What a waste
Jul. 10th, 2006 06:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
taleyaComplete and utter waste that season finale was.
Yeah, I didn't expect anything too much from it. This whole season has been rather like imperfectly cooked porridge without any seasoning - bland and boring, with the occasional piece that you could either sink you teeth into or choke on.
And the finale was just a second helping.
This came across as incredibly sloppily written. Oh dear. Armageddon. It could have been good, but it fell flat on its face. The biggest waste in this was the long-touted battle between the Cybermen and the Daleks. Instead of seeing a decent war, we get rather Darth Vader-esque bleats of "We can upgrade together!"Join with me luke and what ends up being a bunch of shiny shiny creatures with guns going "poot-poot-pooot" at each other while humans run around screaming randomly.
This was what I wanted to see. I wanted to see a quite frankly psychotic battle between the two iconic baddies of DW. I wanted to see world war three on a braveheart scale of brutality. What did we get? Poot-poot-poot.
Quite honestly you didn't need the Cybermen there at all. In fact, it would have been more horrific to have the humans from the parallel world breaking into and attempting to take over our own because their own was unlivable after the war against the Cybus cyborgs. Humans are the monsters. It would have made a nice bookend to the Christmas Invasion. Apart from that, it's obvious that the production team have a massive hardon for Daleks, and they wrote them as such. "Oh Daleks gotta win! Gotta win Daleks! " Fuck that shit, after seeing their weapons were ineffective, I wanted to see the Cybus lot go after them and take them apart with their bare hands.
The storyline was weak. Paper-weak. And not the weakness that last year's finale had - which, let's face it, was extremely forgivable given the sheer scale and impressiveness of it - but the sort of weakness you get from third-rate station toilet paper that ends up breaking under the pressure of your fingers and smearing your hands with fecal matter.
The Cybermen come over here! they don't know why, they just do. Oh ho ho. Looky here! we found a hole! After the white rabbit and once more unto the breach ey wot wot? And then the humans FOLLOW them. Jeez, Pete explicitly states they had massive problems with them, they had them sealed into factories and quite frankly didn't know wtf to do with them. Suddenly their problems are solved, they should be happy happy people. Instead, they go and get involved in a war that they then turn around and state IS NOT THEIR BLOODY PROBLEM. I've had thick-sauced pasta dishes that were less sloppy than this writing.
So anyway. We have Daleks, in a Time Lord prison ship. And anyone who's travelled in time can release them!!
...the fuck?
Ok
1) why keep prisoners. We're talking all out war. The High Council had no qualms about sending the Doctor to explicitly commit mass genocide of the Dalek race in Genesis, so why the hell would they want prisoners? You can't exactly rehabilitate a Dalek.
2) Oh, chronoton absorption can release it! Except by that time there are several time travelling races, INCLUDING the Daleks who could have set them free. You'd think they'd have used the Rassilon Imprimature. It would have been better to have them force the Doctor to release them. Especially since they did that whole "Oh, we recognise that man as possibly being the Doctor despite not having seen him since possibly his 8th incarnation..."
Wanking with one hand, and pissing on canon with the other. This is beyond a joke.
But Mickey sets them loose in a scene that's supposed to be a swanky nod back to the s27 ep Dalek, despite the fact that they wanted no part of that distastfully wanky canon thing as they've said so many times and the thing starts shooting out Daleks like a pez dispenser. It was at this point![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
torasin was saying we should get a decent battle now - because there's no longer just four daleks, the production guys can afford to flip some off as canon fodder.
Nope. Poot Poot Poot. Argh argh argh, cur humans running around, cue the main characters acting like freshly beheaded chooks and everyone going "WTF?" Even the characters think this is getting a bit stupid.
So! The Cybermen ally themselves with humans! Despite all their talk about how humans are inferior, we must be upgraded, they are better than us, stronger, more powerful, oh, and their weapons are probably more effecient than standard human artillery but nope. They're siding with us. Does not compute. Lesse..they were merrily dominating their way against our armies. The Daleks are taking them out like ninepins. So..Let's join with the pissy forces to beat 'em! yaaaay! While you're at it, bung a rock at them for me, wouldja?
