The current series of Dr Who has been a bit uneven - there was one pretty weak episode about Daleks and the Empire State Building - but this weekend's story, Blink, was perhaps the best I've seen.
It had a time travel story that was easy to follow, and the scariest baddies ever: they can only move when you can't see them, but when you blink, they move very quickly indeed...
It had a time travel story that was easy to follow, and the scariest baddies ever: they can only move when you can't see them, but when you blink, they move very quickly indeed...
Yes, I too thought Blink was a terrific story, even though the Doctor featured so little.
ReplyDeleteOne way I measure how good a Dr Who story is, is the number of shivers I get while watching it. This one certainly gave me the shivers!
I loved Tom Baker as the Doctor, found Peter Davison to be too jarring a successor, and, perhaps to my detriment, haven't watched since.
ReplyDeleteYouTube has plenty of fanvids featuring montages of dramatic moments over romantic soundtracks...
Doctor Who became increasingly nerdy and esoteric, until only harcore fans like Martpol were watching.
ReplyDeleteIt was pulled in about 1989 and only brought back a few years ago by Russel T Davies, but as an infinitely superior show, hitting exactly the right Saturday teatime note as a children's programme which adults can enjoy. It's now overtaken Eastenders as the BBC's 'flagship' show.
I absolutely loved Blink, though I liked the previous two episodes even more. All three - plus Father's Day, the two World War II episodes from the first series, and the 'Satan' episodes last year - were written by big Doctor Who fans who'd previously written fannish-type novels, so it just goes to show how great we are!
ReplyDeleteBrit:
As you would expect, I must take issue with your "infinitely superior show" comment. Certainly superior in terms of production values and consistency of acting, obviously (apparently the whole of the 1989 season was made for the price of one episode of Red Dwarf. And also superior to much of the mid-80s dross that made Colin Baker look a complete laughing stock (despite being a really very good actor).
But not superior when considering the broad sweep of TV history. The old series was highly innovative, had proportionally just as many good scripts, just as keen a sense of moral peril, and often more refined plotting. On the downside, many stories were too long (the very first series lasted 38 weeks), and quality control was inferior.
But the new series has hardly been all great: look at this series' Daleks In Manhattan and the dreadful Evolution Of The Daleks, and compare them to Tom Baker's classic Genesis Of The Daleks: so much better written, so much more purpose and, frankly, much better acted. I showed Genesis' "touching the wires" scene to a class of 9-year-olds a while back (there was a legitimate reason), and they were transfixed.
I only call it as I see it, Martpol.
ReplyDeleteI did like the bit at the end of Blink, with the Doctor warning us never to blink over a montage of gargoyles and famous monuments - that segment had absolutely no purpose other than make children forever scared of statues. Genius.
As luck would have it, Daleks in Manhattan was the episode shown while we were visiting. My son, a big Dr. Who fan, says, "Eh." He's still looking forward to seeing the whole season.
ReplyDelete"...that segment had absolutely no purpose other than make children forever scared of statues."
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely, classic Doctor Who. They did it with the Autons in the old series: first make everyone scared of shop dummies, then (to the extent of questions being asked in Parliament) daffodils and police.
Agreed. I was rapt throughout 'Blink'. And as Martpol says, the previous double-episode story, with the Doctor trapped as a normal human, oblivious to his situation, was pretty good as well. The evil public-schoolboy was just brilliant.
ReplyDeleteGoing back to the Tom Baker Doctor Who episodes, the story which sticks in my mind is the one where there was a colony of robots upon some sort of space-station. The robots were supposed to be obedient, but there were some 'bad eggs'...The look of these robots scared the hell out of me as a kid.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteAh yes, that would be - inevitably - .
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure whether the above appears properly on other people's browsers, but that link was supposed to point to http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/robotsofdeath/
ReplyDeleteIndeed, Robots of Death it is.
ReplyDelete