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zeborahI've never actually read Dickens' book. In fact I'm not sure I've read any of Dickens' books in their entirety. I was assigned Great Expectations in school and I must have soldiered through at least half of it, and I did look at the very end which was my favourite part (I enjoy minor ambiguities like "We never said farewell again"), but it's quite possible I skipped the rest. I've tried Oliver Twist and Tale of Two Cities and others at various ages, but it just comes down quite simply to the fact that I don't enjoy reading Dickens' novels.
So everything I know about A Christmas Carol I learned from the general societal gestalt, inhaled from bits of TV movies and duck-filled cartoons and fanfic pastiches and the Blackadder parody and YA novels involving children putting on plays and a multitude of slighter references. A Lamb Chop episode once argued that people are born knowing "Three Blind Mice" because who can remember not knowing it? The story of A Christmas Carol is like that for me. A Dickens fan would grimace and say I really should read the book, of course, but there's lots of things that should happen and won't.
Because of my utter lack on fanning over Dickens, then, I was disappointed to see that the title of this year's Doctor Who Christmas Special was A Christmas Carol. We've already met Dickens, y'know? and moreover, the story's been done, in movies and cartoons and fanfics and parodies and novels about plays and and and.
But within the first minute I'd forgotten all wariness for giggling over Amy and Rory. (Also, I really like the ship uniforms. They've got that futuristic form-fitting thing going on, but they look like proper uniforms with actual style.) And then having the sickly voiceover turn out to be our Scrooge carried me through the next half-scene (I like it when voiceovers are done right), and then the Doctor's whimsical tumble down the chimney because it's Christmas and what the heck? and by the time he's shouting "A Christmas carol!" and getting that look on his face I've given up any reservations I might have still had because of course the Doctor's going to seize the chance to pretend to be the Ghost of Christmas Past. Nine hundred years of traveling through time and space and when's he ever going to have such an opportunity again?
So I very much enjoyed the story, though I had to pause in a hurry at one point to move to a more earthquake-proof location. I did still have a couple of minor issues:
So everything I know about A Christmas Carol I learned from the general societal gestalt, inhaled from bits of TV movies and duck-filled cartoons and fanfic pastiches and the Blackadder parody and YA novels involving children putting on plays and a multitude of slighter references. A Lamb Chop episode once argued that people are born knowing "Three Blind Mice" because who can remember not knowing it? The story of A Christmas Carol is like that for me. A Dickens fan would grimace and say I really should read the book, of course, but there's lots of things that should happen and won't.
Because of my utter lack on fanning over Dickens, then, I was disappointed to see that the title of this year's Doctor Who Christmas Special was A Christmas Carol. We've already met Dickens, y'know? and moreover, the story's been done, in movies and cartoons and fanfics and parodies and novels about plays and and and.
But within the first minute I'd forgotten all wariness for giggling over Amy and Rory. (Also, I really like the ship uniforms. They've got that futuristic form-fitting thing going on, but they look like proper uniforms with actual style.) And then having the sickly voiceover turn out to be our Scrooge carried me through the next half-scene (I like it when voiceovers are done right), and then the Doctor's whimsical tumble down the chimney because it's Christmas and what the heck? and by the time he's shouting "A Christmas carol!" and getting that look on his face I've given up any reservations I might have still had because of course the Doctor's going to seize the chance to pretend to be the Ghost of Christmas Past. Nine hundred years of traveling through time and space and when's he ever going to have such an opportunity again?
So I very much enjoyed the story, though I had to pause in a hurry at one point to move to a more earthquake-proof location. I did still have a couple of minor issues:
- Moffat has in fact told this story before, firstly in "Girl in the Fireplace" and secondly "The Eleventh Hour". At first having the kid be a boy was a minor twist, but then it cunningly turns back into "Boy takes girl out of her box to play with her at his convenience, falls in love, and then she goes and dies on him" and... yeah, that's a bit too familiar; with that formulation we can add in "Silence in the Library" too (both with how the girl is treated and with River's fate).
- Just when you think you've got the rules of the TARDIS sorted out... It had seemed to me that once the Doctor is in the thick of things, he can't move the TARDIS around in it. This is why, when he discovers a Big Bad has been killing people, he can't go back and stop it killing the people, he's just got to deal with it in the present he's in. Here, though, he can go back and visit the guy's childhood... which kind of makes you wonder why he couldn't go back and visit Amy's. One can of course fanwank, to wit: this guy clearly needed it so messing in his history was scarcely going to make things much worse for him; whereas Amy is (abandonment issues aside) pretty happy and well-balanced, so messing in her history could Cause Problems. Still. Amy's gotta wonder, I think.
- The great thing about the end of "The Big Bang" was the message that yes, married people can have adventures too! I mean really, that was astounding and wonderful to see on TV. And now it turns out that Amy and Rory's first adventure as a married couple consists of them standing around saying "Save us, Doctor!" I am disappoint.
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Date: 2011-02-01 06:11 am (UTC)First impression: OMG, are they copying a Star Trek bridge? (Compare for example to the bridge of the Titanic, which had no such feel to it.[*]) But they did it just differently enough that it felt Doctor Who again :-)
[*] In fact, I'm fairly amused that many non-ship sf series, when they have to invent a ship, use the Star Trek bridge layout with some serial-number-filing-off to make it not a total ripoff (Stargate SG-1 comes to mind). There are other choices, you know.
I loved the story as it was unfolding, and the way the Ghost of Christmas Future was done was IMO quite brilliant.
Afterward, I started wondering about the frozen woman (whose name I've already forgotten...). Did she have any other role in the story but to be two plot coupons (the love interest and the singer)? She seemed even be the sort of perfect woman a man such as our Scrooge here could possible want. (And what's with the singing? The timbre sounded wrong to me, more like a boy soprano than a woman's voice. But I could be imagining things.)
Oh well. I still enjoyed it a lot.