And then, suddenly, miraculously, the Doctor pulls a solution clean out of his bum. Now I know a lot of people say this happens aaaaaaalll the tiiiiiiiiime with DW, but at least they do SOME pre-work. This is as bad as the TARDIS swallowing Blon in Boom Town to finish it off. So what happens? We get an insane Jumanji-like solution with all the cybermen and daleks swirling around and around and getting sucked into buildings and into holes and damn, I do want an icon of that because it didn't look cool it was just so damned FUNNY thattorasin and I damned near pissed ourselves laughing.
And then it degenerates into soapie dribble about Rose. Come on, at least throw us a 'fantastic' line. But finally finally we see it. David Tennant. Acting, the way we KNOW he can. This has been a bit of a sore point with me all season - I've seen him in many things before he was slated as the Tenth Doctor and he's always impressed me as a good actor. Right up there with Andrew J Robinson (DS9's Garak) , Andrew Miller (Cube, Nothing), and David Hewlett (Atlantis, Pin) in my personal scope. But stick him in a dream role and he becomes mister cardboard cutout. The hell?
Several pre-series screening interviews said that he's been pushing for darker slants, pushing the envelope on some eps. If this season is the result, then I honestly shudder at the thought of what it would have been like if he hadn't.
Compare this finale to Parting of the ways. We had Plot. Ramifications. Pain, time wars, characters that could be developed in a short order and at least you felt something when they met their inevitable squishy deaths. What do we get here? Daddy issues and Emo Cybermen.
But, the season is over, and here's hoping like fuck we at least get the level of s27 back.
Interesting points:
- If there is a parallel Torchwood...then there must be a parallel Doctor. Torchwood was created as a direct consequence of the Doctor's actions.
- If Cybus did indeed get their technology from International Electromatics (Tobias Vaugn's company (Invasion)) then surely Torchwood would have been on that like shit on velcro. Cyber technology? They'd be all over that shit. Perhaps it was a link to Cybus that ended up bringing about their downfall. Now that's an interesting thought...
Niggles
- Ok, RTD, you're just not making sense. Please back the fuck off now and let other people write decent stories. If this is, as you've so touted, the same man who fought the Master, the Daleks, the Silurians...and Torchwood was created in the 1800s, then what the FUCK were they doing throughout the UNIT years? Why was UNIT created at all? Jesus christ man, you're a who fan, you KNOW how obsessively wanky we are. So why end up pissing about with a backstory you're so in love with that you end up making the two canons almost irreconcilable? You should have just made it UNIT / Broadsword and stopped gazing lovingly into your own mirror and reinventing the wheel.
- Please stop treating people like idiots. "Time Lord Technology - it's bigger on the inside than the outside!" yeah, that hoary old fan joke just sounds pathetic now. Try having him say the dimensional transcedentialism - and then when someone says "wha?" you trot out the joke. It would have made the Doctor sound less like a yokel and brought us back a bit to the sci fi roots.
- Skaro is the Dalek home planet. Gallifrey was the Time Lords homeworld. For fucks sake, just say the words. Gall-i-frey. Ska-ro. They're not hard. Stop pissing about and trying to build a mythos about them and make them all mysterious and unnamed when any half-wit with a library card can hit the BBC site and find out what they are. Build the mythos from existing facts, you twats.
- The Cult of Skaro - well, setting aside the whole old school canon where they used humans as components in their battle computers rather than contaminating their own - given how the lone Dalek in Dalek related to its own individuality, and the massive racial purity that the Daleks have - why have the Cult? Why contaimante their own kind? Bloody hell, I was hoping that the Black Dalek would give us a snifter of the Dalek Civil War and we'd end up with the imperial faction.
Rose: "I killed the emperor. Wiped out your whole race"
Black Dalek: "They were Impure. The Dalek Race thanks you."
- Rose remembers wiping out the emperor, but can't remember bringing Jack back to life, merging with the TARDIS and killing the 9th Doctor. Talk about selective memory...
All in all?
Well, it suited the season. Bah.
