NewWho 6.7: A Good Man Goes To War
Jun. 5th, 2011 04:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
susanreadsIn which there are questions answered and questions unanswered, including some doozies.
So, today the Doctor finds out who River is; but the reason she can't arrive till the end is about who she is, not about his finding out. I love it! She avoids crossing her own timeline, unlike Some People. Now I need to watch all the previous episodes with her and the Ponds again, except not "now" (I am so far behind with everything else, and there's a whole summer before they come back), and not "all" (I didn't keep recordings of the previous season). Also love: the significance of "The only water in the forest is the river".
One unanswered question: is she Tiny Time Lady (in which case, she'd have to know, and has been carefully not mentioning it)? Or is that more misdirection? I also wonder whether the "young girl" waiting for the Doctor to drop out of the sky was younger than the people complaining about loss of agency were allowing for. If she grew up in captivity, learning all those useful skills that don't really go with being an archaeologist that River displays, the Doctor's visits would be when she got to play hookey. Now she can get out of jail herself. On the other hand, we'd then have her parents being tormented by the writers, which wouldn't be new, but over a longer timespan than seems sustainable; they're going to pull another Time Can Be Rewritten, perhaps.
Another unanswered question is who she's going to kill. The idea of it's being the Doctor is left lying around in plain sight for us to pick up, a bit too obviously I think. But if it's somebody we know nothing about until that episode, that would be cheating. Ever since I saw the episode title and the promo shot of Rory in his centurion costume, I've been thinking, hmmm... Moffatt does like writing lines that appear to be about the Doctor and actually refer to Rory. "Last of his kind" is pushing it, though, srsly.
Two things I don't love: the way the cleric from the forest (the Radio Times calls her Lorna Bucket) gets killed after checking off two, or was it three, plot points, as if that's all she was there for; and the way they wrote the "Fat One and the Thin One" scene. I liked the offhand reference to "my husband", but then we get "We're the Gay Marriage Anglicans, do we need names too?" (not an exact quote), which strikes me (not having seen Confidential yet) as a meta comment that really doesn't fit. I loved That One Line in episode 2, where we already knew the character, and it didn't make any difference except for explaining why he had to leave the FBI, and that was the point. If the Anglican line and the one about the Papal Mainframe were meant to imply a whole universe of schismatic churches militant that had all united for the crusade that I guess we'll see more of in the second half-season, I don't think it worked. I'm not jumping up and down saying "I hate this". The season isn't complete yet, after all.
Another thing I do love is Jenny and her Silurian boss/lover/protector/whatever. Is that the Silurian general who killed Rory? Evidently in this timeline things went very differently - well, obviously they'd have to, but not just in the "not killing Rory" aspect. The Doctor apparently convinced her to stop attacking the humans, and I guess the "going back to sleep for a thousand years" wasn't necessary ... so how did she end up in the Victorian age? More unanswered questions! I wonder whether there'll be a canonical revised timeline somewhere in the online extras I haven't sought out, or whether they're leaving it to the fans to do that.
When I've posted this I'll go back to my reading page. I expect to see squee posts all over![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
doctorwho and rivereffinsong.
Spoilers, sweetie.
So, today the Doctor finds out who River is; but the reason she can't arrive till the end is about who she is, not about his finding out. I love it! She avoids crossing her own timeline, unlike Some People. Now I need to watch all the previous episodes with her and the Ponds again, except not "now" (I am so far behind with everything else, and there's a whole summer before they come back), and not "all" (I didn't keep recordings of the previous season). Also love: the significance of "The only water in the forest is the river".
One unanswered question: is she Tiny Time Lady (in which case, she'd have to know, and has been carefully not mentioning it)? Or is that more misdirection? I also wonder whether the "young girl" waiting for the Doctor to drop out of the sky was younger than the people complaining about loss of agency were allowing for. If she grew up in captivity, learning all those useful skills that don't really go with being an archaeologist that River displays, the Doctor's visits would be when she got to play hookey. Now she can get out of jail herself. On the other hand, we'd then have her parents being tormented by the writers, which wouldn't be new, but over a longer timespan than seems sustainable; they're going to pull another Time Can Be Rewritten, perhaps.
Another unanswered question is who she's going to kill. The idea of it's being the Doctor is left lying around in plain sight for us to pick up, a bit too obviously I think. But if it's somebody we know nothing about until that episode, that would be cheating. Ever since I saw the episode title and the promo shot of Rory in his centurion costume, I've been thinking, hmmm... Moffatt does like writing lines that appear to be about the Doctor and actually refer to Rory. "Last of his kind" is pushing it, though, srsly.
Two things I don't love: the way the cleric from the forest (the Radio Times calls her Lorna Bucket) gets killed after checking off two, or was it three, plot points, as if that's all she was there for; and the way they wrote the "Fat One and the Thin One" scene. I liked the offhand reference to "my husband", but then we get "We're the Gay Marriage Anglicans, do we need names too?" (not an exact quote), which strikes me (not having seen Confidential yet) as a meta comment that really doesn't fit. I loved That One Line in episode 2, where we already knew the character, and it didn't make any difference except for explaining why he had to leave the FBI, and that was the point. If the Anglican line and the one about the Papal Mainframe were meant to imply a whole universe of schismatic churches militant that had all united for the crusade that I guess we'll see more of in the second half-season, I don't think it worked. I'm not jumping up and down saying "I hate this". The season isn't complete yet, after all.
Another thing I do love is Jenny and her Silurian boss/lover/protector/whatever. Is that the Silurian general who killed Rory? Evidently in this timeline things went very differently - well, obviously they'd have to, but not just in the "not killing Rory" aspect. The Doctor apparently convinced her to stop attacking the humans, and I guess the "going back to sleep for a thousand years" wasn't necessary ... so how did she end up in the Victorian age? More unanswered questions! I wonder whether there'll be a canonical revised timeline somewhere in the online extras I haven't sought out, or whether they're leaving it to the fans to do that.
When I've posted this I'll go back to my reading page. I expect to see squee posts all over
doctorwho and rivereffinsong.