008 18:32:54 GMT
The Stolen Earth
Cough-cough-cough-cough.
One thing that Dr Who rarely does is bore me outright. Episodes I dislike often have me spitting in derision for sure, but as a rule, they don't have me actually looking pleadingly at the clock and gasping for the end. The only stories that have ever come close to doing that to me were The Krotons, which was proof that even Bob Holmes had his fair share of off-days, Tomb Of The Cybermen, whose reputation as a classic is born entirely from the fact that no one had been able to watch it for a quarter of a century, allowing its legend to grow far beyond its meagre limits, and Paradise Towers, which was just too stupid for my brain to stay awake through.
But now we have The Stolen Earth, and at last Dr Who has made a definite contribution to the war against insomnia. It's a confused heap of junk, such a yawner that I was shocked to discover half an hour in that I still had another fifteen minutes - and indeed an extended second episode, heaven help me - to sit through.
This isn't to say it was an awful episode as such, just tedious, because there were too many set-piece scenes happening at random, and far too many central characters appearing, making it impossible for the narrative to focus on anybody for more than a few seconds. The whole story therefore had no focus, therefore had nothing to engage the audience, therefore it seemed horribly shallow and dull. It also made precious little sense, which made it all the more tiring to watch.
The plot. Yet another season ends with an alien invasion of Earth. It doesn't even pretend to be trying anything new this time, it's just a clone of the ends of seasons one and two, with the Daleks invading in their tens of thousands. And that's about all there is to say really. The rest of the time is taken up by too many people shouting at each other for the plot to progress properly or smoothly.
I'm not going to grail at all the familiar failings of Russell T Davies' work, as I've been through them so many times before that I'm bored of listing them. But it does once again emphasise how undisciplined and self-indulgent his would-be sense of humour is, especially having Daleks joining in the lazy equation that repetition-equals-wit. "Yes. We know who you are." Oh, sorry, was I supposed to burst out laughing, instead of screaming, "Oh f*ck off, Russell T Davies!!!" at the screen? Obviously I didn't watch it properly, I'll try harder next time.
It's true though, I got so angry at that moment that I swore at the screen. I just cannot grasp why people think this man is a funny writer. His jokes are so inappropriate for the series that Bernard Manning would blush, and so dated that even the Marx Brothers would steer clear, while his love of repetition is playground-stuff; kids do that routine just after they learn to talk, for Pete's sake, and RTD is getting paid thousands of pounds per episode for writing that way...
The cramming of so many characters into the episode is another example of substituting scale for a plot, and it does no end of damage. How the hell did Harriet Jones of all people manage to build a sub-wave transmitter (whatever the technobabbling hell that's supposed to be) for contacting people who know the Doctor? How does the machine know who knows the Doctor? What use is it contacting them anyway? Surely it's already occurred to them to try summoning him?
There really is no reason for the sub-wave communicator to be in the story at all except to have a really lame excuse for crowbarring Harriet into a tale that had no use for her. And again I ask, why her? Wouldn't someone with, say, something resembling a scientific background, like one of the Torchwood team, be a better candidate for inventing such a thing?
On the subject of contrived guest appearances, why the hell are Sarah Jane and son in the story either? They do nothing except stand around bursting into tears over and over. What's Martha Jones' mother got to do with anything? All her pointless cameo achieves is to highlight how indistinguishable she is from Donna's mother.
UNIT have reverted to their accepted mid-70's role of buffoonish gun fodder, put into the storyline to make the mortal danger of the situation more apparent; Star Trek red-shirts in all but name in fact. This device that Martha has been lumbered with is clearly just another magic super-plot device, very self-consciously talked up in a cartoonish way; "YOU ABSOLUTELY MUSTN'T USE THAT DEVICE, ITS CONSEQUENCES ARE TOO TERRIBLE TO CONTEMPLATE!!! I FORBID YOU USE IT!! I FORBID IT!! I FORBID IIIIIIIIIIIIT!!!!!" Oh. I wonder what they will do with it in the next episode... (Please note, this is sarcasm.)