Yeah, I didn't expect anything too much from it. This whole season has been rather like imperfectly cooked porridge without any seasoning - bland and boring, with the occasional piece that you could either sink you teeth into or choke on.
And the finale was just a second helping.
This came across as incredibly sloppily written. Oh dear. Armageddon. It could have been good, but it fell flat on its face. The biggest waste in this was the long-touted battle between the Cybermen and the Daleks. Instead of seeing a decent war, we get rather Darth Vader-esque bleats of "We can upgrade together!"
 |
About 15 years ago, this image appeared in a fanzine. (Quite possibly Data Extract) along with a bit of a fanwank about a Dalek/Cyberman war. And seriously, it shits all over RTD's poot-pooting. Actually when you look at it, it does show a serious flaw that are with s28's cybermen - they've lost that visceral, brutal power that was very much a homage to their Frankestein origins - the human form, twisted and monstrous. |
This was what I wanted to see. I wanted to see a quite frankly psychotic battle between the two iconic baddies of DW. I wanted to see world war three on a braveheart scale of brutality. What did we get? Poot-poot-poot.
Quite honestly you didn't need the Cybermen there at all. In fact, it would have been more horrific to have the humans from the parallel world breaking into and attempting to take over our own because their own was unlivable after the war against the Cybus cyborgs. Humans are the monsters. It would have made a nice bookend to the Christmas Invasion. Apart from that, it's obvious that the production team have a massive hardon for Daleks, and they wrote them as such. "Oh Daleks gotta win! Gotta win Daleks! " Fuck that shit, after seeing their weapons were ineffective, I wanted to see the Cybus lot go after them and take them apart with their bare hands.
The storyline was weak. Paper-weak. And not the weakness that last year's finale had - which, let's face it, was extremely forgivable given the sheer scale and impressiveness of it - but the sort of weakness you get from third-rate station toilet paper that ends up breaking under the pressure of your fingers and smearing your hands with fecal matter.
The Cybermen come over here! they don't know why, they just do. Oh ho ho. Looky here! we found a hole! After the white rabbit and once more unto the breach ey wot wot? And then the humans FOLLOW them. Jeez, Pete explicitly states they had massive problems with them, they had them sealed into factories and quite frankly didn't know wtf to do with them. Suddenly their problems are solved, they should be happy happy people. Instead, they go and get involved in a war that they then turn around and state IS NOT THEIR BLOODY PROBLEM. I've had thick-sauced pasta dishes that were less sloppy than this writing.
So anyway. We have Daleks, in a Time Lord prison ship. And anyone who's travelled in time can release them!!
...the fuck?
Ok
1) why keep prisoners. We're talking all out war. The High Council had no qualms about sending the Doctor to explicitly commit mass genocide of the Dalek race in Genesis, so why the hell would they want prisoners? You can't exactly rehabilitate a Dalek.
2) Oh, chronoton absorption can release it! Except by that time there are several time travelling races, INCLUDING the Daleks who could have set them free. You'd think they'd have used the Rassilon Imprimature. It would have been better to have them force the Doctor to release them. Especially since they did that whole "Oh, we recognise that man as possibly being the Doctor despite not having seen him since possibly his 8th incarnation..."
Wanking with one hand, and pissing on canon with the other. This is beyond a joke.
But Mickey sets them loose in a scene that's supposed to be a swanky nod back to the s27 ep Dalek, despite the fact that they wanted no part of that distastfully wanky canon thing as they've said so many times and the thing starts shooting out Daleks like a pez dispenser. It was at this point
torasin was saying we should get a decent battle now - because there's no longer just four daleks, the production guys can afford to flip some off as canon fodder.Nope. Poot Poot Poot. Argh argh argh, cur humans running around, cue the main characters acting like freshly beheaded chooks and everyone going "WTF?" Even the characters think this is getting a bit stupid.
So! The Cybermen ally themselves with humans! Despite all their talk about how humans are inferior, we must be upgraded, they are better than us, stronger, more powerful, oh, and their weapons are probably more effecient than standard human artillery but nope. They're siding with us. Does not compute. Lesse..they were merrily dominating their way against our armies. The Daleks are taking them out like ninepins. So..Let's join with the pissy forces to beat 'em! yaaaay! While you're at it, bung a rock at them for me, wouldja?
