Tag Archives: Amy Pond

The surface of the Earth.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Last week we were five years in the future of our dreams and being attacked by the alien elderly from our nightmares, and this week we’re ten years into the future, humans are drilling into the ground, drilling deeper into the planet than anyone has ever drilled before, but little do they know that someone or something else is under there, and that something or someone is drilling up…

And that’s this week’s episode of Doctor Who, “The Hungry Earth,” which is the first part of a two parter.

The episode itself was solid, as everything this series has been, but with not too much in the ways of frills and thrills. We’re in Wales (again, of course), and Amy’s got a good reason to be in short skirts (again, of course). “Something for the dads” in the audience, they call it. It’s an episode that has a concept that fills Moffat’s proclamation that each episode’s premise should make a good feature film, of course, but it just feels… lacking, in a way. Somewhat rushed, perhaps. Not complete, basically. Personally, I blame this all on Torchwood‘s Chris Chibnall, and I’d suggest that you do the same.

The cast is solid enough, especially Meera Syal, who was fantastic fun in Moffat’s brilliant Jekyll, but who is just kind of there here. There’s a lot of ideas bouncing around, so hopefully she’ll get a little more play in part two, which looks a vastly more interesting, but at least she got to take a ride in the TARDIS this week. Technically, I think that means that she’s a bit of a companion, right?

As for the Silurians, I don’t know much about them other than what I read in other people’s reviews, but they’re an intriguing concept for a “villain” of a species. Seemingly they’re not considered all that “classic” by old school Doctor Who standards, but they certainly seem to be more exciting than the fucking Sontarans, right? Unless you’re the type to find Mr. Potato Head just terrifying. Who wouldn’t want to see homo reptilia transformed into femme fatales?  The prosthetics there are certainly impressive, as they usually are, and the captive Alaya’s assurance that not only will there be a war, but that it’ll start with her death in captivity at the hands of the human apes was fascinating and intriguing. And her “I know which one of you will kill me” was incredibly chilling. I want to start saying shit like that just to freak people out. I’m assuming that’s why Jesus said it, you know, just to fuck with people’s minds.

from here, What if Doctor Who were a Disney movie?

Two things. The first: Is it me or does it seem like Matt Smith’s Eleventh Doctor spends quite a bit of his time asking and pleading for people to trust him? Is that because he feels so young (and looks it too, certainly) and feels that people don’t take him seriously? It’s an interesting character flat, possibly, especially when you stack it up alongside David Tenant’s Tenth Doctor’s constant need to tell everyone he met that he was sorry, so sorry.

The second: Amy and Rory in the future come to see themselves landing in the past with the Doctor and wave? That seems interesting, but only in the sense that it has to be a terrific red herring, right?

Especially since, and this is just my theory, mind you, but I think that something bad is going to happen to Rory next week. There seems like there’s quite a bit happening in part two and I wouldn’t surprised if Rory gets lost in the mix. Perhaps fatally. At least until the two part (“The Pandorica Opens” and “The Big Bang”) finale.

from here.

What do you think? And I feel like the lack of Amy Pond in this episode was really felt, so it’s easier to examine Rory on his own. Do you like Rory, regardless of his lack of chemistry with Amy or not, and want him to stick around or would you rather he fell off the surface of the Earth?

Oh, and this is a bit spoiled from being in so many trailers, but is still brilliant dialogue…

Little kid: “Are you afraid of monsters?”

The Doctor: “No, they’re afraid of me.”

It’s similar to the line the Doctor says to the young Madama De Pompadour in “The Girl In The Fireplace,” but that’s okay because it still just works, you know?

Oh, and I should add: Loved the spooky graveyard stuff, but thought it was wasted terribly. And I really liked that last image.

Above is a nice tease of a picture, featuring Richard Curtis (who writes the Van Gogh episode this series), Steven Moffat, and Neil Gaiman, who is holding up the finished script for his episode next series. Notice how he is of course keeping the episode title obscured, but it was originally “The House Of Nothing,” which features nicely into old Gaiman mystique. You can also find Gaiman writing about Ray Bradbury, and meanwhile,

I’ll still be crossing my fingers at the idea of Phillip Pullman writing an episode next series. Or maybe Warren Ellis. I’d love to see his take on the Doctor, who would most likely go around shouting at his companions for being stupid, ordering them to get him some tea, and then bonking things and people over the head with a cricket bat. But that sounds genius to me.

