Post by George Avalos"Doomsday"
12-22-06 Dr. Who
5 stars (1:00 a.m.)
0-1 stars (11:59 p.m.)
2. The plot was muddled to the point that it seemed to be telling a
completely different story from part 1 - this was an unrelated Dalek
story that just happened to have left-over Cybermen from last week. The
'war' was nothing but an excuse for identikit special effects scenes
and had no bearing on anything that actually happened in the story -
the Doctor's solution would have been the same had the two sides been
allies, and was a deus ex machina to boot (again!) Cyber-Yvonne ran
wholly counter to everything we know of Cybermen, not least the whole
emotional inhibitor business so critical to Rise of the Cybermen. Most
grating of all (okay, second most grating of all) was the continual
dimension-hopping (including a scene ripped straight from X-Men 2 - how
did Pete know to jump at that moment, and how did he manage to jump to
*a different point* in the building from the one he'd left to catch
Rose?) - never mind that Time Lords apparently never had the tech to do
that so it strains credibility that Torchwood would, it rather makes a
nonsense of the Doctor's dire warning "It could cause the universes to
collapse ... but not until after the next time. And the next. And...".
The most grating thing was of course Rose's departure. The "I died
because I got a death certificate" thing is so unimaginative and
cliched that it would have been better to forget the Beast's prophecy
altogether (after all, he was wrong when he told the crew that that
planet would be their tomb, and for all the audience knew when he
claimed that he would live, so why not about Rose?) and gone with the
Doctor's claim that he'd lied than to try and force the story to comply
with it if RTD wasn't willing to actually kill off the character. But
worse even than that is that she gets a *happy ending*. There's so much
set-up in various parts of the season foreshadowing something dire
coming of the characters' lighthearted attitude to their adventures and
(in Age of Steel and Love & Monsters) that Jackie's life was on the
line, that having Rose reunited with a full family and boyfriend and a
job running Torchwood was a huge letdown quite aside from simply being
bad, hackneyed storytelling.
Phil