Doctor Who 4x12 "The Stolen Earth"
Jun. 30th, 2008 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kerravonsen!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
OMGWTFBBQ!
Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness!
NO! He can't be regenerating! We can't lose Ten now! No!
There would have been leaks, surely?
Okay, logically, we have a few options:
1) he regenerates, bye-bye Tennant, hello knew unknown Doctor. This is very unhappy-making.
2) he regenerates, but we have some sort of reset that makes it un-happen. That's a bit of a cop-out, since that's what they did last year.
3) he manages not to regenerate after all. That's also a cop-out, considering that it would un-cliff-hang the cliffhanger.
I don't trust RTD to be able to resolve this in a believable manner, considering what a mess was made last year.
Okay, so, let's look at the rest of the episode.
Very dramatic, the Earth vanishing from underneath them. Bit strange, really; one would have thought that the TARDIS would have gone with it, but then that would have made the entire episode pointless.
They actually did manage to have all these companions do stuff in a coherent way, that was good: it was giving us a snapshot of how widespread the disaster was. And everyone did their stuff, they were good. Yay former companions!
Hooray for Harriet Jones! I'd heard a rumour that someone was going to die, and people speculating that it was going to be her, so I wasn't really surprised. Loved, loved, loved the "yes we know who you are" refrain. Sad that Harriet didn't get back into office after all: I've read some fanfic that said that (a) she managed to weather the vote of no-confidence or (b) she stood for election after the Saxon business, and won. But this looks like neither of those happened.
It rather looks like Gwen and Ianto are going to die too. 8-( But they're not dead yet, so they might be saved at the last moment. And if they got killed off, that would mean that the entire cast of Torchwood except for Jack, would be gone. It's bad enough with half of them gone, TPTB wouldn't sabotage themselves even more by killing off the rest of them.
I loved how Rose was jealous of Martha "Who's she? I was here first!" oh, what poetic justice!
So Rose is using a gizmo, not a superpower, because she talked into a communication device and gave directions to "control".
When we had the Doctor and Rose running towards each other for the fantabulous reunion, I realized something was going to go wrong because they were taking so ruddy long to get from one end of the street to the other.
I liked how Jack's teleport needed a key code to reactivate it. On the other hand, that doesn't make sense, because Martha's teleport was Sontaran technology, and Jack's vortex manipulator was Time Agency technology, so why would they have the same code? No, that doesn't make sense at all. Darn. Unless the Time Agency and the Sontarans had the same suppliers. Not very likely. And it's rather iffy that, what, teleports that read minds now? I'm talking about Martha ending up at her mother's appartment. (handwave, handwave)
The paintball gun was my idea! I did it first! Darn, that means that canon now says that it won't work. Does that mean I have to rewrite "By Any Other Name"? Prunes.
But good on Wilf for thinking of it.
The Daleks tried to move the Earth in one of the earliest Dalek adventures, they were drilling into the Earth's core, planning to turn it into a giant spaceship. But I didn't twig to that at first when the Doctor said "Someone tried to move the Earth before" because my first thought was of "The Trial of A Time Lord", when the Earth had been moved, and I think it was moved by the Time Lords, if I recall correctly. So I was momentarily confused.
I'm sick of Davros even more than I'm sick of the Daleks. Boo, hiss!
The Time War is "time locked". Interesting tidbit.
I'm confused. We saw one of the Cult of Skaro Daleks do an "emergency time shift" at the end of Doomsday; I'd always assumed that it was Dalek Sek that we saw in The Daleks Take Manhatten. But this episode stated that it was Dalek Khan, that he went back to the Time War and rescued Davros and went mad.
Interesting that the Doctor took off, ran away from the Shadow Proclamation rather than lead an army. I guess that would have been too simple; and would have ended up being the Time War all over again.
So the Medusa Cascade area is 1 second out of sync with the rest of the universe. That's been used in a few other SF stories.
The running hints through this season:
- the missing bees (I really didn't follow the technobabble about this)
- "There Is Something On Your Back!" (was resolved last week, but since it got mentioned again, I note it here)
- the Medusa Cascade
- Rose appearing and dissappearing
- the Shadow Proclamation
Questions asked:
1) I wonder why the TARDIS didn't translate the Judoon language?