Next time: Can the Doctor prevent a war between the original inhabitants of the planet of the Earth and the current occupants, and can he also find Amy Pond, that little kid’s dad, and that little kid as well?

“There’s only one person in the universe who hates me as much as you do.”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Last week we were in the past and in the dark with vampires from an alien ocean and now we’re trapped both in the here and now in the freezing cold and in the future, in a dark and nasty happily ever after. Two realities, two dreams, and an impossible choice between the two with the wrong one leading to certain death…

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“You have no idea how dangerous you make people to themselves when you’re around.”

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Paradoxes will follow a cute redhead anywhere, anywhen.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

No turning back, no way out, and nowhere else to go…

And that’s where we were left with last week’s episode of Doctor Who as the Doctor, Amy, River Song, and Father Octavian and his clerics were surrounded by the advancing Weeping Angels. The cliffhanger was deadly and our characters were down so low that they had only one way left to go… Up.

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“What if our dreams no longer needed us?”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Okay then! Having survived the return of those silly Daleks, it’s another week, and a brain new episode of Doctor Who, this being “The Time Of Angels,” part one of a two parter…

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“Keep buggering on!”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

As promised at the end of last week’s episode, this week on Doctor Who we’re in the middle of London during the Blitz, sitting in cabinet war meetings with massive lion that is Winston Churchill and meeting with England’s new weapon against the Nazi Menace…

The humans call them “Ironsides,” thinking they’re a brand new creation, but they don’t realize just how old and deceptive and evil these metal incased creatures are, nor that they’re the Doctor’s oldest and most nefarious enemies, the Daleks.

And that’s the start of this weeks’ Doctor Who, “The Victory Of The Daleks.”

And quite a victory it is. Not to get too spoilery here for you, but the Daleks don’t have some massive plan for conquest there in the past. They can’t. After their last encounter with the Doctor (in series four’s “The Stolen Earth” and “Journey’s End”), they’re broken, weak, unworthy of their own Nazi-ish ideals of what their master race should be. Of course they survived that encounter though. Much like the Doctor, they always survive.

I remember having a good laugh with the denouement in that two parter in the last proper series of what the Daleks and Davros’ big plan was – the utter destruction of all reality, literally the end of all creation except for themselves – because we knew that Steven Moffat was taking over and I saw it as Russell T. Davies saying to his creator, “Ha! Take that. There’s no greater evil master plan than the attempt to destroy all reality, is there?” I’m sure Moffat isn’t afraid to take the challenge, but this episode wasn’t about that. This was about rebuilding his inherited Doctor Who mythos, bringing the Daleks back in a one off episode, showing that the Doctor does have enemies, does have desires for revenge and feels fear, and then moving this particular menace to the background, only to return at some point in the future.

Not a bad episode though, just filler, it felt like, no matter how fun it was. Mark Gattis delivers strong writing and Ian McNeice is lively as a caricature of Churchill. And Amy Pond gets another opportunity to show that she’s lively and amazing. Also, we get nutty android professors and a silly but amazing looking dogfight between British spitfires and the Dalek mothership in orbit above the Earth.

Kylie apparently finds the Daleks sexy.

More importantly we get the return of the mysterious crack in time and space and a nod towards the bigger mystery than we’ve started to suspect was dangling before us: What year exactly is Amy Pond from?

Why doesn’t she remember the attack of the Daleks in “The Stolen Earth”/”Journey’s End” when she definitely should, shouldn’t she? (She’s not Donna Noble, after all.)

Next up: The return of the motherfucking Weeping Angels and the Doctor’s once and future love interest, the awesome archaeologist, River Song.

“Nobody human has anything to say to me today!”

Posted by Marco Sparks on

Like I said before, last week’s episode of Doctor Who felt like it came after waiting an eternity. This week’s episode, “The Beast Below,” certainly didn’t feel like it it took that long to get here, but after how great “The Eleventh Hour” was, the excitement level for “The Beast Below” was just as high.

This week, the Doctor is finally firmly regenerated and takes his new companion, Amy Pond, on her first real journey in the TARDIS. So much of it feels like a classic Russell T. Davies set up, with the second episode in the new series doing a paint by numbers journey to a slightly dystopian human society somewhere out there ins pace in the future and showing the companion exactly what the Doctor’s philosophy of time travel is. This time, the Eleventh Doctor tells Amy that it’s a strictly non-interference policy, unless, that is, a little girl is crying somewhere.

