'Last of the Time Lords' Oh my giddy aunt, oh crumbs!!

I have held off on reviewing 'Last Of The Time Lords' for several weeks. I have now seen it twice & have had several weeks to sit with it & ruminate over it. My considered opinion? An inept, embarrasing & deeply frustrating travesty!

Here's why...Firstly; the casual off-handed nastiness of it. The Doctor has a dog bowl & lives in a tent with hay on the floor...Fabulous darlings!!...thought the Production Office! How wonderfully degrading! Oh! I know!... let's chuck a plastic pop song over it & have a whole glitzy montage of the Doctor's miseries inflicted by the Master. If you have to show the Doctor suffering (which is fine because it creates drama & makes his final victory sweeter) don't be so damned flip about it Russell & Co! Also, the shrinking Doctor looked utterly ridiculous. He was shrunk basically to make the Master seem more intimdating by comparison. This is lazy writing. Make the Master seem more intimidating by his deeds, his words & by the acting performance. As if the Doctor would shrink with age anyway? This is just arrant silliness. A chance to create a second rate Yoda/ Lord of the Rings type of gimp. And what was with the big eyes? "Oh we have to make him look REALLY sad because the viewers won't be able to just imagine that or draw their own conclusions". Why the oversize head? "oh we have to make him look tragic yet also strangely cute of course!"

The most disappointing thing however was the inexcusable laziness of the """RESOLUTION""" of Martha's character. If the unrequited love storyline was going to prove such an unresolvable problem, why push her character that way all season? We are robbed of the chance of watching her character develop slowly in confidence & wisdom next season by having her turned into a cliche no-nonsense action woman on a quest for "oh I don't know...a year?!, Let's make it seem REALLY dramatic" & writing her out for the lions' share of next season. A one minute montage of Martha sludging through snow & sleet for a year doesn't cut it for character development I'm afraid. Lazy, lazy, lazy. It seems the Production Office believes nothing gives a greater sense of drama than casually upping the scope?! A silly slitheen attack? Let's call it WW3!, Dalek & Cybermen trouble?, it's Doomdsay!!! Also, as the Co-Pilot pointed out, the casual reference to Japan burning after the Toclaphane attacks; show it damn it!! Big words, no action.

I won't delve into the ridiculous religious iconography & "magical" conclusion that 'flipped the bird' to hard science & credibility. Suffice to say it was rubbish. The delicate Paradox machine that the Doctor didn't want to breathe or even think too hard near lest he rattle it & break its concentration? Let's get Captain Jack to shoot from the crotch at it like a bi-sexual John Rambo. Everyone will have forgotten it's so delicate after the fabulous diva like re-birth of the Doctor & Murray Gold laying on the gluggy treacle. Anything's possible with magic! (and when you need to wrap up a ridiculously convoluted plot, a character (Martha) & a whole season in about 4 minutes)

'Sound Of Drums' was flawed, but fun & I really hoped the game would be lifted for this, alas it was an absolute fizzer. :( :( :(


A grumpy Lucozer...

Doctor Who - Season 3 Report Card...

Hello fellow Whovians!!

I guess we are are now also; to greater & lesser degrees... Tennantians, Barrowmanians, Simmians & Freemian Agyemians...

Anyway, I digress, I am not yet ready to commit my thoughts about 'Last of The Time Lords' to the cold, yawning vastness of cyber space. However, now seems an apt time to (very) briefly summarise my thoughts about the season, story by story, to bring things up to date.


Runaway Bride - Flashy chase set-piece aside, utterly wretched. Red card...5/10

Smith & Jones - Suprisingly good romp that transcends it's silliness...8/10

Shakespeare Code - A shallow confection & a wasted opportunity...6.5/10

Gridlock - An unexpected heart string tweaker, against the odds...8/10

Daleks In Manhattan - Sub par & disconcerting...6.5/10

Evolution of The Daleks - Imagine drinking your own urine with some toe-nail clippings & belly button lint thrown in for good measure &..Voila! You're half way to imagining this travesty!...5.5/10 (So bad it deserved a three line review!)

