Well, I'm tired of waiting for the 5-star poll. :)
Douglas Adams called. He doesn't so much want his Starship
Titanic back as he just wishes they'd done something more
interesting with it.
I've said before, I think these Christmas Specials are designed
to be watched while not paying much attention - that is, in a
house filled with relatives, kids, toys, and tryptophane-filled
turkeys. (Britain eats the Turkey-people? To annoy any British
reading this, I thought when Christmas was coming your geese were
getting fat...) So this has even less consistency than even a
usual Who episode, but still...
One of the show's standards has been the Doctor berating Humans
for being dim, or at least out of step with galactic society
(insisting on Code Red when everyone else uses Code Mauve, for
example). Yet here we're shown a virtual mirror of our own
society. The Titanic itself is explained away, and must be
allowed anyway, given the decisions that the specials take place
This Christmas (hilarious scene that reveals it!) and that it
would be a space adventure (something I don't think they'd yet
decided when they filmed the cliffhanger that dropped a life
preserver on the Doctor). More begging of coincidence are the
close analogs to tuxedos, Texans, television, and telephones.
The last, the cell phone (or von, as the closed-captioning has
it) particularly disappoints me; I thought they were making a
point of having this mania for "staying connected" as a
particular feature of turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Earth and
its parallel timelines. Maybe this is just my fannishness in
explaining how it wasn't a feature of the futures past Doctors
traveled to.
Well, that's all I had to say on that element of the episode.
Among other things:
I'm glad they didn't dump the malfunctioning Angel Robots, (as
they mentioned doing,) too much wackiness would have ensued. And
at least they weren't Father Christmas Robots this year!
The Angelbots turned to the Doctor as an authority figure?
Because he set himself up as Max's "apprentice" and succeeded in
the test?
Could it have been done with a bit less killing? Instead of
dumping Max in the core, dump his protective "black box" in the
core. "Gee, how are you going to get into it now? Hey, you want
to help us save this ship?" I suppose you could still keep the
tragic death that keeps the Doctor from traveling around with
someone who looks like Kylie Minogue...
--
-Jack
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