But then again, this is not the RTD era anymore. This is the new age, the age of Steven Moffat, mixing both the cool, the new, and the classic, and Moffat’s going to put his truly creepy, brilliant spin on all the old RTD tropes and formulas (that did work, for the most part). The Doctor can be lost in the wild regions of deep outer space and be exploring the creepy, cave-like bowels of a spaceship. And you get classic Moffat stuff here: Recurring creepy phrases, sad little girls, and terrifying monsters. This episode was certainly a quick one, bit of a throw away episode, though charming, and one for the kids, though the children in the audience are going to spend probably this entire series behind their sofa.

There was a lot going on in this episode as well: Starship UK, sailing through the stars during a point in the future after the Earth has burned and the individual nations have gone to the cosmos in search of a new home. And also Sophie Okonedo as Liz Ten, the future English monarch, Elizabeth X. Also, the eponymous beast at the heart of the great ship, and the Winders and the Smilers, and the voting booth: Once every British citizen on the ship comes of age, the terribly dark truth of what’s going on is revealed to them and they’re given two simple choices, “Protest,” or “Forget.” Pretty much everyone chooses “Forget,” and that allows them to go on with their lives guilt-free. Those who click on “Protest” are promptly fed to a monster. The modern parallels are terrifying.

from here.

I’m trying to stay light on spoilers here and not really recap the episode at all, because, well, we don’t actually like strict recaps here at Counterforce. Why read a recap of a television show when you can go watch the thing?

from here.

I liked how we got into the heart of the relationship between the Doctor and Amy a little more, and it’s almost like they’re already old friends. Matt Smith’s Doctor goes where Moffat wants him to (pickpocketing little girls, for starters), showing that he understands humanity even when he doesn’t, he’s human in the terrible ways that they can be, but his instincts are hardly human. The ending comes in a neat little bow as Amy notices that the Star Whale (that name is my only real gripe with this episode) is incredibly similar to the Doctor: old and kind and can’t help but respond when a little girl is crying.

And then there’s Karen Gillan as Amy Pond, who just can’t stop winning me over. I never disliked Rose, but I disliked the ways in which we were constantly told in the RTD era how great and wonderful Rose was. Not shown, but told. To me Amy Pond has already surpassed Rose, rather easily, I might add, but also carries the flare of all the right elements of companions like Martha Jones and Donna Noble. Donna Noble in particular, possibly, echoing her telling the Doctor, “Sometimes I think you need someone to tell you when to stop.”

I like that Karen Gillan’s companion can do everything that the previous companions can do, and more, and all while still wearing her nightie.

from here.

I liked how the end of this episode tied into next week’s and I wonder if that’ll be something they strive for more of this year. That, and it seems, constant references to Amy’s always needing to be making choices (one episode towards the end of this season is actually entitled “Amy’s Choice”). Also, while there was no mention of the Pandorica or how “Silence will fall,” that mysterious crack in the wall of her childhood room (and the Doctor’s TARDIS console at the end of last week?) has seemingly followed Amy Pond into time and space.

Next up: Back to World War II, Winston Churchill, and the Daleks/”Ironsides” fighting on behalf of the Allies… or are they?

Like a name in a fairy tale…

Posted by Marco Sparks on

After having waited for what has felt like an eternity, here’s just a few thoughts on tonight’ s episode of Doctor Who, “The Eleventh Hour,” the first new episode of series 5, and the first to properly feature the new Doctor, the new companion, the new TARDIS and new sonic screwdriver and new titles and themes and new everything!

Actually, I don’t want to say a whole lot about this episode. Partly because I’m still in shock from it, of sorts, and part because I want to reserve thoughts for next week’s episode. But what I can tell you about tonight’s episode is that it’s good. Really good. A bit cheesy and silly in places, but also dark and epic in other places.

It literally starts moments after where we last saw the Doctor, having just regenerated from David Tennant/The Tenth Doctor into Matt Smith/The Eleventh Doctor, and now the TARDIS, which is wild and out of control and on fire is spiriting over London at ludicrous speed! And the Doctor is hanging out the side, clinging for dear life!

From there he eventually crashes in the back yard of a little Scottish girl in an English village, Amelia Pond, the girl who has a name like something out of a fairy tale. Boy, does she ever. The fearless little girl helps this strange man sort out his cravings (apples, yogurt, bacon, beans, and toast don’t work, but fish sticks dipped in custard do) and then he helps her investigate the only thing that does scare her: the mysterious ever growing crack in her bedroom’s wall.

