Busy week, and The Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel thoughts

[auroracloud]

Ugh, it's been a terribly, terribly busy and exhausting week. And the weekend was terribly busy as well, though mostly for good reasons. Now I mainly want to lie down and eat chocolate and watch Doctor Who episodes for the next two days or so. Unfortunately that's not an option. But I'm really proud of myself that throughout this week, I managed to keep writing something every day. Wouldn't have managed it without Write Every Day to check in to.

Tonight I at least watched The Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel. I love that double episode, and damn, it felt good to sink into that world again. After such a week, it made me feel whole somehow. I probably need to just try to find time to watch more of it during the next week. Losing myself to stories and characters I love, it has this amazing power of restoration.

Funny, though, although I love most of the Doctor Who S2 episodes, I'm constantly thinking "I want to watch Utopia already". Is this normal, constantly wanting to watch Utopia? Or just me? Anyway, I'd say I'm going to go a little out of order, and when I'm done with S2, I'll watch Utopia and the rest of the S3 ending before I start on Torchwood. Because I have no patience to wait for as long as it'll take me to get through two more seasons, at this rate, and I've been wanting to re-watch Utopia for ages. (I've only watched it once, for goodness's sake! At first I wasn't quite ready to watch it again, and then I had moved onto the next season and it felt weird to go back.)

Anyway, a few thoughts about The Rise of the Cybermen / The Age of Steel.

Damn, Mickey's just so wonderful in this. I love his character arc in the show, the way he starts out as someone very ordinary and scared and un-heroic, then occasionally finds it in himself to do a heroic act after all, but he still doesn't change into a big damn hero immediately. He only gradually grows and starts to want to see more, do more, find something more in himself. And then he does, he saves the day and makes a choice of a new life for himself, while still staying himself. (At least up to this point. I don't like the later episodes with him as much anymore, he feels a bit too heroic, no longer the Mickey I got to know and love.)

And the minor characters in this one are so great. I love Jake. (And it's interesting, I remember I picked up there was something between him and Ricky the first time I watched this, then discovered there had been a line of dialogue cut that said it indeed was so.) I adore Mrs Moore - there need to be more middle-aged female badass rebel mad-gadget inventors! The Cybermen rank among the scariest of Doctor Who monsters for me, especially because it's so possible something like that could exist in the future. And I love parallel universes. One of the fanfic possibilities that intrigues me is everything that could go on in the parallel world. Who else out of the whole show's cast is there, in parallel version? How are they different and similar to the ones we know?

By the way, one of the things that annoys me about S2 Rose is the way she goes madly jealous every time the Doctor as much as speaks to any young and nice-looking female. S1 Rose would usually connect with the other women she met, she generally cared about people and would especially seek contact with the other girls and try to understand what's going on with them, and I loved that. But with S2 the jealousy thing, it's such a trope. I know they're underlining her romantic feelings for the Doctor, but could they possibly come up with a slightly less clichéd way of doing it?

Well, other than that, there isn't anything about this episode I don't love. And it's one of those where I actually cry at the ending. Did the first time, did again.

Comments

[trobadora]

Is this normal, constantly wanting to watch Utopia? Or just me?

Utopia is very much worth watching over and over again!

(And I'm with you on the s2 jealousy thing. It's very annoying.)

[auroracloud.livejournal.com]

And I expect I will be watching it many times over yet. :-) I had this plan that I would just watch everything in order for the second time and then I'll watch favourite episodes whenever I feel like it, but well... some things I must make exceptions for. I've been dying to re-watch it for months now. Right now I feel it won't quite work to jump straight from mid-S2 Ten to that episode. The mood would clash too much. But once I've watched S2, it should be doable.

(Glad I'm not the only one who can't stand that. Well, with a fandom the size of DW anyone's unlikely to be the only one with a certain opinion, but you know.)

[trobadora]

I must have watched Utopia a dozen times just in the week it first aired!

[auroracloud.livejournal.com]

Wow, I feel like a poor fan in comparison! :-P For some reason I couldn't bear watching it again right away - didn't help that I'd watched all three last episodes of S3 in one go with my friend, so there was a lot of stuff at once - and I needed time to digest it at first. I did watch some key individual bits more than once due to watching extras etc. and for some reason I couldn't emotionally handle watching all of it again immediately. And by the time I had digested enough, I was already watching S4 and didn't feel quite right go back. Now I've been aching to watch it again for so long it doesn't make sense to wait much...

