Doctor Who: Partners in Crime

[purplecat]

I liked this. I'm not sure I have a great deal to add beyond that. My favourite bit was the scene between Donna and her grandfather in the allotment - to be honest right up until the moment Donna went all dreamy eyed about travelling between the stars. It occurs to me that there are a lot of these speeches sprinkled through NuWho and they only occasionally work because, frankly, they are just not the sort of thing people say and they break the down-to-earthness it strives for in its contemporary characters.

We missed the very start of the episode so I was a little unclear on the set-up. Was it ever made clear that Adipose (aside for the issues of consent and the fact they were killing folk that witnessed them) were harming their victims? The story came close towards the end to pointing out that these were not straightforward villains but didn't seem to have quite the courage to say so. But it was a clever counterpoint to the Runaway Bride to make this story also about alien children. My jury, I must admit, is still out on Donna. I can see how they've tried to mellow the character a bit but the end result was a little schizophrenic as if they weren't quite sure how to make her challenge the Doctor while at the same time wanting to travel with him. Hopefully this will settle down as the series progresses and once he has no choice but to have her with him.

Comments

[bunn.livejournal.com]

It seemed to me that the Doctor disrupted a situation that would otherwise have ended well for all involved this time round.

Anyone want to painlessly remove my body fat while I sleep without doing any other damage at all, and using the body fat in what seems like a perfectly nice sort of way, is very welcome to it. I don't mind not signing a consent form!

[purplecat]

That was pretty much my feeling. I mean, there were issues about the Adipose, but they were a lot more complex than "look! evil alien! I will thwart your heinous plans!" and I'm not convinced a throw away remark about how it could have worked as a diet plan and a "You've changed" from Donna really washes as an acknowledgment that the Doctor's actions were morally rather murky. But I did wonder if I missed some initial set-up where it was revealed that the dieters eventually wasted away or something.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I don't think there was - in fact, it was explicitly stated that making Adiposes out of non-fatty tissue made the child-Adiposes sick. Which was rather an odd thing to include, now I think about it - if they had just not mentioned that bit, then the Doctor's actions would have made more sense as we would then have assumed that the reproduction would continue until the host died. Peculiar.

I caught a bit of the Confidential afterwards and Russell whatsisname was saying that he thought the Adiposes were sinister, so perhaps they were relying on the 'ick' factor to explain why this was considered so awful. I thought they were cute, personally.

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

The details of what the Adipose were actually up to are irrelevant. Whatever it was, it must have been evil.

Allow me to demonstrate:

- The Doctor is the good guy.
- The Adipose are not the Doctor, and are not endorsed by the Doctor.
- They are therefore the bad guys.
- Therefore what the Adipose were doing was evil.
QED.

It doesn't matter whether they were making babies out of unwanted body fact, destroying the Earth, fixing global warming, or just humming the theme to the Archers. They must be stopped.

[purplecat]

Indeed.

This sort of default reasoning tied to the extremely cautious way the show chooses to display its ambivalence towards the Doctor is the sort of thing that upsets Lawrence Miles so much (though I think his "The Unquiet Dead is all anti-immigration hate propaganda" rant is no longer available for public consumption and I also think, on that occasion, that Miles was wrong).