Lazarus Experiment - Slight but fun, with a cracking climax...7/10

42 - Gripping & genuinely scary. Add two hunks & you've got a happy Lucozer...8.5/10

Human Nature - Stylish, adult & only just short of perfect...9/10

Family Of Blood - Something of a let down, but still highly watchable...8/10

Blink - By turns charming & terrifying. A splendid oddity...9/10

Utopia - This is the stuff! Silly savages aside, I was on tenderhooks...9/10

Sound of Drums - Lots of dressing, not quite enough green leafy vegetables...8/10

Last of the Time Lords - TBA....


The Co-Pilot & I have decided to team up for our final blog onslaught for season 3. We will each contribute our LOTTL thoughts & the Co-Pilot will also deftly deliver a sweeping examination of the last 4 stories of the season, in one final gargantuan tome. Keep your eyes peeled wuunda-nougats!? wuundanoo-gettes?....


Sincerely, Lucozer....

Doctor Who 'Sound Of Drums' Review - Lucozer's drum solo (with SPOILERS)

Umm, er, scratch, scratch. Well it was gooood! but, um, was it the whizz bang 'give up & go home' episode we have been hungry to gnaw on like rabid dogs all week? No, it wasn't. Twas lots of ('spirit fingers' gesture) & not perhaps enough ('clawed hand with palm to the sky & a little shake' gesture...quite similar to the 'grabbing someones bollocks' gesture actually, but done at chest level) The Co-Pilot knows what I mean even if no one else does! It was lacking that special something that 'Utopia' had in oodles. The Co-Pilot felt it lacked the finesse & depth of emotion of Utopia & I have to agree. It had moments, but Utopia had us by the heart strings throughout the episode. 'Sound Of Drums' just gave them the occasional, slightly fumbled pluck.

The episode was dominated by Simm, who's Master so far seems to be a comic-book evil 'fool', all smart arse one liners & unresolved adolescent brattiness. It is not the Master I know or was hoping for. The Co-Pilot & I do feel though that if he starts in 'fifth gear', so to speak, there will be nowhere for the character to go. Perhaps he is now at 'Boomtown' level on RTD's 'fabulometer', with the intention of being cranked up to 'Bad Wolf' in a year or two. There may be some Rusty wisdom at work & we may have to live with a slow build if we want to see many more Dr/ Master tete-a-tetes over the next few years that aren't bogged down by plateaud repetition. Let's hope a darker, less comedic characterisation will emerge with time. Simm does well & is marvellously entertaining, but the characteristation (for now at least) is flawed & he is capable of much more than the (albeit expensive smoked) ham we have seen so far.

Capt. Jack felt a little superfluous to proceedings this week, I hope he gets more to do in the lavish finale. Freema's Martha was lovely to watch as per usual & was kept busy. Tennant was pretty strong again & one of the few moments of real emotion in the episode was seeing the resigned hopelessness in the face of the aged Doctor as he looked at the havoc being wrought by the Toclaphane. A rare occasion in the new series where I couldn't imagine an easy escape with a boastful quip & a good sonic screwdriver-ing. The other emotional bits were Martha's reaction to her family being bundled away in the van. The scene at her house was a tidy little action set piece. I also felt the scenes on Gallifrey were well handled. They looked sumptuous & had a suitable grand austerity about them. Lovely to see the Time Lord garb hadn't changed too. Speaking of nice little bits of fanboy foaming continuity; the Masters 'People's of the earth, please attend carefully' speech had me putting a big golden tick in a mental box & sending flowery notes of telepathic congratulation to RTD & his feverishly busy quill.

All the drum schtick (sorry!) had such a sinister, foreboding bent in Jacobi's hands; shame it became a nasty party trick set to the wretched strains of Rogue Traders with Mr Simm. Quite a let down even though the idea was clever. I hope there is greater significance to the drums to be explored next week, beyond the coded mobile phone bleeps.

So, the action was flash, the master's meddling using another species was truly in character (see 'Terror Of The Autons' & 'Survival' etc) & the cliffhanger was pretty tense. So let's have some more emotional resonance generally & a little less 'vengeful spoilt teenager' from the Master & we may yet have a classic on our hands. Instinct says it will be more 'Doomdsday' than 'Parting Of The Ways', which isn't a great thing, but neither is it bad thing. It is merely the lesser of two pretty goods.

Cheers & Chockers, Lucozer.