December with the Doctor: Great Quotations II

Lucie Miller: Well, you know, there's nothing wrong with the TARDIS...
The Doctor: No.
Lucie Miller: Apart from all the things that are wrong with the TARDIS.
The Doctor: Admittedly.
Lucie Miller: Just, it's not so much a spaceship as...a shed.
The Doctor: A shed.

Later...

Lucie Miller: What did you say it stood for again? Time And Relative Dimensions...
The Doctor: Yes.
Lucie Miller: Time And Relative Dimensions...In Shed.
The Doctor: That is not what it stands for.
Lucie Miller: Yes it does. It's a shed.
--Lucie Miller and the Doctor, Max Warp

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December with the Doctor: Great Quotations I

"Ah. Well, you're a beautiful woman, probably."
--The Doctor, City of Death

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December with the Doctor: The (Stair)Master

Okay, I'm as excited about "The End of Time" as anyone. I'm really looking forward to David Tennant's last go-round as the Doctor, some more quality time with the Nobles (and hopefully a less depressing end for Donna), and even the return of the Master. I really enjoyed John Simm's take on the character, and I wonder if they'll be regenerating a new version for Matt Smith.

But while some of the latest promo shots have been intriguing and impressive, and while the trailer has me counting down the days, I can't help but be a little underwhelmed by this image:

This doesn't feel like the Master, the menacing villain who traveled from the end of time to conquer Earth with an army of decapitated humans. This doesn't feel like the Master, the megalomaniacal sociopath who once destroyed a sizable portion of the universe. This feels like the Master, a guy who just got done with his Saturday morning jog and is now contemplating breakfast at a coffee shop. This is the Master who has had a bit of a stomach bug the last few days, and so he's using another sick day and just kind of lounging around in sweats. In "The Waters of Mars," we saw the Doctor as the Time Lord Triumphant, it looks as though "The End of Time" will be giving us The Master Unemployed.

I'm still excited about the next episodes, and all, but really...a hoodie?

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Edit: Forgot to mention: photo courtesy of Blogtor Who.

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December with the Doctor: Spin-Offs

A couple of brief thoughts:

• "The Sarah Jane Adventures" is a far better show than "Torchwood." Maybe it's because "Torchwood" rarely feels like it fits comfortably in the Whoniverse, maybe it's because the tone of "SJA" is closer to the tone of the parent series, all I know is that it's just a shame that a great character like Captain Jack has to headline the inferior show. Not that Sarah Jane should be headlining an inferior show; I'd just like "Torchwood" to be better.
  
• And I don't have much hope that the forthcoming 13-episode series of "Torchwood" (is it the third or fourth season? Does "Children of Earth" count as a season?) will be much of an improvement. I mean, the actual Torchwood Three team is down to two members, one of whom is in the family way. Either the season is going to have to have a recruitment drive--which might be interesting, since Gwen started out as the POV character for the uninitiated audience and would now be playing the veteran--or it's going to have a very small pool of people left to kill off in the finale.
  
  Perhaps I'm just a little bitter, but Tosh and Ianto were my favorite non-Jack characters on the show, and I'd really like them not to be dead.
  
• Which is not to say that I can't think of any way for the series to improve. Maybe they could begin the show with finding (and absorbing the members of) the lost Torchwood Four, maybe Martha and Mickey could join up, maybe the larger Torchwood body could demote Jack (for frequently going AWOL and getting the vast majority of his team killed, not to mention allowing a civilian to participate in classified activities) and bring in someone to take charge and create drama (in my dreams, it'd be UNIT transfer from the old series--Mike Yates, Liz Shaw, Jo Grant, or Sgt. Benton). Maybe we could get a sense that there is a larger Torchwood organization, because that really hasn't been present in the series so far.
  
• Seriously, if "SJA" ends without someone--anyone!--making reference to the fact that a main character's name is Rani, I'm going to go nuts. I don't necessarily think that she should turn out to be the Rani, but I definitely think that the name shouldn't go unnoticed. It'd be like naming a character "Cy Lurian" or "Mac Ra." Letting it hang is just frustrating.
  
• I have no desire to watch the new "K-9" series, although I hope it doesn't mean the absence/rumored death of K-9 from the next season of "SJA."

What are your thoughts?

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December with the Doctor: A Capital Idea

So, is it "the Doctor" or "The Doctor"? Same question for "T/the Master."

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December with the Doctor: Vwhat?

So, in my recent flurry of watching, listening to, and otherwise absorbing all things Whovian, I've purchased a couple of Doctor Who Magazines and I've finally gone back and read the first two IDW miniseries. The quality of the comics therein has been pretty mediocre¹ (though I also got the collection of Grant Morrison stories, so that ought to raise my impressions a bit), but something has really stuck out to me: the TARDIS materialization sound. The onomatopoeia is typically rendered as "Vworp vworp" or "vwaarp vwaarp." Now, I'm all for distinctive sound effects--"snikt," "thwip," "bamf," etc.--but I'm also a little peeved when such sound effects are discarded (see: almost any time any of those has been rendered in film. I mean, is it really that hard to have Wolverine's claws make a metal-sliding-against-metal sound like "snikt"?).

So it's interesting to see the dissonance go in the opposite direction, from film to text. See, here's the TARDIS dematerialization sound:

I don't know about anyone else, but I certainly don't here anything in there that sounds like "vworp." It's certainly a difficult sound to render into text, but listening to it several times, I can't imagine translating it without some e's and probably a ch. "Vreeench" doesn't quite do it...maybe "vreeunnnnch."

But "vworp"?

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1. This is, of course, excluding The Ten Doctors, which rocks my socks. I'm enjoying The Stalker of Norfolk too.

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The Doctor is In!

Seeing as I am a glutton for punishment and self-disappointment, I've decided to do one more theme month before the year is out. The decision came naturally out of my currently-waxing Whovianism, which cut just a little into my Bat-Month posting. I'll admit, there were times when I was paying too little attention to Gotham City and too much attention to "City of Death." On the plus side, this means I have a bunch of things to post about already. And just to be fair, I'll see about working a couple of Batman leftovers in here and there...it'll be like time travel!

So get ready to spend December with the Doctor!

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Bat-Month: Turning off the signal

Well, that appears to be the end of a belfry-sized Bat-Month. There were an awful lot of things that I would have liked to have done and didn't get around to, due to various factors--as usual. At the very least, I have a wealth of ideas for future posts, both for now and for any Bat-months in the future. Some Bat-leftovers will likely be getting posted in the coming weeks, popping out of the shadows when you least expect it.

I hope you enjoyed this journey through Gotham as much as I did, and I hope you're looking forward to one more theme month before the end of the year...

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