progressive politics and regressive entertainment. like peanut and butter.
June 30, 2012 13 Comments
I had high expectations going into this episode of Doctor Who, as it came highly recommended by friends on the interwebs as well as by friends in the material world. And yeah, they were all right. Keep out if you’re scared of spoilers, but come on in if you want to read me fawning over a top-rate forty-four minutes or so of Doctor Who.
DOCTOR WHO: Your life could depend on this. Don’t blink. Don’t even blink. Blink, and you’re dead.
June 26, 2012 2 Comments
When we rejoin the Doctor at the start of “The Family of Blood,” he’s not quite himself. Turned into a human in order to hide, the Doctor is now John Smith. John Smith simply doesn’t know what to do when faced with a family of aliens who have killed some humans, taken over their bodies, and employ scarecrows as soldiers. It’s up to Martha.
MARTHA: Don’t just stand there, move! God, you’re rubbish as a human!
June 17, 2012 2 Comments
“Human Nature” is one of those episodes of Doctor Who which start with action. As in, the Doctor and Martha are dodging lasers in the very first second.
June 13, 2012 7 Comments
So the premise of “42″ is clever. We learn quite quickly that the characters have 42 minutes before crashing into the sun, which means that we’re in for a “real time” episode in a series known for breaking the rules of time. Of course, you can’t break the rules of network time, as those may be stronger than the laws of physics. 42 minutes it is, with some good old-fashioned sci-fi. Look! Spaceships!
June 2, 2012 3 Comments
With Community and Modern Family having come to their temporary ends — not to mention the untimely demise of Sherlock– I’m back to catching up on television from years past. May 5, 2007, to be precise, when “The Lazarus Experiment” first aired on the BBC. To what exotic locale are we going this time?
MARTHA: Home. You took me home.
May 24, 2012 2 Comments
I’m not a Doctor Who fan (though I suspect I might become one if I ever took a look) and even I had to pause over this headline. In my browser, “Jailed for Treason” shows up on a second line, almost like a sub-heading, making the first half of the headline look like it stands alone:
Doctor Who Helped Find Bin Laden
April 9, 2012 Leave a comment
The good stuff starts at 0:30.
H/t Blogging with Badger.
April 8, 2012 1 Comment
I’ve been promised that season three of the new Doctor Who really starts to heat up in the middle, probably around episode 8, which is titled “Human Nature.” In the meantime, I feel compelled to watch these things in order and the next step of the trek required me to view “Evolution of the Daleks,” the second half of a two-parter. I had found the first half (“Daleks in Manhattan”) to be passable but clunky and that’s an accurate description of this episode as well, although there is some inevitable satisfaction in seeing an ending come together.
Plus, they leap straight into the action. Fear the plunger!
March 18, 2012 3 Comments
With “Daleks in Manhattan,” Doctor Who takes us back in time and place to New York, 1930. I assume that the show had an accent coach working with many of the so-called New Yorkers. At times the voices don’t fit so well, but hey, it’s an episode about fighting trash cans and pigs. The revamped daleks I like. The pig-men, eh, not so much…
February 9, 2012 4 Comments
Last night I traveled through time and space, to April 14, 2007, when Season 3, Episode 3 of Doctor Who first aired in Britain. The basic conceit of the episode, as put by the good Doctor, is
What if the traffic jam never stops?
We’re taken to the future, to New New York, underneath the city, in a motorway where people spend their lives driving a few miles.
January 3, 2012 5 Comments
I was thinking about my childhood fascination with the Doctor Who theme song the other night because, well, you’d think about it too if that was one of your childhood highlights, and also because I’ve finally been getting to the new Doctor Who. New. As in 2005.
December 28, 2011 1 Comment
True confessions time: as a child I was a member of two (2) Doctor Who fan societies. In memory of that age, here are the intro themes from all the Doctor Whos, 1963-2010. It’s the BBC Radiophonic Workshop at its best.
You can also mix your own version over at the BBC.