I also have to get out the big-helping ladel for dishing up the stupid points to Martha and Captain Jack over the matter of the teleport device. Firstly, Martha mentions the name of the project, then sounds shocked when Jack knows all about it, because it's supposed to be Top Secret. If it's Top Secret, Martha, why the hell are you speaking its name out loud on a mobile phone? Well, any excuse to set up the necessary info-dump. Jack later yells at Martha not to use the teleport because it could kill her. If she doesn't use it, Jack, she will get the skin blasted from her bones by a Dalek. The way I see it, thicky, she has nothing to lose by using it.
Now, I'm no stranger to soppy romantic gestures - there's a girl I know at work who adores the silly romantic poems I send her - but the Doctor and Rose running down the street into each other's arms was so stale and dated that it almost had me vomiting. I almost cheered when the Dalek intervened in fact. More logic questions... why would the Doctor be mortally-wounded by what was very clearly a shot in the elbow? How did Captain Jack appear to know that the Dalek was there even before materialising, when the Doctor and Rose were completely oblivious to it even though it was standing almost between them (near enough to it to be within their line of sight)?
The Doctor's regeneration is almost certainly not as it appears. We know David Tennant has been contracted to do four episodes next year, and rumours are rife on the Internet that the Doctor is set to be bifurcated as opposed to being regenerated. This could be the birth of the Valeyard, who was supposedly a latter-generation by-product of the Doctor's evil half. (Although it was established in The Trial Of A Time Lord that the Valeyard as we saw him then was from some point between the Doctor's final two generations, it didn't state at what stage the two halves originally separated off.) Either way, it's the third time we've seen a regeneration in NuWho and they've all been exactly the same; a man stands upright, his head back, and his body re-shaping itself in a rush of flames. Either RTD is being self-congratulatory about how good he believes it looked first time, or he's being lazy, or even he's being condescending to the audience, by assuming that if the process of regeneration isn't completely identical, us poor ignorant little people won't realise what is in fact going on. We're that thick, you see. I preferred the way it used to be, that each regeneration was somewhat different from the others.
The mechanics of how the message is sent to the Doctor is technobabble and stupid physics of a truly infantile order. Harriet Jones' idea is to boost the sub-wave signal by having everyone phone the number at once. I have a number of questions about this, the most important one of which is... How bloody THICK is that? If you have everyone trying to dial the same number at once, the first caller might get through, but all the subsequent numbers will simply get an engaged tone. They won't boost anyone else's signal! How ignorant and thick must RTD be not to know this?
There's also the question of how the signal could reach the Doctor immediately at all, given how many light years away the TARDIS is, but I suppose that this 'subwave' thing could be a device that transmits through the mythical 'sub-etha', so I'll let that one pass. But I still wish that the series would recognise the difference between science and pseudo-science, and stop plucking convenient chunks of non-existent, super-advanced technology out of thin air just to move the story forward. It's a lazy short-cut and it's a sign of a writer who has no sensible or plausible ideas for fitting his stories in the real world, so he simply amends the world to fit round his stories.
You can get away with that in Creative Writing classes at school. When you're in your 40's and a supposed professional writer at the peak of the industry, you really should have learned to temper vivid imagination with a measure of intellectual sense. That's the distinction between genius and madness or mere inanity. (Genius is not about vision alone. Genius is about working out how the new ideas are put into effect, and RTD never even slightly articulates these things. They don't happen because they flow naturally from the storyline, they don't happen because of shrew calculation. They happen simply because RTD says they do.)
The business about the stolen planets being sent a second forward in time is still more botched pseudo-science, again proving that RTD is too lazy to think his plots through properly. All right, I'll pretend that I'm buying the idea that it can be done; I'd have thought that all you need to do in order to find the planets is wait one second (otherwise surely the Doctor just turns completely invisible every time he uses the TARDIS, and not just in the dematerialisation sense), but okay, I'll pretend I'm convinced.
