![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I quite liked it! But I will point out some things I did not care for as much. As usual, take what steps you need to protect your squee.
1) Okay, Mel made me SORT OF UNCOMFORTABLE right up until the reveal. She's sassy! And goes to jail a lot! ::headtilt:: hmm. But once I rewatched it with the awareness that I was looking at Wee Baby River Song it made more sense and was less perplexing.
Here's the thing: River Song is an encapsulated timeline. Mel has existed for Rory and Amy's whole lives, and also has only been real for three months and has also covered millenia of lived human time. I think her life story can only be understood as its own whole sealed up thing.
I appreciated them kind of fanwanking it to explain why she gets younger farther into her timeline. That's neat. Honestly I am usually very DEATH TO SPOILERS but I have an overwhelming urge to find out how many more episodes Alex Kingston is listed in.
2) You have to figure there was a timeline where Amy and Rory got together without Mel's prompting, right? There very clearly seems to be a world where she never existed and then this little loop of a bubble in time where she does exist. The fact that she kind of does and also doesn't would certainly lend to her mythic qualities. Honestly more than anything the Mel portion reminded me of the Buffy episode Superstar, the one where Jonathon rewrote the story to make himself the hero. I guess now Amy's been through at least three versions of her own timeline. I have to admit I was very fond of the version of Amy where she was All Alone Except for Rory and also where she was officially the Quirkiest. I can't really accept a world in which that person's erased and she spent the whole time being the stern mainstream friend of a charismatic car thief. I have to believe it's a bubble on the time stream and the real Amy who can't resist a keep-out sign was already there and got looped into raising Mel, who is also a whole real person who also got to be the Quirkiest because her childhood time is folded up in a ball inside the larger story.
I honestly think that knot will probably untie itself by the end of the series, though I'm nervous about how. I kind of want Amy and Rory to go to the Library and meet Eternal Virtual River. I'll bet Moffat could handle that okay. I have decided that she really did love archaeology and while the interface model that she chose was Thematically Alarming Virtual Children, in reality she's creating new archival AIs for information retrieval who love historical data just as much as she does. Yes. That is what I have decided: she becomes a space librarian.
I too will handwave giving up all her regenerations. I liked having a lady timelord again for three whole minutes, though.
Hm, thinking about it, I want there to be lots of fix-it where Mel and Amy and Rory go on adventures and go camping and solve mysteries and the strange pasted-on filament in which they lost their original formative lives to child-parenting a monomaniacal protagonist becomes a real, rich experience of knowing each other as people. I don't actually think child-parenting is all that nice if you think about it.
3) Aw, I loved basically the rest of the episode. I loved the Star Trek Judgement Bot a whole lot; honestly the idea of a bunch of tiny Federation officers traveling through time to impose their moral worldview on history cracks me up and is fantastic. Because they must have run out of places in space to judge and have to go back in time to find things that aren't judged yet! WHAT WILL THEY DO WITH ALL THEIR EXCESS JUDGING OTHERWISE, OH, HALP.
4) I have to approve of setting a story in Hitler's freaking office and just punching him in the face and putting him in a cupboard. Sure it was random and glued together with chewing gum, as a plot point, but as far as fanservice bait-and-switches go, I actually enjoyed that we spent the whole summer bracing for a deep exploration of how history changes or doesn't change if you remove key people or change their life course and the entire premise got punched and shoved in a cupboard immediately. Not the story that's being told! Who wants a metamorphizing judgement bot? KEEP YOUR HANDS AND FEET INSIDE THE VEHICLE BECAUSE WE ARE MOVING RIGHT ALONG.
5) This sounds weird but at this point I am not 100% sold on Doctor/River. I think the show's going to have to earn it from here. I ship everything we've seen up to this point! But apparently most of the good stuff's ahead of us, not behind.
I am wondering if when that knot in the timeline comes untied River will actually wind up getting her regenerations back, as it is useful to have another infinitely recastable character around.