From there, the Doctor heads into the TARDIS, needing to fly it five minutes into the future to sort out it’s damaged engines, but doesn’t return til 12 years later. Amy Pond’s all grown up and hot, but has suffered from years from the damage inflicted on her by her “imaginary friend,” the Doctor, and the potential adventures she never got to share with him. Oh, and now Amy’s a kissogram girl, which is both exactly what it sounds like, and also cutesy Brit talk for a stripper.

I’ll stop there, but the story proceeds in classic opening season style for Doctor Who: There’s an alien prisoner on the loose in the house, and a hidden room in Amy’s house. The Doctor’s TARDIS is broken, and soon so is his sonic screwdriver. He’s still going through the pangs of regeneration, still unaware even of what he looks like, and on top of it, he was 20 minutes to save the Earth from being incinerated.

The episode reminded me quite a bit of series 3′s “Smith And Jones” in that the story was good, but not great, but it was a proper romp of an adventure, and the interplay and introductions between the characters were fantastic. Amy goes off for adventures in time and space with the Doctor on the eve of her wedding to her male nurse boyfriend, and you can tell that that’s going to have dark consequences as the season progresses. Nice cameo by Patrick Moore, as well. The “arc words” seeded into this series will seemingly be “Silence will fall” and something called “the Pandorica.” How gloriously sci fi. I like how Moffat is firing on all his own cylinders, but also keeping the things from Russell T. Davies’ tenure that really worked.

…except for the new title/credits sequence. The visuals aren’t terrible, but what they’ve done to the theme song is fucking atrocious. The bombast is gone. The excitement and thrill of that music smashing to life has been replaced with… a casio demo for something not terribly interesting. Glad that they didn’t actually go with the old school giant image of Matt Smith’s head floating there in the vortex.

As for Matt Smith’s Doctor… Not bad, not terrible at all. He’s still growing on me, aided by the fact that I think that Matt Smith genuinely appears to be a weird and awkward person and the writing that supports him is still pretty amazing. The sequence in which we’re reintroduced to the character of the titular Time Lord himself only to have Smith literally burst through and take his place among his predecessors worked as beautifully as it should’ve. I’m sure I’ll have more to say as this series floats on.

from here.

But before I go… My crazy theory about the “new spin” on the Doctor/companion relationship this year: I believe we’re going to see the Doctor, for the first time ever, develop an unrequited crush on Amy Pond. I know I certainly would were I in his suspenders/braces and bow tie.

Next up: The future, the Smilers, and all aboard the Starship UK!

Prima Aprilis.

Posted by Marco Sparks on

So… the first day of a new month, and you ponder as you recover from the madness of mars, how are you supposed to prepare for a whole new month when the first day of said month is one for joking and tomfoolery and hoaxes. And you wonder about this new month, who does it belong to? The jokers and manipulators or the gullible and foolish?

from here.

That’s a question we can ask ourselves, certainly, but maybe another time.

Cause we are clearly not in Kansas anymore, Toto.

I haven’t seen a lot of great April Fool’s Day jokes out there, not even a tremendous amount of RickRolling either, but Maria pointed out that Joel McHale took over Ryan Seacrest’s site, which is kind of funny to me, and also an upgrade, obviously.

How can Ryan Seacrest’s joke be anything but a failure when it’s a celebration of someone like Ryan Seacrest? An age old question. If you look good and hard at the walls in Plato’s cave, that question is written there, along with mythic super hero hieroglyphics and crude depictions of humans hunting animals and having sex with lightning bolts or whatever crazy thing people were onto back then.

Oh, and then I just saw this:

I giggled a bit at that, I won’t lie.

Oh, and this:

Way to go fake science news, as reported by CNET UK: “A would-be saboteur arrested today at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland made the bizarre claim that he was from the future. Eloi Cole, a strangely dressed young man, said that he had traveled back in time to prevent the LHC from destroying the world.”

So many lovely references in the CNET UK article there, I recommend you glance at it, sci fi nerds. There’s a nice glance towards H. G. Well’s famous novel in the paragraph above, but the story also references that the mysterious stranger from the future was wearing “wearing a bow tie and rather too much tweed for his age,” which is a lovely nod to the fact that, as I shall remind you once again, the new series of Doctor Who starts this weekend with the brand new Doctor.

Oh, and this clips’s decent as well.

Maybe I was wrong before when I saw that time travel was something special about last year, something that was meant to stay in last year and that our lurch towards something big and new and wonderful here in the year we make contact was going to be just that, here, now, in this year. But maybe time travel isn’t done with us yet. At least not in pop culture. I say that half seriously, half in jest, and a whole other crazy half in an attempt to segue into how I think that next week’s episode of Lost, which of course is a Desmond one, makes me think it’ll be similar to “The Constant.”