Trouble is, how come when the TARDIS passes through the barrier and the planets become visible to it, all the stars and planets from the rest of the Universe are still visible in the background? Surely they are 'out-of-synch' with the stolen planets? And yet Richard Dawkins goes on about the star formations being different, so obviously they are visible, and so they're not out-of-synch after all. Stupiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid.
The sequences with the Judoon are just there to fill up time; seeing the Doctor and Donna appear more or less to work out for themselves where the Earth has disappeared to, there is no need within the frame of the plot introduce this Galactic Police Force into the equation.
And could Donna please shut up about being a temp? Dr Who production staff, please pay attention...
We
already
f*cking
know.
Please stop hitting us over the head with blitheringly obvious bits of information, and please, even more, be it for exposition's sake or for would-be comic effect, stop repeating them over and over. The former is patronising, the latter is just dreary, and jars horribly with what is supposedly a drama unfolding on-screen.
On the plus side, I very much enjoyed the revived Davros of Julian Bleach, who gets the voice Michael-Wisher perfect. Pity they didn't make it less glaringly obvious who it was all the way through though. The way Davros' face is portrayed, especially the talking-through-gritted teeth, is very reminiscent of Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, and the business of him taking his body apart cell by cell is appropriately gross. But his presence begs more questions of the overcrowding variety. For instance, is there any point in having the Supreme Dalek in the story when Davros himself is in charge? As this story is set millennia before Bad Wolf/The Parting Of The Ways, does that not mean that the Dalek Emperor is still around somewhere as well? Three different Supreme Rulers of the Daleks? A top-heavy organisation, is it not?
I also have to concede that the three-pronged cliffhanger is rather good, and it makes a nice change that they didn't include a trailer for the next episode, which has always struck me as an insecure gesture on the part of the makers to keep the audience watching.
But most of the story is confused, contrived, highly implausible, and a lot of noise and scale used as a substitute for a working plot. I did genuinely get very bored with the stupid confusion of it all by the mid-to-late stages, and even if there was some okay stuff in the last few minutes, overall I am not madly eager to watch the conclusion.
Feeble stuff. 3/10.
Cough-cough-cough-cough.
One thing that Dr Who rarely does is bore me outright. Episodes I dislike often have me spitting in derision for sure, but as a rule, they don't have me actually looking pleadingly at the clock and gasping for the end. The only stories that have ever come close to doing that to me were The Krotons, which was proof that even Bob Holmes had his fair share of off-days, Tomb Of The Cybermen, whose reputation as a classic is born entirely from the fact that no one had been able to watch it for a quarter of a century, allowing its legend to grow far beyond its meagre limits, and Paradise Towers, which was just too stupid for my brain to stay awake through.
But now we have The Stolen Earth, and at last Dr Who has made a definite contribution to the war against insomnia. It's a confused heap of junk, such a yawner that I was shocked to discover half an hour in that I still had another fifteen minutes - and indeed an extended second episode, heaven help me - to sit through.
This isn't to say it was an awful episode as such, just tedious, because there were too many set-piece scenes happening at random, and far too many central characters appearing, making it impossible for the narrative to focus on anybody for more than a few seconds. The whole story therefore had no focus, therefore had nothing to engage the audience, therefore it seemed horribly shallow and dull. It also made precious little sense, which made it all the more tiring to watch.
The plot. Yet another season ends with an alien invasion of Earth. It doesn't even pretend to be trying anything new this time, it's just a clone of the ends of seasons one and two, with the Daleks invading in their tens of thousands. And that's about all there is to say really. The rest of the time is taken up by too many people shouting at each other for the plot to progress properly or smoothly.
I'm not going to grail at all the familiar failings of Russell T Davies' work, as I've been through them so many times before that I'm bored of listing them. But it does once again emphasise how undisciplined and self-indulgent his would-be sense of humour is, especially having Daleks joining in the lazy equation that repetition-equals-wit. "Yes. We know who you are." Oh, sorry, was I supposed to burst out laughing, instead of screaming, "Oh f*ck off, Russell T Davies!!!" at the screen? Obviously I didn't watch it properly, I'll try harder next time.
