Filmography
Feb. 21st, 2010 10:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyDoctor Who: Robots of Death
This is the Who episode that comes before the Talons of Weng-Chiang, and let's face it, the title probably gives away a bit of what the plot is about. Essentially the story is set upon a mining ship run mainly by robots - who have been programmed to kill, thus overriding one of their core programming commands. The Doctor and Leela, suspected of being the murderers themselves, must find out who the killer is, before all goes horribly to pot.
A definite highlight is the mining vessel captain, Commander Uvanov (Russell Hunter), who is brilliantly wicked and evil and just a wee bit camp when he can't control himself. He's a real pantomime villain, so you know it can't be him. There's a very touching robot self-sacrifice. Leela, of course, starts screaming in panic at one point, but I felt a bit less bad about her doing this when she doesn't understand the technology that's exploding at the time. The second in command, Toos (Pamela Salem) was far more wimpy and screaming, not helped by extended scenes of her being strangled by robots in her cabin which, frankly, was kitted out rather more as a boudoir than a cabin. I have to admit finding that a bit irritating. But it was all redeemed by fantastic face-paint for the evil genius who was reprogramming the robots and who, naturally, lost in the end. Thanks to helium. Yes, helium. Squeaky voices bought down the robot overlord. So there you go.
Four stars - tightly plotted and entertaining, but somewhat reliant on the screaming women trope for comfort.
As Time Goes By, season 7
This is more of a marker than a review, because if you haven't seen this from season 1, by this point you'll be thoroughly lost. I'm starting to appreciate just how lovingly the writers build up this program, reincorporating references and comments and jokes from the very first season right into the latest episodes - a real sense of a family which makes this such a work of genius.
If you're interested, this is the season when new people move into the house next door and turn out to be awful; Lionel and Jean work out not to get involved in village politics down in their country home; the crew host a party for an old folks' home; and Alastair proposes to Judy. With not fantastic consequences.
I have developed a slightly nasty habit of curling up on the futon watching an episode and giggling to myself while G plays silly computer games on the dining table. I mainly do this so I can enjoy the uncontrollable giggles that he gets whenever Alastair says something particularly outrageous.
Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric
We watched this tonight, whilst eating take-away curry. A lot of take-away curry. Nom. Anyway. This is a 1989 Sylvester McCoy Doctor, with sidekick Ace (Sophie Aldred), so it officially is now the newest Old Who episode I've seen. No real reason for the decision to jump timeslots, I just quite liked the name. As you may have guessed, it does presage the Norse mythology that is woven into quite a lot of the storyline, about Fenric (Fenrir properly, of course) and his Wolves and Viking Treasure and so forth. There are also vampires, or haemovores, in a small sleepy English seaside town in the Second World War, and ciphers, and computers, and Norse inscriptions, and Russians. Yes, Russians. That bit got a wee bit garbled, although I understand it was something about stealing a deciphering computer - now I think about it, quite how they were planning to get a bloody big deciphering computer (think ENIGMA) into the tiny dingies that these lads had is beyond me, but there we go.
Now, I did like Ace as a Companion, and think I would like to see more of her; I also think that there's a certain resonance between the hints at discovering-the-Companion's-history storyline that were picked up in this arc and the Billy Piper/Rose discovering-the-Companion's-inner-self storyline that is going to play such a big part when New Who comes around. That's as much a hunch as anything else, of course, but it struck me that there were more affinities between New Who and that episode than the Tom Baker ones. I'm not quite sure what I think of McCoy' Doctor - he's not bad, in that he does confident bluster and bluff well, but there are moments when I don't think he quite had authority. He was trying to, but it didn't always work. About a quarter of the time, I would say, not any more, but it was quite noticable.
Anyway! The costume department obviously had a ball, and there were latex tentacle-masks. So that's all good. Four stars, I think.
This is the Who episode that comes before the Talons of Weng-Chiang, and let's face it, the title probably gives away a bit of what the plot is about. Essentially the story is set upon a mining ship run mainly by robots - who have been programmed to kill, thus overriding one of their core programming commands. The Doctor and Leela, suspected of being the murderers themselves, must find out who the killer is, before all goes horribly to pot.
A definite highlight is the mining vessel captain, Commander Uvanov (Russell Hunter), who is brilliantly wicked and evil and just a wee bit camp when he can't control himself. He's a real pantomime villain, so you know it can't be him. There's a very touching robot self-sacrifice. Leela, of course, starts screaming in panic at one point, but I felt a bit less bad about her doing this when she doesn't understand the technology that's exploding at the time. The second in command, Toos (Pamela Salem) was far more wimpy and screaming, not helped by extended scenes of her being strangled by robots in her cabin which, frankly, was kitted out rather more as a boudoir than a cabin. I have to admit finding that a bit irritating. But it was all redeemed by fantastic face-paint for the evil genius who was reprogramming the robots and who, naturally, lost in the end. Thanks to helium. Yes, helium. Squeaky voices bought down the robot overlord. So there you go.
Four stars - tightly plotted and entertaining, but somewhat reliant on the screaming women trope for comfort.
As Time Goes By, season 7
This is more of a marker than a review, because if you haven't seen this from season 1, by this point you'll be thoroughly lost. I'm starting to appreciate just how lovingly the writers build up this program, reincorporating references and comments and jokes from the very first season right into the latest episodes - a real sense of a family which makes this such a work of genius.
If you're interested, this is the season when new people move into the house next door and turn out to be awful; Lionel and Jean work out not to get involved in village politics down in their country home; the crew host a party for an old folks' home; and Alastair proposes to Judy. With not fantastic consequences.
I have developed a slightly nasty habit of curling up on the futon watching an episode and giggling to myself while G plays silly computer games on the dining table. I mainly do this so I can enjoy the uncontrollable giggles that he gets whenever Alastair says something particularly outrageous.
Doctor Who: The Curse of Fenric
We watched this tonight, whilst eating take-away curry. A lot of take-away curry. Nom. Anyway. This is a 1989 Sylvester McCoy Doctor, with sidekick Ace (Sophie Aldred), so it officially is now the newest Old Who episode I've seen. No real reason for the decision to jump timeslots, I just quite liked the name. As you may have guessed, it does presage the Norse mythology that is woven into quite a lot of the storyline, about Fenric (Fenrir properly, of course) and his Wolves and Viking Treasure and so forth. There are also vampires, or haemovores, in a small sleepy English seaside town in the Second World War, and ciphers, and computers, and Norse inscriptions, and Russians. Yes, Russians. That bit got a wee bit garbled, although I understand it was something about stealing a deciphering computer - now I think about it, quite how they were planning to get a bloody big deciphering computer (think ENIGMA) into the tiny dingies that these lads had is beyond me, but there we go.
Now, I did like Ace as a Companion, and think I would like to see more of her; I also think that there's a certain resonance between the hints at discovering-the-Companion's-history storyline that were picked up in this arc and the Billy Piper/Rose discovering-the-Companion's-inner-self storyline that is going to play such a big part when New Who comes around. That's as much a hunch as anything else, of course, but it struck me that there were more affinities between New Who and that episode than the Tom Baker ones. I'm not quite sure what I think of McCoy' Doctor - he's not bad, in that he does confident bluster and bluff well, but there are moments when I don't think he quite had authority. He was trying to, but it didn't always work. About a quarter of the time, I would say, not any more, but it was quite noticable.
Anyway! The costume department obviously had a ball, and there were latex tentacle-masks. So that's all good. Four stars, I think.
