A Good Man Goes to War
Jun. 20th, 2011 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
purplecatI liked that.
I can see that it has many of the flaws of the RTD style finale. There is a lot of sound and thunder. It is, in places, rather more portentious than it can really carry. It's not clear that what has already been established about River Song on screen adequately supports what we get here but...
I loved the way we got a whole new set of people from the Doctor's past and how they all managed to establish themselves with a personality in a very packed 45 minutes. Obviously none of them have great depth, but not a single one was faceless and bland in the way that some of the characters from The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People managed to be with twice the time available. And they were fun which was important, otherwise the whole episode could have become too grim. I was very interested that Moffat here managed to push so many of the "returning character!" buttons while using new characters. Thinking of the Doctor's explicit rejection of a lengthy flashback sequence at the end of last season (where he's talking to Amy in her sleep) I think this demonstrates something of an agenda on Moffat's part not to become too trapped into referring backwards where he can introduce something new.
The same, of course, is true of the revelation of River's origins. Setting up and then satisfactorarily resolving a long running mystery in a television (or other) series is notoriously difficult (The X-files springs instantly to mind here). I felt this did pretty well. Obviously we don't yet have the full story of River's relationship to the Doctor but we know now why they're so close and why she seems to have super-powers (albeit ones she singularly failed to demonstrate in her first appearance) and all this has been done without the necessity of harking back to Who lore. I liked the fact that the resolution was actually set up after the mystery had been proposed. It shouldn't have worked but somehow it did!
I still don't much like River, to be honest, much preferring Amy and Rory (and I'm getting quite worried about poor Rory). Most of that is performance, I think, though I'm also not that keen on the way she's transformed from practicing archeologist to super-powered time baby con-woman. I thought this episode was good for both Amy and Rory. I said earlier in the season that I wished Amy showed a little more self-awareness and Rory a little more backbone and I felt the balance was pretty much perfect in A Good Man Goes to War. They were still recognisably the same characters but it was easier to see what was special about them and why they worked as a couple than it has been in some other stories.
The accusation that this "wasn't a story" can be levelled at this episode just as it was at The Doctor's Wife. This was all middle with no real beginning or end. I regret that, in a way, because I enjoyed it so much I would like to be able to watch it as a standalone but it's so tightly connected to everything around it, I don't think that is really possible. That's the price you have to pay, of course, for arc plots that are more tightly integrated into a season than a simple recurring word or motif. On the whole I think I can live with that.
I can see that it has many of the flaws of the RTD style finale. There is a lot of sound and thunder. It is, in places, rather more portentious than it can really carry. It's not clear that what has already been established about River Song on screen adequately supports what we get here but...
I loved the way we got a whole new set of people from the Doctor's past and how they all managed to establish themselves with a personality in a very packed 45 minutes. Obviously none of them have great depth, but not a single one was faceless and bland in the way that some of the characters from The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People managed to be with twice the time available. And they were fun which was important, otherwise the whole episode could have become too grim. I was very interested that Moffat here managed to push so many of the "returning character!" buttons while using new characters. Thinking of the Doctor's explicit rejection of a lengthy flashback sequence at the end of last season (where he's talking to Amy in her sleep) I think this demonstrates something of an agenda on Moffat's part not to become too trapped into referring backwards where he can introduce something new.
The same, of course, is true of the revelation of River's origins. Setting up and then satisfactorarily resolving a long running mystery in a television (or other) series is notoriously difficult (The X-files springs instantly to mind here). I felt this did pretty well. Obviously we don't yet have the full story of River's relationship to the Doctor but we know now why they're so close and why she seems to have super-powers (albeit ones she singularly failed to demonstrate in her first appearance) and all this has been done without the necessity of harking back to Who lore. I liked the fact that the resolution was actually set up after the mystery had been proposed. It shouldn't have worked but somehow it did!
I still don't much like River, to be honest, much preferring Amy and Rory (and I'm getting quite worried about poor Rory). Most of that is performance, I think, though I'm also not that keen on the way she's transformed from practicing archeologist to super-powered time baby con-woman. I thought this episode was good for both Amy and Rory. I said earlier in the season that I wished Amy showed a little more self-awareness and Rory a little more backbone and I felt the balance was pretty much perfect in A Good Man Goes to War. They were still recognisably the same characters but it was easier to see what was special about them and why they worked as a couple than it has been in some other stories.
The accusation that this "wasn't a story" can be levelled at this episode just as it was at The Doctor's Wife. This was all middle with no real beginning or end. I regret that, in a way, because I enjoyed it so much I would like to be able to watch it as a standalone but it's so tightly connected to everything around it, I don't think that is really possible. That's the price you have to pay, of course, for arc plots that are more tightly integrated into a season than a simple recurring word or motif. On the whole I think I can live with that.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-20 11:56 pm (UTC)If you're referring to the possibility of her regenerating, I recall her saying to the Doctor that the Chair would kill him, too. It's been proven several times over that Regeneration can be prevented - that may have been the case in Forest of the Dead.
It felt very meta-arc, with the beginning being the entire prior of the season and the end...well, we've seen bits of it. Which, in a show that's traditionally (pre-Ninth) been fairly episodic, is really odd. But a lot of scifi lately is cribbing forms from precursors such as Babylon 5, in which it's not so much season 1, season 2, season 3, as miniseries 1, miniseries 2, miniseries 3 - arguably even X-hour made-for-tv movie 1, X-hour made-for-tv movie 2, X-hour made-for-tv movie 3. Which, when it works, is amazing.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-06-21 09:45 am (UTC)I was thinking more of the jump-in-the-air-swirl-around-and-shoot-things bit. The Doctor exhibits a lot of what could broadly be classed as super-powers, though they tend to be signified as being-terribly-clever within the show. River has gradually begun to show the same tendencies. We're encouraged to think of her as time-lord-special rather than human-special. If you see what I mean.
Babylon 5 was obviously incredibly influential. Though you can see how its attempt at ARC plotting was so tightly woven that it ended up over-constraining the show. Buffy, for instance, managed much better by not committing itself too far in advance. I've noticed a certain move away from ARC plotting in a lot of shows recently, but I don't think we're going to return to the 1980s when genre shows tended to default to the assumption that the audience couldn't even remember last week's episode, let alone anything that had come before. A lot of 70s shows (e.g. Blakes' 7 and Survivors) seem a lot more adult, in that respect, than the stuff that was being churned out when I was a teenager and I think now we'd refer to the things those shows were doing as "ARC plotting". Interestingly, I suppose, a lot of Doctor Who's flirtations with ARC plotting (e.g. the E-Space trilogy and the Black Guardian trilogy were 80s experiments. Though the Key to Time was in the 70s). But I thing B5, for all its faults, really marked a sea change in the way the producers of genre shows regarded what their audience wanted from them.