It's true though, I got so angry at that moment that I swore at the screen. I just cannot grasp why people think this man is a funny writer. His jokes are so inappropriate for the series that Bernard Manning would blush, and so dated that even the Marx Brothers would steer clear, while his love of repetition is playground-stuff; kids do that routine just after they learn to talk, for Pete's sake, and RTD is getting paid thousands of pounds per episode for writing that way...
The cramming of so many characters into the episode is another example of substituting scale for a plot, and it does no end of damage. How the hell did Harriet Jones of all people manage to build a sub-wave transmitter (whatever the technobabbling hell that's supposed to be) for contacting people who know the Doctor? How does the machine know who knows the Doctor? What use is it contacting them anyway? Surely it's already occurred to them to try summoning him?
There really is no reason for the sub-wave communicator to be in the story at all except to have a really lame excuse for crowbarring Harriet into a tale that had no use for her. And again I ask, why her? Wouldn't someone with, say, something resembling a scientific background, like one of the Torchwood team, be a better candidate for inventing such a thing?
On the subject of contrived guest appearances, why the hell are Sarah Jane and son in the story either? They do nothing except stand around bursting into tears over and over. What's Martha Jones' mother got to do with anything? All her pointless cameo achieves is to highlight how indistinguishable she is from Donna's mother.
UNIT have reverted to their accepted mid-70's role of buffoonish gun fodder, put into the storyline to make the mortal danger of the situation more apparent; Star Trek red-shirts in all but name in fact. This device that Martha has been lumbered with is clearly just another magic super-plot device, very self-consciously talked up in a cartoonish way; "YOU ABSOLUTELY MUSTN'T USE THAT DEVICE, ITS CONSEQUENCES ARE TOO TERRIBLE TO CONTEMPLATE!!! I FORBID YOU USE IT!! I FORBID IT!! I FORBID IIIIIIIIIIIIT!!!!!" Oh. I wonder what they will do with it in the next episode... (Please note, this is sarcasm.)
I also have to get out the big-helping ladel for dishing up the stupid points to Martha and Captain Jack over the matter of the teleport device. Firstly, Martha mentions the name of the project, then sounds shocked when Jack knows all about it, because it's supposed to be Top Secret. If it's Top Secret, Martha, why the hell are you speaking its name out loud on a mobile phone? Well, any excuse to set up the necessary info-dump. Jack later yells at Martha not to use the teleport because it could kill her. If she doesn't use it, Jack, she will get the skin blasted from her bones by a Dalek. The way I see it, thicky, she has nothing to lose by using it.
Now, I'm no stranger to soppy romantic gestures - there's a girl I know at work who adores the silly romantic poems I send her - but the Doctor and Rose running down the street into each other's arms was so stale and dated that it almost had me vomiting. I almost cheered when the Dalek intervened in fact. More logic questions... why would the Doctor be mortally-wounded by what was very clearly a shot in the elbow? How did Captain Jack appear to know that the Dalek was there even before materialising, when the Doctor and Rose were completely oblivious to it even though it was standing almost between them (near enough to it to be within their line of sight)?
The Doctor's regeneration is almost certainly not as it appears. We know David Tennant has been contracted to do four episodes next year, and rumours are rife on the Internet that the Doctor is set to be bifurcated as opposed to being regenerated. This could be the birth of the Valeyard, who was supposedly a latter-generation by-product of the Doctor's evil half. (Although it was established in The Trial Of A Time Lord that the Valeyard as we saw him then was from some point between the Doctor's final two generations, it didn't state at what stage the two halves originally separated off.) Either way, it's the third time we've seen a regeneration in NuWho and they've all been exactly the same; a man stands upright, his head back, and his body re-shaping itself in a rush of flames. Either RTD is being self-congratulatory about how good he believes it looked first time, or he's being lazy, or even he's being condescending to the audience, by assuming that if the process of regeneration isn't completely identical, us poor ignorant little people won't realise what is in fact going on. We're that thick, you see. I preferred the way it used to be, that each regeneration was somewhat different from the others.