As usual, I am capable of large amounts of tl;dr about Doctor Who when I get going.
1) Okay, Mel made me SORT OF UNCOMFORTABLE right up until the reveal. She's sassy! And goes to jail a lot! ::headtilt:: hmm. But once I rewatched it with the awareness that I was looking at Wee Baby River Song it made more sense and was less perplexing.
Here's the thing: River Song is an encapsulated timeline. Mel has existed for Rory and Amy's whole lives, and also has only been real for three months and has also covered millenia of lived human time. I think her life story can only be understood as its own whole sealed up thing.
I appreciated them kind of fanwanking it to explain why she gets younger farther into her timeline. That's neat. Honestly I am usually very DEATH TO SPOILERS but I have an overwhelming urge to find out how many more episodes Alex Kingston is listed in.
2) You have to figure there was a timeline where Amy and Rory got together without Mel's prompting, right? There very clearly seems to be a world where she never existed and then this little loop of a bubble in time where she does exist. The fact that she kind of does and also doesn't would certainly lend to her mythic qualities. Honestly more than anything the Mel portion reminded me of the Buffy episode Superstar, the one where Jonathon rewrote the story to make himself the hero. I guess now Amy's been through at least three versions of her own timeline. I have to admit I was very fond of the version of Amy where she was All Alone Except for Rory and also where she was officially the Quirkiest. I can't really accept a world in which that person's erased and she spent the whole time being the stern mainstream friend of a charismatic car thief. I have to believe it's a bubble on the time stream and the real Amy who can't resist a keep-out sign was already there and got looped into raising Mel, who is also a whole real person who also got to be the Quirkiest because her childhood time is folded up in a ball inside the larger story.
I honestly think that knot will probably untie itself by the end of the series, though I'm nervous about how. I kind of want Amy and Rory to go to the Library and meet Eternal Virtual River. I'll bet Moffat could handle that okay. I have decided that she really did love archaeology and while the interface model that she chose was Thematically Alarming Virtual Children, in reality she's creating new archival AIs for information retrieval who love historical data just as much as she does. Yes. That is what I have decided: she becomes a space librarian.
I too will handwave giving up all her regenerations. I liked having a lady timelord again for three whole minutes, though.
Hm, thinking about it, I want there to be lots of fix-it where Mel and Amy and Rory go on adventures and go camping and solve mysteries and the strange pasted-on filament in which they lost their original formative lives to child-parenting a monomaniacal protagonist becomes a real, rich experience of knowing each other as people. I don't actually think child-parenting is all that nice if you think about it.
3) Aw, I loved basically the rest of the episode. I loved the Star Trek Judgement Bot a whole lot; honestly the idea of a bunch of tiny Federation officers traveling through time to impose their moral worldview on history cracks me up and is fantastic. Because they must have run out of places in space to judge and have to go back in time to find things that aren't judged yet! WHAT WILL THEY DO WITH ALL THEIR EXCESS JUDGING OTHERWISE, OH, HALP.
4) I have to approve of setting a story in Hitler's freaking office and just punching him in the face and putting him in a cupboard. Sure it was random and glued together with chewing gum, as a plot point, but as far as fanservice bait-and-switches go, I actually enjoyed that we spent the whole summer bracing for a deep exploration of how history changes or doesn't change if you remove key people or change their life course and the entire premise got punched and shoved in a cupboard immediately. Not the story that's being told! Who wants a metamorphizing judgement bot? KEEP YOUR HANDS AND FEET INSIDE THE VEHICLE BECAUSE WE ARE MOVING RIGHT ALONG.
5) This sounds weird but at this point I am not 100% sold on Doctor/River. I think the show's going to have to earn it from here. I ship everything we've seen up to this point! But apparently most of the good stuff's ahead of us, not behind.
I am wondering if when that knot in the timeline comes untied River will actually wind up getting her regenerations back, as it is useful to have another infinitely recastable character around.
As usual, I am capable of large amounts of tl;dr about Doctor Who when I get going.
Tags: