My week, food and Doctor Who
Jan. 17th, 2010 02:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lyornThe weather forecast said something about rain this night, but guess what? It's snowing. Again.
Because I was too lazy to dig out my car and not confident enough to bicycle through the old-and-new snow I walked a lot this week. Which was fun. I also took the bus a few times, which wasn't.
Friday evening we (the usual gang, minus I___, plus G___ and P___) went for steak. During the dark part of the year I occasionally become way more carnivorous than usual, and by now I know better than to ignore it. The place I talked us into going has steaks from grass-fed Argentinean cattle and from corn-fed North American, which really makes a difference. (All things considered, I prefer the Argentinean one. It is not as tender, but has more taste.) Because it's the middle of winter, I had hash browns and Brussels sprouts with it. After that, some very chocolaty dessert would have been fine, but the place isn't that good with desserts, so I stuck with coffee. P___ had a cheese plate and let everyone taste who wanted to, and I discovered a very mild French cheese spiced with walnut liquor that I absolutely loved. I bought some today.
Today we watched "Waters of Mars" and "End of Time". Both were OK, but I felt they didn't quite manage to become what they could have been. "WoM" could have used more time and a more complex story, I felt -- compared with "The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit" it didn't develop quite as well. I cared less for the characters, and trying to make them real by passing around family photos did not convince me. The Doctor's change of mind was well done and especially well-acted, but somehow did not fully connect with me. A little more technobabble might have helped.
The "my reward" in "EoT" ruined the pacing badly. I loved the Master to bits, though -- even though the more superhero-y manoeuvres were giggle-worthy. The green people were also great. I felt with the captain of the salvage ship who got caught up in that madness on what should have been a routine mission and was just seriously pissed off. The rest of the Time Lords, though... I don't know. Undermotivated? Star Wars did it better? I enjoyed the throwing around of impressive-sounding names and things in the Doctor's "hell follows them" speech. If they had left out the dragging "reward" part, I would have ended up a lot more impressed. Interesting, also, that Ten, after being pretty much suicidal in Series 3, now goes out with "But I don't want to".
I see Ten's arc as attempting to deal with being the last Time Lord -- less the loneliness part of it (though that, too), but more the trying to find a code to live by, an idea about what, as Jack Sparrow would say, the last Time Lord can do and what he can't do. The Doctor prefers, it seems, that there be rules so he can break them, but now the rules are gone, so what is he going to do? He oscillates between god-like power and renouncing it or being unable to put it to use, which makes him so scarily overreacting against e.g. the Racnoss and the Family of Blood.
Rose distracted him from that conflict -- those two just egged each other on to behave outrageously, which still was a way of rule-breaking, even if only those of politeness. Martha, though, being incredibly supportive, left him with nothing to butt his head against, so with her he had to confront the can do/can't do question. He tries to pull the "mighty Time Lord!" stunt on the Titanic and fails painfully. Donna is the one who tells him to stop and changes the question from can/can't to should/shouldn't. But before he can find the answers, it's over. Or maybe he did find them, just before it was over.
That might be the redeeming feature of that "reward" bit. It has taken everything to save Wilf, but it takes only knowledge of the right place and time to do a lot for the people he cares for.
I still didn't like it. And regarding my ideas about Ten, and where he was going, well, we'll see.
Because I was too lazy to dig out my car and not confident enough to bicycle through the old-and-new snow I walked a lot this week. Which was fun. I also took the bus a few times, which wasn't.
Friday evening we (the usual gang, minus I___, plus G___ and P___) went for steak. During the dark part of the year I occasionally become way more carnivorous than usual, and by now I know better than to ignore it. The place I talked us into going has steaks from grass-fed Argentinean cattle and from corn-fed North American, which really makes a difference. (All things considered, I prefer the Argentinean one. It is not as tender, but has more taste.) Because it's the middle of winter, I had hash browns and Brussels sprouts with it. After that, some very chocolaty dessert would have been fine, but the place isn't that good with desserts, so I stuck with coffee. P___ had a cheese plate and let everyone taste who wanted to, and I discovered a very mild French cheese spiced with walnut liquor that I absolutely loved. I bought some today.
Today we watched "Waters of Mars" and "End of Time". Both were OK, but I felt they didn't quite manage to become what they could have been. "WoM" could have used more time and a more complex story, I felt -- compared with "The Impossible Planet/The Satan Pit" it didn't develop quite as well. I cared less for the characters, and trying to make them real by passing around family photos did not convince me. The Doctor's change of mind was well done and especially well-acted, but somehow did not fully connect with me. A little more technobabble might have helped.
The "my reward" in "EoT" ruined the pacing badly. I loved the Master to bits, though -- even though the more superhero-y manoeuvres were giggle-worthy. The green people were also great. I felt with the captain of the salvage ship who got caught up in that madness on what should have been a routine mission and was just seriously pissed off. The rest of the Time Lords, though... I don't know. Undermotivated? Star Wars did it better? I enjoyed the throwing around of impressive-sounding names and things in the Doctor's "hell follows them" speech. If they had left out the dragging "reward" part, I would have ended up a lot more impressed. Interesting, also, that Ten, after being pretty much suicidal in Series 3, now goes out with "But I don't want to".
I see Ten's arc as attempting to deal with being the last Time Lord -- less the loneliness part of it (though that, too), but more the trying to find a code to live by, an idea about what, as Jack Sparrow would say, the last Time Lord can do and what he can't do. The Doctor prefers, it seems, that there be rules so he can break them, but now the rules are gone, so what is he going to do? He oscillates between god-like power and renouncing it or being unable to put it to use, which makes him so scarily overreacting against e.g. the Racnoss and the Family of Blood.
Rose distracted him from that conflict -- those two just egged each other on to behave outrageously, which still was a way of rule-breaking, even if only those of politeness. Martha, though, being incredibly supportive, left him with nothing to butt his head against, so with her he had to confront the can do/can't do question. He tries to pull the "mighty Time Lord!" stunt on the Titanic and fails painfully. Donna is the one who tells him to stop and changes the question from can/can't to should/shouldn't. But before he can find the answers, it's over. Or maybe he did find them, just before it was over.
That might be the redeeming feature of that "reward" bit. It has taken everything to save Wilf, but it takes only knowledge of the right place and time to do a lot for the people he cares for.
I still didn't like it. And regarding my ideas about Ten, and where he was going, well, we'll see.
