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| Old lovers can still be friends. |
Romancing the Doctor (On New Doctor Who)
by Cynthianna
***Spoiler alert!***
Even my husband agreed with me on this point concerning The Husbands of River Song. Less teenage angst and lots more humor--and Alex Kingston to boot. It's nice to see an actress who's equal in charisma to Peter Capaldi playing opposite him. River Song is a fun and mischievous character who is always up to something, so the lighthearted jaunt to sell off a pilfered diamond to a race of genocidal alien one-percenters aboard a space cruise liner is just the mindless entertainment we needed.
It's not a perfect episode of course. The threat of killing River's "husband" the cyborg king with a human head and then crashing a ship full of passengers (no matter how heinous their crimes) is a downer. Fortunately, the excellent performances of and the magical chemistry between Capaldi and Kingston pretty much drown out that tinge of nastiness that always seems to be a part of a Steven Moffat script. The unneeded nastiness really could have been edited out, but this season pretty much proves script editing is not of importance to the show runners.
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| See? The Twelfth Doctor can smile. And it fits his face just fine. |
Ah, but to stare into the handsome face of Peter Capaldi and admire the beautiful radiance of Alex Kingston on screen for an hour! Now, that's a holiday gift worth the wait.
What do you think? Please leave your comments below, and check out my reviews of earlier episodes of this season of Doctor Who:
Hell Bent Heaven Sent
Face the Raven
Sleep No More
The Zygon Inversion (or Inversion of the Zygons)
The Zygon Invasion
Classic Who on Retro TV
3 comments :
At least I won't need to take the kids to a Panto' this year.
I think they have forgotten that the idea of a Christmas Special, is to allow the people who don;t watch a show the rest of the time, to sit down with their family and have some fun.
Once again this was too reliant on fan background to work properly.
By comparison, the larks of Catherine Tate telling 10 to shut up when he started techno babbling, and riding segways down secret under water tunnels while menaced by a giant spider monster and a Christmas Death-Star are likely to have granny giggling at the silliness, while explaining to her, "It's the sonic River had in the library..." is more likely to earn a patronising "Yes dsear" and a request for more sherry...
I haven't watched any recent episodes of Doctor Who, since I found it akin to watching a Marx Brothers movie with the sound off. This Christmas episode I found fairly enjoyable. There were some weak spots, but on the whole, not bad.
I'm relieved there weren't "Christmas Death Stars" or "Killer Angel Halos" or "Murderous Christmas Trees" in this episode. The story could have been placed in any season, really, so at least we weren't forced to suffer through blatantly anti-Christmas theatrics as part of the storyline. Those were a real turn off to me in other new Who "Christmas Specials". Why not call them "holiday specials" from now on and show them on New Year's Eve or another night of the week besides Christmas instead?
Agreed, River Song takes a lot of explaining to understand even to New Who fans. She went from being seen as a serious scientist in her first outing (where she "died") to a manic sociopath in her next outings as Amy and Rory's "child of the TARDIS". She needs a bit more consistency in characterization. Alex Kingston should have been brought back on the show as a different character with a different name than the one she portrayed in "Silence in the Library". However, character and plot inconsistencies and necessary long explanations to make any sense of them seem to be the name of the game with Moffat's Who.
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