[trobadora]

It's different if you're watching whole seasons at once! But if you have to wait a week for the next episode, rewatching helps tide you over. :)

[auroracloud.livejournal.com]

True, that! I squeezed 5 years into one year, basically (and mostly 4 years into half a year - it was the specials season that took me longer to watch, for real-life and other-fandom reasons). Now is when I'm watching it all again. :-)

[tinny]

Yeah, the Cybermen are my favorites, too. (Although that's not too hard, since the Daleks are just ridiculous.)

I like Mickey's arc, too. I didn't actually pick up on Rose's jealousy until much later, so it didn't get on my nerves at that point yet. But I suspect it would if I rewatched it.

I can totally identify with the restorative powers of watching a loved show. It calms me down like nothing else, too. (My name is Tinny and I am a tv show addict. What else is new? ;))

[auroracloud.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's rather hard to be properly scared by Daleks. The only reason I have any respect for them is because of Jack. I mean, if I laugh at them all the time then it gets harder to take his first death and the consequences thereof seriously. ;-)

The jealousy thing got on my nerves even the first time around - I guess it's because it's one of my pet peeves overall. I hate it that women are constantly pitted against each other in stories, usually over a man. And in S1 I'd been so happy to see Rose usually connect with other women and girls, taking their side, it felt jarring that suddenly she was getting jealous whenever the Doctor spoke to another woman. It's at its worst mid-season, now I've gotten to the later episodes and it's not so bad.

I actually don't watch TV shows often, because I have a hard time finding ones that do it to me (and I'm not the most visually oriented person, so it takes a bit more effort to start watching a new one). But when I do, I fall hard. Normally it's books and theatre that do this for me, but TV shows are a special way of storytelling and I realise now they can have a powerful effect on me as well. Should probably seek out others that work for me as well as this one. Then again, I'll take quite a while to catch up here.... :-)

[tinny]

I actually don't watch TV shows often, because I have a hard time finding ones that do it to me (and I'm not the most visually oriented person, so it takes a bit more effort to start watching a new one).

Ah, that makes sense. I am very visual, so I have a hard time with anything that isn't TV. Even comics or anime don't do it for me, I can't properly connect with drawn faces.

I love reading books too, but I don't usually get fannish over them.

If you ever need a new show, I'd be happy to rec you stuff. I'm not really up to date with a lot of new shows, but I have accumulated a few favorites over the past decade, and those are definitely worth watching.

[auroracloud.livejournal.com]

TV shows are among my top three favourite forms of storytelling - the other two are books and theatre. I like them a lot better than movies, because you get proper story arcs and character arcs, and can spend a long time getting to know the characters. And don't always need to get to know completely new ones all the time. Overall I get more easily strained by visual media, but TV shows are my favourite kind for that reason. And I think you may just have explained why I can't usually get into comics or cartoons and such - maybe it's the drawn faces thing for me, too. I need the real people.

I get fannish over books, but TV series do have the advantage that you can spend much more time getting to know the characters. Still, Doctor Who is actually the first series I'm getting this level of obsessed with.

But by all means, I'm glad to get recommendations for new shows! It will take me a while to be caught up with the Whoniverse, certainly, but I might feel like something new in between at some point, especially since I now have noticed how much I can love watching a series.

Let's see, for some guidance, things I have loved in the past before Doctor Who include Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, BBC's Sherlock, the first couple of seasons of Once Upon a Time (eventually the writing got too bad for me to put up with), and on the miniseries front, Cambridge Spies and BBC adaptations of Jane Austen and other classics. For someone who's always been a huge sf/f book geek, I have huge gaps in my scifi & fantasy series education - even the only Star Trek I know is quite a bit of The Next Generation I watched as a kid - so I can probably be recommended even Really Obvious Things. I'm not too good at violence, and the scary episodes of Doctor Who (The Empty Child, Blink, The Silence of the Library etc.) are about as scary as I can take. (Midnight and Waters of Mars were actually more than I could take.)