2) "I'm sorry for your loss... the one that's going to happen." Eerie. But since there's a lot of loss going on, it could be anything.
3) Why was a medical doctor (Martha Jones) put in charge of technological research?
4) Dalek Khan's ramblings... will presumably make sense later. "The Children of Time" "The Dark Lord is coming"
5) And we have The Darkness, which hasn't really been explained any more than it was last week.
6) What is the "key" that Martha has? Of course she's going to use it. Or someone is. It's one of those big red buttons that should never ever be pressed; of course somebody's going to use it.
7) Why 27 planets? What do the Daleks want them for? And what do they want with the humans? If they're growing Daleks from Davros's cells, they don't need to turn humans into Daleks as was happening with the Daleks in "Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways".
8) And what does "Bad Wolf" have to do with any of this? What's going to happen to Rose? Is she going to get killed off for good this time?
And we all have to wait for next week...
I will now go and look at what everyone else said.
OMGWTFBBQ!
Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness! Oh my goodness!
NO! He can't be regenerating! We can't lose Ten now! No!
There would have been leaks, surely?
Okay, logically, we have a few options:
1) he regenerates, bye-bye Tennant, hello knew unknown Doctor. This is very unhappy-making.
2) he regenerates, but we have some sort of reset that makes it un-happen. That's a bit of a cop-out, since that's what they did last year.
3) he manages not to regenerate after all. That's also a cop-out, considering that it would un-cliff-hang the cliffhanger.
I don't trust RTD to be able to resolve this in a believable manner, considering what a mess was made last year.
Okay, so, let's look at the rest of the episode.
Very dramatic, the Earth vanishing from underneath them. Bit strange, really; one would have thought that the TARDIS would have gone with it, but then that would have made the entire episode pointless.
They actually did manage to have all these companions do stuff in a coherent way, that was good: it was giving us a snapshot of how widespread the disaster was. And everyone did their stuff, they were good. Yay former companions!
Hooray for Harriet Jones! I'd heard a rumour that someone was going to die, and people speculating that it was going to be her, so I wasn't really surprised. Loved, loved, loved the "yes we know who you are" refrain. Sad that Harriet didn't get back into office after all: I've read some fanfic that said that (a) she managed to weather the vote of no-confidence or (b) she stood for election after the Saxon business, and won. But this looks like neither of those happened.
It rather looks like Gwen and Ianto are going to die too. 8-( But they're not dead yet, so they might be saved at the last moment. And if they got killed off, that would mean that the entire cast of Torchwood except for Jack, would be gone. It's bad enough with half of them gone, TPTB wouldn't sabotage themselves even more by killing off the rest of them.
I loved how Rose was jealous of Martha "Who's she? I was here first!" oh, what poetic justice!
So Rose is using a gizmo, not a superpower, because she talked into a communication device and gave directions to "control".
When we had the Doctor and Rose running towards each other for the fantabulous reunion, I realized something was going to go wrong because they were taking so ruddy long to get from one end of the street to the other.
I liked how Jack's teleport needed a key code to reactivate it. On the other hand, that doesn't make sense, because Martha's teleport was Sontaran technology, and Jack's vortex manipulator was Time Agency technology, so why would they have the same code? No, that doesn't make sense at all. Darn. Unless the Time Agency and the Sontarans had the same suppliers. Not very likely. And it's rather iffy that, what, teleports that read minds now? I'm talking about Martha ending up at her mother's appartment. (handwave, handwave)
The paintball gun was my idea! I did it first! Darn, that means that canon now says that it won't work. Does that mean I have to rewrite "By Any Other Name"? Prunes.
But good on Wilf for thinking of it.
The Daleks tried to move the Earth in one of the earliest Dalek adventures, they were drilling into the Earth's core, planning to turn it into a giant spaceship. But I didn't twig to that at first when the Doctor said "Someone tried to move the Earth before" because my first thought was of "The Trial of A Time Lord", when the Earth had been moved, and I think it was moved by the Time Lords, if I recall correctly. So I was momentarily confused.
I'm sick of Davros even more than I'm sick of the Daleks. Boo, hiss!
The Time War is "time locked". Interesting tidbit.