The mechanics of how the message is sent to the Doctor is technobabble and stupid physics of a truly infantile order. Harriet Jones' idea is to boost the sub-wave signal by having everyone phone the number at once. I have a number of questions about this, the most important one of which is... How bloody THICK is that? If you have everyone trying to dial the same number at once, the first caller might get through, but all the subsequent numbers will simply get an engaged tone. They won't boost anyone else's signal! How ignorant and thick must RTD be not to know this?
There's also the question of how the signal could reach the Doctor immediately at all, given how many light years away the TARDIS is, but I suppose that this 'subwave' thing could be a device that transmits through the mythical 'sub-etha', so I'll let that one pass. But I still wish that the series would recognise the difference between science and pseudo-science, and stop plucking convenient chunks of non-existent, super-advanced technology out of thin air just to move the story forward. It's a lazy short-cut and it's a sign of a writer who has no sensible or plausible ideas for fitting his stories in the real world, so he simply amends the world to fit round his stories.
You can get away with that in Creative Writing classes at school. When you're in your 40's and a supposed professional writer at the peak of the industry, you really should have learned to temper vivid imagination with a measure of intellectual sense. That's the distinction between genius and madness or mere inanity. (Genius is not about vision alone. Genius is about working out how the new ideas are put into effect, and RTD never even slightly articulates these things. They don't happen because they flow naturally from the storyline, they don't happen because of shrew calculation. They happen simply because RTD says they do.)
The business about the stolen planets being sent a second forward in time is still more botched pseudo-science, again proving that RTD is too lazy to think his plots through properly. All right, I'll pretend that I'm buying the idea that it can be done; I'd have thought that all you need to do in order to find the planets is wait one second (otherwise surely the Doctor just turns completely invisible every time he uses the TARDIS, and not just in the dematerialisation sense), but okay, I'll pretend I'm convinced.
Trouble is, how come when the TARDIS passes through the barrier and the planets become visible to it, all the stars and planets from the rest of the Universe are still visible in the background? Surely they are 'out-of-synch' with the stolen planets? And yet Richard Dawkins goes on about the star formations being different, so obviously they are visible, and so they're not out-of-synch after all. Stupiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiid.
The sequences with the Judoon are just there to fill up time; seeing the Doctor and Donna appear more or less to work out for themselves where the Earth has disappeared to, there is no need within the frame of the plot introduce this Galactic Police Force into the equation.
And could Donna please shut up about being a temp? Dr Who production staff, please pay attention...
We
already
f*cking
know.
Please stop hitting us over the head with blitheringly obvious bits of information, and please, even more, be it for exposition's sake or for would-be comic effect, stop repeating them over and over. The former is patronising, the latter is just dreary, and jars horribly with what is supposedly a drama unfolding on-screen.
On the plus side, I very much enjoyed the revived Davros of Julian Bleach, who gets the voice Michael-Wisher perfect. Pity they didn't make it less glaringly obvious who it was all the way through though. The way Davros' face is portrayed, especially the talking-through-gritted teeth, is very reminiscent of Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars, and the business of him taking his body apart cell by cell is appropriately gross. But his presence begs more questions of the overcrowding variety. For instance, is there any point in having the Supreme Dalek in the story when Davros himself is in charge? As this story is set millennia before Bad Wolf/The Parting Of The Ways, does that not mean that the Dalek Emperor is still around somewhere as well? Three different Supreme Rulers of the Daleks? A top-heavy organisation, is it not?
I also have to concede that the three-pronged cliffhanger is rather good, and it makes a nice change that they didn't include a trailer for the next episode, which has always struck me as an insecure gesture on the part of the makers to keep the audience watching.
But most of the story is confused, contrived, highly implausible, and a lot of noise and scale used as a substitute for a working plot. I did genuinely get very bored with the stupid confusion of it all by the mid-to-late stages, and even if there was some okay stuff in the last few minutes, overall I am not madly eager to watch the conclusion.
Feeble stuff. 3/10.