Filmography
Apr. 11th, 2010 12:10 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_lady_lilyDoctor Who: The Ark in Space
Why, yes, we are watching a lot of vintage Who. It's alright, we're swapping over to Heroes and 30 Rock for a bit.
This particular Who, from 1975, features Sarah-Jane and Harry coming with the Doctor to a space ark in which the human race is being cryogenically suspended until they can safely return to Earth, which apparently has been irradiated by solar flare thingummies. The problem, however, is that a parasitic giant wasp thingy, a Wirrn queen, got into the station, and laid her eggs in the body of one of the humans, which promptly did what parasitic wasp thingies do and devoured him to get themselves to the larvae phase. The episode is basically a race against time to save the sleeping humans before the Wirrn become full adults.
It's not one of the greatest ones, although it's not bad. Poor Sarah-Jane gets rather short shrift, and there's some incredibly sexist commentary throughout from both the Doctor and Harry in her direction. She gives Harry what-for, but takes it from the Doctor, which is rather irritating. She also does a lot of rather limp flailing, which gets a bit tiresome; she's far more robust by the time we see her in Pyramids of Mars. I quite like Harry, in a bumbling cheerfully incompetent and dim kind of way; I do think that Vira, the first human to be reanimated, has it spot on when she says something like "Your language has no meaning" - he's full of that rather public school 'dash it, old girl' style that is so evocative of a certain period and class. One senses parody.
I'm not quite sure why this wasn't particularly gripping; there was just something missing in terms of excitement and drive, I think. It felt a bit - lazy isn't the word, but certainly a bit going through the motions. It's not bad, but it's not one of my favourites. Three stars.
Why, yes, we are watching a lot of vintage Who. It's alright, we're swapping over to Heroes and 30 Rock for a bit.
This particular Who, from 1975, features Sarah-Jane and Harry coming with the Doctor to a space ark in which the human race is being cryogenically suspended until they can safely return to Earth, which apparently has been irradiated by solar flare thingummies. The problem, however, is that a parasitic giant wasp thingy, a Wirrn queen, got into the station, and laid her eggs in the body of one of the humans, which promptly did what parasitic wasp thingies do and devoured him to get themselves to the larvae phase. The episode is basically a race against time to save the sleeping humans before the Wirrn become full adults.
It's not one of the greatest ones, although it's not bad. Poor Sarah-Jane gets rather short shrift, and there's some incredibly sexist commentary throughout from both the Doctor and Harry in her direction. She gives Harry what-for, but takes it from the Doctor, which is rather irritating. She also does a lot of rather limp flailing, which gets a bit tiresome; she's far more robust by the time we see her in Pyramids of Mars. I quite like Harry, in a bumbling cheerfully incompetent and dim kind of way; I do think that Vira, the first human to be reanimated, has it spot on when she says something like "Your language has no meaning" - he's full of that rather public school 'dash it, old girl' style that is so evocative of a certain period and class. One senses parody.
I'm not quite sure why this wasn't particularly gripping; there was just something missing in terms of excitement and drive, I think. It felt a bit - lazy isn't the word, but certainly a bit going through the motions. It's not bad, but it's not one of my favourites. Three stars.