[tinny]

Okay! It looks like we have a lot of overlap there. I never got into UOAT, probably because people despaired over the writing before I had time to catch up so I never tried. But I have seen everything else you mentioned, except Cambridge Spies.

I am not one for scary at all, so you're safe from scary recs from me. :D

Hmmm, let's see.

By far my favorite SF series is Farscape.

It comes with the caveat that the first series is very popcorn-cracky. I gave up on it after only six episodes the first time I tried. But the closer you get to the end of the first series, the more the story arc is starting to develop. If you don't like violence, you may have a hard time with some of the episodes, since one of the evil (and later not so evil... it's a long story) characters sometimes tortures people. There are two eps in the first season I remember were hard for me, too. But it's not a permanent feature. I think they just wanted to introduce him as evil as possible.

But the main tone of the show is very funny. Cracky, even. They really know how to make fun of themselves. They have a different tone of humor than most US shows - it is a US show, but was produced in Australia. Crichton is constantly making pop culture references nobody understands, and often the aliens make jokes at his (and Humans' in general) expense. One of the funniest eps is the one where all the protagonists swap bodies. It's fanfic come to life. :D

At the same time, it's emotionally very intense - in the same way Doctor Who is: Crichton is transported to the other end of the galaxy, and can't get home. Dangerous alien races are fighting a war and at some point Earth is threatened, too. So the stakes are really high, and you can feel with him. All the characters routinely have to make great sacrifices.

It is often a showcase for Henson's muppets, thus a lot of the aliens are prosthetics, and very out-there ones, too. You have to go into it with a little suspension of disbelief at first. It took me quite a while to get used to Rygel, one of the puppet aliens who is part of the main cast. Once you have accepted that these are real beings with real feelings, it gets better.

Last but not least: they have the best and most intense OTP ever. My favorite pairing of all time.

Long story short: my #1 recommendation.


I can rec you more stuff any time. :D

[auroracloud.livejournal.com]

That sounds intriguing! Doesn't look like our library has it, though (it sometimes has surprising things, but not everything), so I'll have to see if any of my friends has a DVD to borrow me. Unless I end up getting something else I can watch it from, but I've been slow at that kind of stuff. But I will keep this one in mind and see if there's a way to get it. Feel free to recommend other things, too!

If you ever do start on OUAT, I recommend just the first season and maybe first half of second season. Then it hits a bog of bad writing and only occasionally rises above it. That was my impression of it, at least. I went on quite long because I loved some of the characters and their relationships to each other, but eventually I just couldn't.

[tinny]

Hmmm. It has a cult following, but it's not super known. Maybe you do have friends who own it.

[auroracloud.livejournal.com]

I'm gonna have to check! I have some pretty geeky friends, so I might get lucky if I ask around enough. :-)

[tinny]

Okay, then, if you can't get Farscape, my #2 rec would be Babylon 5.

It's more of a space opera with a 5-year story arc. It also has a lot of non-humanoid aliens, and revolves around a station in space that gets caught up in a war.

They had strange production problems, i.e. the lead quit after the first season and they had to bring in another actor. That definitely wasn't in their original plan, but it also didn't hurt much. Then, they knew they were going to get cancelled after the fourth season, causing the writers to cram the last two seasons into one. And then they got renewed after all, and the fifth season is totally useless, since they'd already finished their arc. ;)

That said, the show is pretty cool. Especially the time travel episodes, because they really have a well-thought-out story behind them, spanning the seasons. They also have a wonderful slashy bromance between two aliens, a lesbian commander, telepaths, and a few really scary enemies. Not like shock-value scary, just in the way nobody knows what they are, and what their goals are. And they just look creepy. *g*

The general atmosphere of that show is a lot more serious than Farscape, but the characters themselves have enough sense of humor to make it fun to watch. The appeal of this show is more getting to know the different alien races and how they get along on the space station.

Here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtrUhIuEqdY

(omg i am still in love with Michael O'Hare's voice - the way he says "tons of spinning metal - all alone in the night")

[auroracloud.livejournal.com]

Ooh, that one I know I can get, I've been recommended it before and so I know where I can borrow it. Time to definitely add it to the watch-next list, then. :-)