(no subject)

[chelseagirl]

Just watched this week's Who; haven't seen reactions yet, but they're mixed at our house. The idea of looking at the Doctor from an outsider's perspective was inherently a good one, and the cartoony elements worked at first, but there was a strange shift in mood that didn't work for me -- these sweet lonely people end tragically, and we know enough about them to *care*, so weren't they prime candidates for the Doctor to make everything all right? Just this once? (Shades of Nine crying Everybody Lives!) I like darker Who, but here the elements were too disparate -- I cared about the secondary characters in Impossible Planet/Satan Pit but expected they wouldn't all make it, because it wasn't that sort of a story. Here, we began with fluff, but then fluff went strangely sour. The half-rescue of Ursula puts both her and Elton into a sort of half-life, where neither can move on (and if she doesn't get any older, what happens to her years and years from now when Elton's gone?). Oh, and did the episode really need to end on an obvious oral sex joke? (Er, this is still partly a kid's show, yeah?) This poor actress, between Moaning Myrtle and this, she seems strongly bound up in architectual elements -- plumbing, paving slabs . . .

Pluses: much of the episode amused, the Doctor saying he's not a nice person, the return of Compassionate!Rose, the shoutout to Mickey . . . and Jackie, who started out on a one-note Predatory!Jackie note but then really opened up her performance and was quite moving.