And then, suddenly, miraculously, the Doctor pulls a solution clean out of his bum. Now I know a lot of people say this happens aaaaaaalll the tiiiiiiiiime with DW, but at least they do SOME pre-work. This is as bad as the TARDIS swallowing Blon in Boom Town to finish it off. So what happens? We get an insane Jumanji-like solution with all the cybermen and daleks swirling around and around and getting sucked into buildings and into holes and damn, I do want an icon of that because it didn't look cool it was just so damned FUNNY that
torasin and I damned near pissed ourselves laughing.And then it degenerates into soapie dribble about Rose. Come on, at least throw us a 'fantastic' line. But finally finally we see it. David Tennant. Acting, the way we KNOW he can. This has been a bit of a sore point with me all season - I've seen him in many things before he was slated as the Tenth Doctor and he's always impressed me as a good actor. Right up there with Andrew J Robinson (DS9's Garak) , Andrew Miller (Cube, Nothing), and David Hewlett (Atlantis, Pin) in my personal scope. But stick him in a dream role and he becomes mister cardboard cutout. The hell?
Several pre-series screening interviews said that he's been pushing for darker slants, pushing the envelope on some eps. If this season is the result, then I honestly shudder at the thought of what it would have been like if he hadn't.
Compare this finale to Parting of the ways. We had Plot. Ramifications. Pain, time wars, characters that could be developed in a short order and at least you felt something when they met their inevitable squishy deaths. What do we get here? Daddy issues and Emo Cybermen.
But, the season is over, and here's hoping like fuck we at least get the level of s27 back.
Interesting points:
- If there is a parallel Torchwood...then there must be a parallel Doctor. Torchwood was created as a direct consequence of the Doctor's actions.
- If Cybus did indeed get their technology from International Electromatics (Tobias Vaugn's company (Invasion)) then surely Torchwood would have been on that like shit on velcro. Cyber technology? They'd be all over that shit. Perhaps it was a link to Cybus that ended up bringing about their downfall. Now that's an interesting thought...
Niggles
- Ok, RTD, you're just not making sense. Please back the fuck off now and let other people write decent stories. If this is, as you've so touted, the same man who fought the Master, the Daleks, the Silurians...and Torchwood was created in the 1800s, then what the FUCK were they doing throughout the UNIT years? Why was UNIT created at all? Jesus christ man, you're a who fan, you KNOW how obsessively wanky we are. So why end up pissing about with a backstory you're so in love with that you end up making the two canons almost irreconcilable? You should have just made it UNIT / Broadsword and stopped gazing lovingly into your own mirror and reinventing the wheel.
- Please stop treating people like idiots. "Time Lord Technology - it's bigger on the inside than the outside!" yeah, that hoary old fan joke just sounds pathetic now. Try having him say the dimensional transcedentialism - and then when someone says "wha?" you trot out the joke. It would have made the Doctor sound less like a yokel and brought us back a bit to the sci fi roots.
- Skaro is the Dalek home planet. Gallifrey was the Time Lords homeworld. For fucks sake, just say the words. Gall-i-frey. Ska-ro. They're not hard. Stop pissing about and trying to build a mythos about them and make them all mysterious and unnamed when any half-wit with a library card can hit the BBC site and find out what they are. Build the mythos from existing facts, you twats.
- The Cult of Skaro - well, setting aside the whole old school canon where they used humans as components in their battle computers rather than contaminating their own - given how the lone Dalek in Dalek related to its own individuality, and the massive racial purity that the Daleks have - why have the Cult? Why contaimante their own kind? Bloody hell, I was hoping that the Black Dalek would give us a snifter of the Dalek Civil War and we'd end up with the imperial faction.
Rose: "I killed the emperor. Wiped out your whole race"
Black Dalek: "They were Impure. The Dalek Race thanks you."
- Rose remembers wiping out the emperor, but can't remember bringing Jack back to life, merging with the TARDIS and killing the 9th Doctor. Talk about selective memory...
All in all?
Well, it suited the season. Bah.
