purplecat | Oct. 6th, 2011

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Oct. 6th, 2011

I have a feeling that I'm maybe going to have to stop comparing Doctor Who episodes to Sapphire and Steel since the comparison is rapidly going to become over-used. It is worth noting, I think, that we've had a run of stories that are deliberately working with an atmosphere of claustrophia and a fairly strong sense of place and that naturally invokes Sapphire and Steel whenever the atmosphere veers towards the surreal. It's possible that this is because of budgetry constraints, though I'm not a great counter of sets and locations so I don't really know.

( Onto Spoilers )

Coming back to that comparison with Sapphire and Steel, I'm undecided about the extent to which the show is deliberately giving us stories reminiscent of P. J. Hammond's output. Clearly there is an ascetic (claustrophic, apparently mundane, locations and surreal images) that both episodes share with the 1970s show but, as I said when I reviewed Night Terrors, Doctor Who continues to maintain the fundamental conceit that there is an explanation for events that can be understood by mere humans which is rather different from the Sapphire and Steel approach. Doctor Who has its own history of slightly surreal story-telling and constrained sets, though it's fondness for the mundane setting really only arrived with Russell T. Davies. Possibly what I should really be surprised about is that we haven't been having at least a couple of episodes per season that cause me to hark back to the older show.

I have a feeling that I'm maybe going to have to stop comparing Doctor Who episodes to Sapphire and Steel since the comparison is rapidly going to become over-used. It is worth noting, I think, that we've had a run of stories that are deliberately working with an atmosphere of claustrophia and a fairly strong sense of place and that naturally invokes Sapphire and Steel whenever the atmosphere veers towards the surreal. It's possible that this is because of budgetry constraints, though I'm not a great counter of sets and locations so I don't really know.

( Onto Spoilers )

Coming back to that comparison with Sapphire and Steel, I'm undecided about the extent to which the show is deliberately giving us stories reminiscent of P. J. Hammond's output. Clearly there is an ascetic (claustrophic, apparently mundane, locations and surreal images) that both episodes share with the 1970s show but, as I said when I reviewed Night Terrors, Doctor Who continues to maintain the fundamental conceit that there is an explanation for events that can be understood by mere humans which is rather different from the Sapphire and Steel approach. Doctor Who has its own history of slightly surreal story-telling and constrained sets, though it's fondness for the mundane setting really only arrived with Russell T. Davies. Possibly what I should really be surprised about is that we haven't been having at least a couple of episodes per season that cause me to hark back to the older show.

This entry was originally posted at http://purplecat.dreamwidth.org/54766.html.

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