I'm confused. We saw one of the Cult of Skaro Daleks do an "emergency time shift" at the end of Doomsday; I'd always assumed that it was Dalek Sek that we saw in The Daleks Take Manhatten. But this episode stated that it was Dalek Khan, that he went back to the Time War and rescued Davros and went mad.
Interesting that the Doctor took off, ran away from the Shadow Proclamation rather than lead an army. I guess that would have been too simple; and would have ended up being the Time War all over again.
So the Medusa Cascade area is 1 second out of sync with the rest of the universe. That's been used in a few other SF stories.
The running hints through this season:
- the missing bees (I really didn't follow the technobabble about this)
- "There Is Something On Your Back!" (was resolved last week, but since it got mentioned again, I note it here)
- the Medusa Cascade
- Rose appearing and dissappearing
- the Shadow Proclamation
Questions asked:
1) I wonder why the TARDIS didn't translate the Judoon language?
2) "I'm sorry for your loss... the one that's going to happen." Eerie. But since there's a lot of loss going on, it could be anything.
3) Why was a medical doctor (Martha Jones) put in charge of technological research?
4) Dalek Khan's ramblings... will presumably make sense later. "The Children of Time" "The Dark Lord is coming"
5) And we have The Darkness, which hasn't really been explained any more than it was last week.
6) What is the "key" that Martha has? Of course she's going to use it. Or someone is. It's one of those big red buttons that should never ever be pressed; of course somebody's going to use it.
7) Why 27 planets? What do the Daleks want them for? And what do they want with the humans? If they're growing Daleks from Davros's cells, they don't need to turn humans into Daleks as was happening with the Daleks in "Bad Wolf/Parting of the Ways".
8) And what does "Bad Wolf" have to do with any of this? What's going to happen to Rose? Is she going to get killed off for good this time?
And we all have to wait for next week...
I will now go and look at what everyone else said.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 01:42 pm (UTC)Clearly, the Daleks decided to develop the new self-cleaning eye as a direct result of being shot by your paintball.
no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 01:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 02:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 11:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 11:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 03:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 03:37 pm (UTC)Jack said the numbers were a "base code." I assumed it was, like, the location for the galactic coordinates of Earth, which is why it would be the same for both of them. But it suddenly occurs to me now that the Earth having been moved ought to kind of mess that up. (I'm also wondering whether the Sontarans even use base 10...)
I'm confused. We saw one of the Cult of Skaro Daleks do an "emergency time shift" at the end of Doomsday; I'd always assumed that it was Dalek Sek that we saw in The Daleks Take Manhatten. But this episode stated that it was Dalek Khan, that he went back to the Time War and rescued Davros and went mad.
Caan was the one who timeshifted away at the end of "Evolution of the Daleks," though, wasn't he?
no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 03:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 11:08 pm (UTC)Oh. Shows how much I was paying attention...
no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 06:49 pm (UTC)"Jack, to lose half your subordinates may be accounted a misfortune. To lose all of them looks lkke carelessness."
As for why 27 planets, something was said about them being in a stable configuration. So maybe the other 26 were taken solely so that the configuration would be stable when the Earth was added, and are otherwise of no interst to the Daleks at all.
As to the Dark Lord reference, maybe next week we'll get a Who/LotR cross-over. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 11:02 pm (UTC)(grin)
As to the Dark Lord reference, maybe next week we'll get a Who/LotR cross-over.
Or Harry Potter.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-01 12:40 am (UTC)It really didn't make sense that the TARDIS didn't go with the Earth. I wondered why at the time. Perhaps it was detected and isolated--any technology that could move planets and put them a second out of phase could do that.
Does that mean I have to rewrite "By Any Other Name"?
No, because only these new Daleks can handle paint in the eye. :-)
the missing bees (I really didn't follow the technobabble about this)
Some are aliens, but I have no idea how they'd know about all this back in the 30s.
Don't the planets form some sort of engine?
As for the regeneration, perhaps the Doctor will die but be recreated from the Hand in the Jar. He'd have to have memories too though; does the TARDIS back them up? :-P
no subject
Date: 2008-07-01 01:04 am (UTC)Eh? What have the 30s got to do with it?
He'd have to have memories too though; does the TARDIS back them up?
But if he's regenerating, he wouldn't die. Unlike in "Turn Left", where he did die.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-01 01:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-01 01:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-01 03:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-01 04:45 am (UTC)