Post by magnusgreel on May 14, 2008 7:26:03 GMT
I just was sent a couple more "season three" (or season 29) tapes from Canada. They skipped a few stories in the middle of the season, but I got to see (with taping errors resulting in bits being lost including some titles) "Utopia" which then leads into the final 2-parter.
I'd really expected not to see anything great or even good and not embarrassing, after the first few of the season. That scenery-chewing spider and the rest of the anthropomorphized Earth animals really depressed me.
I don't know how the budget could have been SO tight in this day and age, that they could have felt they could get away with just using (?) some boiler room for the interior of a spaceship in "42". Same with the miscellaneous low-tech "stuff" on the sets of "Utopia". I know that occasionally DW has joked with itself about the famously cheap sets... I think most of season 15 may have had that sort of attitude in the design-- intentionally cheap-looking. The Castellan's spray-painted control panel with glitter thrown onto it comes to mind.
I know that any technological look they came up with would be incredibly old in a story set in the year, what, 100 trillion was it?! Why not pick a look out of a hat, since we can't imagine what it would really look like anyway, and they're in a period of decline...? But it looked as if they picked some random room in a disused old power plant or something, and shone a bunch of colored light bulbs onto everything. RTD doesn't care about science-fiction, I know, but really...
Still--- that aside, things start getting distinctly creepy and unsettling from the start of "Utopia", and it doesn't let up. The three-part story just gets more and more bizarre, in a good way, surprising, disturbing... I'd thought Tennant DW was permanently shallow and "just TV", by now. What we end up with though is something that-- how do I put it-- this version of DW exceeds itself. It becomes epic.
This is the opposite of the spider Xmas story, where it was just another cartoon villain that didn't matter. What is emotionally compelling about the Doctor-Master relationship and the psychology of the power-hungry is delved into in a way that may have only been in the backs of our minds watching those great Delgado/Pertwee scenes.
Anyway, as the story becomes more emotionally overwhelming, and more epic, it also becomes distinctly freakier. The Master keeping the Doctor in... that form, that was jarring, and it was clear at that point that we were not just watching some escapist space adventure. This is about souls and not ray guns and space ships. What some people will do to other people.... this puts, say, "King's Daemons" to shame, where we weren't even supposed to care or think about the fact that the Ainley Master wanted to subvert the Magna Carta for, apparently, no reason whatsoever. They thought about why someone like that does what he does, in the Tennant story. I still have to see it a few more times to take in what they were saying, precisely, though.
I'd really expected not to see anything great or even good and not embarrassing, after the first few of the season. That scenery-chewing spider and the rest of the anthropomorphized Earth animals really depressed me.
I don't know how the budget could have been SO tight in this day and age, that they could have felt they could get away with just using (?) some boiler room for the interior of a spaceship in "42". Same with the miscellaneous low-tech "stuff" on the sets of "Utopia". I know that occasionally DW has joked with itself about the famously cheap sets... I think most of season 15 may have had that sort of attitude in the design-- intentionally cheap-looking. The Castellan's spray-painted control panel with glitter thrown onto it comes to mind.
I know that any technological look they came up with would be incredibly old in a story set in the year, what, 100 trillion was it?! Why not pick a look out of a hat, since we can't imagine what it would really look like anyway, and they're in a period of decline...? But it looked as if they picked some random room in a disused old power plant or something, and shone a bunch of colored light bulbs onto everything. RTD doesn't care about science-fiction, I know, but really...
Still--- that aside, things start getting distinctly creepy and unsettling from the start of "Utopia", and it doesn't let up. The three-part story just gets more and more bizarre, in a good way, surprising, disturbing... I'd thought Tennant DW was permanently shallow and "just TV", by now. What we end up with though is something that-- how do I put it-- this version of DW exceeds itself. It becomes epic.
This is the opposite of the spider Xmas story, where it was just another cartoon villain that didn't matter. What is emotionally compelling about the Doctor-Master relationship and the psychology of the power-hungry is delved into in a way that may have only been in the backs of our minds watching those great Delgado/Pertwee scenes.
Anyway, as the story becomes more emotionally overwhelming, and more epic, it also becomes distinctly freakier. The Master keeping the Doctor in... that form, that was jarring, and it was clear at that point that we were not just watching some escapist space adventure. This is about souls and not ray guns and space ships. What some people will do to other people.... this puts, say, "King's Daemons" to shame, where we weren't even supposed to care or think about the fact that the Ainley Master wanted to subvert the Magna Carta for, apparently, no reason whatsoever. They thought about why someone like that does what he does, in the Tennant story. I still have to see it a few more times to take in what they were saying, precisely, though.
