Digital Raven (digitalraven) wrote,
Digital Raven
digitalraven
  • Mood: A wee bit melancholy

Army of Ghosts

The good:
  1. Motherfucking Daleks. Yes.
  2. The new "cybermen" are okay homages to real cybermen
  3. Jackie actually playing a part rather than being useless filler (if Ace's mum had been so fucking annoying, she'd have been blown up long before she'd get near a camera)
  4. HR people are evil. Something we know, but good to see it made plain.
The bad:
  1. Fucking Torchwood appears to have wiped UNIT out of continuity. That's too much history to fucking ignore. Unless you're a self-important prick like RTD.
  2. The new "cybermen" are referred to as just "cybermen". No mention that they aren't the Metal Men from Mondas who still exist in the mainstream reality.
  3. How the fuck does an alternate Earth have access to very sci-fi guns?
  4. Yet more dimensional fucking about while ignoring CVEs, Logopolis, or the episodes in the series you're supposed to be concluding
  5. RTD proving that he just plain cannot end a season without saying "Shit, I've got all these obvious plot hooks and no way to wrap them up. Let's have this season's big costume expenditure invade Earth, then I can write some quotable dialogue and nobody will notice my plain old inability to plot!"
  6. The big goodbye scene which &madsh; while overplayed &madsh; was genuine, is revealed to be a pathetic fake without any excuses.
I have no doubt that Doomsday will continue in this vein, and it'll be watchable and enjoyable, but bring the series further and further from being anything to do with Doctor Who. Remembrance of the Daleks showed how good you can go if you don't ignore what's gone before, RTD shows how you can ignore it to get a paper-thin story with flashy action but nowhere near the same sense of being something. Too many retcons, too many changes for new viewers that are never explained. They all mount up. Either RTD can do much better but doesn't give a toss because it's easier this way, or this really is the best he can do. If the latter, he should be fired immediately. It's entirely possible to revamp a series without fucking over fans of what went before, but it's a skill he either doesn't want to use or will never have.

This doesn't mean I won't be devouring the Dalek/Cyberman war with childish glee on Saturday, or that I don't appreciate the new series as a whole in and of itself. The majority of the Bad is just nitpicking. But the Daleks are not the Daleks of Remembrance, the Cybermen not the Cybermen of Earthshock. Which is a shame, because they so easily could be.
Tags: geeking out
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