perlmonger (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
perlmonger) wrote2008-06-08 06:30 pm
perlmonger) wrote2008-06-08 06:30 pm
dead trees
Well, that seems to have generated fairly violent disagreement across Blogistan :)
For my part, I found the two-parter mostly good with some reservations. Mostly, the ending was just wrong: it felt to me like a OMG-nobody-dies bit tacked on because someone up the foodchain thought River dying was too downbeat for a children's slot. Funny that the Library managed to find the lost data to patch together its rendering of Miss Evangelista for the coda, too ;)
I'm not entirely happy with SM's writing for Donna, either: kicking the door down was good, but there was a bit too much (ie. non-zero) Catherine-Tate-Silly-Voice, Donna would for sure have sussed out at least the principle of River's and the Doctor's past/future relationship, and did she really have to exist in semi-detached heteronormative Family conformity whilst in backup?
I would have liked more expansion of the Library/Moon relationship, and some explanation of the presence of cipher-Father and concomitant absence of any mother in the Library's withdrawal. OK, the girl her avatar was based on died, but I don't recall Lux saying anything about (the girl's) family that would explain that.
Can't help wondering about River/Doctor too: since she clearly knows the Doctor across a wide spectrum of times and incarnations, she presumably hadn't (using her perceived timestream) spent huge parts of her life actually travelling with him. How did/will they work it? Does he just turn up in her life, in an arbitrary order, whenever he fancies a shag, or what? Her character doesn't strike me as one who would accept a fundamentally imbalanced relationship (even with her evident hero-worship), but how else could it be?
For my part, I found the two-parter mostly good with some reservations. Mostly, the ending was just wrong: it felt to me like a OMG-nobody-dies bit tacked on because someone up the foodchain thought River dying was too downbeat for a children's slot. Funny that the Library managed to find the lost data to patch together its rendering of Miss Evangelista for the coda, too ;)
I'm not entirely happy with SM's writing for Donna, either: kicking the door down was good, but there was a bit too much (ie. non-zero) Catherine-Tate-Silly-Voice, Donna would for sure have sussed out at least the principle of River's and the Doctor's past/future relationship, and did she really have to exist in semi-detached heteronormative Family conformity whilst in backup?
I would have liked more expansion of the Library/Moon relationship, and some explanation of the presence of cipher-Father and concomitant absence of any mother in the Library's withdrawal. OK, the girl her avatar was based on died, but I don't recall Lux saying anything about (the girl's) family that would explain that.
Can't help wondering about River/Doctor too: since she clearly knows the Doctor across a wide spectrum of times and incarnations, she presumably hadn't (using her perceived timestream) spent huge parts of her life actually travelling with him. How did/will they work it? Does he just turn up in her life, in an arbitrary order, whenever he fancies a shag, or what? Her character doesn't strike me as one who would accept a fundamentally imbalanced relationship (even with her evident hero-worship), but how else could it be?