What do you think? Yes, no, maybe? Oh, who knows. We’ll just watch and see. It’s Desmond, so it’ll be good.

But Benjie Light and I were talking the other day, gabbing and gossiping as we’re prone to do, waxing poetic about things we’d like to see as the last season of Lost winds down and half jokingly, and half in an eerie calm wave of deadly seriousness, we decided that whatever the finale image of Lost is… whether it’s Jack smiling at having found his destiny or a gorgeous sunset or Sayid marching off into the future with a whole bevy of beautiful women on his arm, we’d then like the producers to immediately cut to this:

If time travel were availabe to me, I’d be chilling in Saturday right now…

Posted by Marco Sparks on

from here.

NERD ALERT: I’m excited about the start of series 5 of Doctor Who this weekend.

I could post nothing but geeky teaser photos/youtube clips for the rest of the week, I really could. But then again, if you haven’t noticed, this is me being honest and open and not so guilty about my “guilty pleasure” television show.

Back in the day, Buffy The Vampire Slayer was my “guilty pleasure” show that I didn’t tell anyone I watched. Well, for the first season. It started, I’ll admit, with a borderline insane crush on Sarah Michelle Gellar (which actually included Swan’s Crossing and her on All My Children), and was nurtured by the fact that Buffy had some of the best, smartest, and most fun writing on television at the time. It was the show where, come that time at that night, I’d unplug the phone and make myself unavailable. No one really had cell phones or a rampant internet presence back then, so it was just a little bit easier.

But then somewhere in the middle of season two of that lovely show, a bizarre thing happened: Sitting in front of me in class one day I overheard one of the geeky girls, your band/art nerd stereotype talking with one of the big dumb jock guys about Buffy and Angel having sex. Do you remember that cliffhanger? The girl, who would later in life discover livejournal and live happily ever after, and the guy, who probably slipped himself GHB one day and now works at Geico, had a lot to discuss about it (the girl was spot on, of course, that Angel had experienced a moment of “perfect happiness” and now had to pay the price for it, and the dude assumed that Buffy had the clap or something).

The reflective TARDIS sculpture, by Mark Wallinger.

But sitting there, watching and listening to them, I figured… Fuck it. Guilt is useless about these things. Unless you like drivel like Flash Forward. I mean, hell, you know that show Human Target on FOX currently? I watch that show (on Hulu), and it’s fucking horrible. Real, palpable bullshit, I tell you. So, so many flaws. A ludicrous amount of flaws! But, in small bits here and there, it’s not horrible. Every once in a while a fog clears on that show and there’s something old school and enjoyable shimmering through the curtain of mediocrity. But that’s a whole other post (to come!), I think. So, yeah, I like this smart, well produced and well written science fiction TV show from across the pond called Doctor Who. It comes back this weekend, debuting the new Doctor and his companion, and the new creative team, and I’m excited. In fact, I couldn’t be more excited.

You’ve already seen the 3D theatrical teaser here, but…

Here’s the latest UK trailer for the new season:

Here’s the American (or, rather, BBC America) trailer:

If you click here, you can see a scene from episode 6 of the new season, “Vampires In Venice,” which gives you a real first look at the portrayal of the Matt Smith iteration of the Doctor. It originally aired on Jonathan Ross last week. If you click here, you can see a bevy of behind the scenes clips from the new season, particularly the opening sequence of the first episode of the new season, in which the TARDIS flies wildly and out of control over London with the Doctor hanging over the side, clinging on for dear life. And here is a nice little blog about related things if you’re a dork like myself. Oh, and here’s a look at the new TARDIS interior, which just looks ridiculous and insane and way, way too colorful…

I’m fascinated by the differences in the marketing between one country and the next. The UK trailer certainly seems more… honest, I think is the word I’m looking for. Here’s a bumbling, insane protagonist, one who’s amazingly and painfully self assure, as seen through the normal human woman (with what I’m assuming now will be a gift for almost Lucille Ball-esque comedic facial expressions/reactions) who travels with him. The American trailer seems more built up, in an attempt to showcase certain heroic aspects rather… inaccurately? Does that make sense?

Whatever. I’m too excited to make sense now. Gonna go update my livejournal and make fanboy youtube clips with nothing but SQUEE-like dolphin noises of hysteric elation.