I decided to "take the plunge", as it were, and started the modern series with Eccleston... and right out of the gate am getting a very strong Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Get Smart vibe, which is an interesting combination of tonal influences.
Eccleston makes for a fun and interesting protagonist, as he comes across as part Sylvester McCoy as Radagast the Brown, part Ryan Gage as Alfrid, and part Xander Harris, which is magnified when he's asked to handle "sight gags" like wrestling with a plastic arm (which was hilarious and perfect, I have to say).
Eccleston saved it, IMHO. A lot in "Rose" was awful at the time and it hasn't dated well.
I saw Eccleston more akin to Colin Baker in terms of emotion, and similar to Davison in terms of often doing nothing to save the day.
Billie Piper's Rose reminds me of Greer and Atlee from The CW's Reign, with some of Emily Rose's Audrey Parker, Allison Mack as Chloe Syllivan, and classic comic book Lois Lane as well, and she's got fantastic chemistry with Eccleston.
Yeah, Billie's chemistry with Eccleston also saves the day should a script be pure trash. She reminds me of any generic teenager practicing what I believe is termed "hypergamy", since she has an attraction to this strange guy who looks to be as old as her father. (eww)
I like the pacing of the first episode, how it just drops you in the middle of things and doesn't really bother to explain stuff until it absolutely has to, letting us figure out what's going on as Rose does.
The pacing exists to distract your brain from the gobs of plot holes that exist to insult the audience with. It's as clever as it is patronizing, since plot holes are inevitable in ANY show. Meanwhile, everyone else bleats "today's kids all have ADHD" and some of them even manage to put the pieces together - wow!
Speaking of Rose figuring things out, her first encounter with the TARDIS was great, from running into it, then back out of it, then back into it, to The Doctor's explanation about it and himself in one-word sentences, to her reaction when she comes out of it and they're in a totally different place than they were before.
The show is made a bit more subtly than TNG, which elevated the minor charatcers by dumbing down everyone else.
I'm not sure why the series deliberately chose to use VFX that looked like they came from the 1980s, but it was more than a bit strange and made the episode's climax a little hard to take seriously. Thankfully, though, Eccleston and Billie Piper's acting was strong enough to combat the wonky effects choices.
At the time, everyone fawned over the modern effects. And they're a lot better than anything from the 80s or earlier, technically. Even Michael Grade, the guy who whined about DFW's effects in the 80s as a reason to cancel the show (competing against American shows that looked expensive) when he ran the place and had the ability to give DW the money it needed but chose not to.
On the whole, I liked this first episode enough to keep watching the series, and am kind of regretting that it took me this long to dive in.
The first episode is such mindless offal, complete with "antiplastic"... but I always try to watch two or three episodes of a show before deciding to use time in better ways... glad I had.
"Offal" - internal organs left over from a butchered animal, often used in pet food but not as much for hot dogs.
My thoughts on Episode 2, The End of the World (which I watched last night):
Having the episode open with a condensed repeat of scenes from "Rose" was a 'recap tactic' I can't really recall seeing before (usually there's a structured voiceover montage or maybe a repeat of the very last scene of the previous episode), and I liked it because it dropped you right back into the action.
Yeah, the "last time on" recaps are rather nice. Unless one watches back to back marathons. But, as the Doctor says, "there's a time and a place". The 9th Doctor is underrated as a character, I'll admit...
The Doctor taking Rose to witness the "end of the world" was more than a little random, but it was, I think, a nice way to show off the TARDIS' abilities without having to really explain anything, and gave the episode a little bit of a Sliders-esque vibe.
Maybe season 3 Sliders, the worst of the five by far.
IMHO, the story tries to feel "70s traditional" and largely succeeds. It's one of my favorites, TBH.
I really liked the slow-burn setup of what was happening on Platform One, both with the destruction of Earth and with the "mystery of the spiders" because it gave us a chance to get to see both The Doctor and Rose in a fairly benign situation and get to know them a little better.
Well, the "Let me wave my magic wand across your cell phone and you can call mommy despite being a long way away in time and space" bit was as putrid as it gets, but every TV show invariably has one scene per episode where the writers have to do something to fill up time with. Roll with it, it's splendidly mawksh. But it reeks "sci-fantasy" or "fantasy" rather than "sci-fi", and DW has had a history of overusing the sonic screwdriver with a record the modern series seems to gleefully want to make worse.
But, yeah, the tension kept winding up. Cell phone BS aside, it wasn't half-bad and the episode is quick to ditch the sapping melodrama to get to the actual story.
The support characters in this one were interesting, and the 80s design and VFX actually worked in the show's favor this time because it, in a strange way, actually made the characters feel more 'real' and alien.
Not 80s. Just low budget, even in 2005 DW wasn't given a goldmine to make a lot of nothing with. The f/x team just did it very well.
I really liked the character of Jabe, especially in her interactions with The Doctor, and it was really quite sad to see her perish.
If you think about it, her death - in a sequence from the story that was lampooned in 1990s sci-fi comedy movies no less - was completely unavoidable. The Doctor could have held it down while she runs at super-magical speed to hit the magic reset button. We know little about Jabe, who would have been a far better companion than Rose ever would... but the Doctor has too much personal history and all of a sudden he has magical running speed skills, never to be used again. come on, even high schoolers do a better job at coherence than that cliche-driven slop had. (Yes, I do like the story and adore Jabe, but where the story lets viewers down is a huge slap in the audience's face. If this were 1955, such gaffes were closer to being par for the course and would be easier to forgive. But it's 2005, most audiences are more sophisticated. The writer dropped the ball, it's as simple as that.)
Lady Cassandra was an interesting character as well because, at first, she doesn't seem like anything more than a stock support character whose purpose is largely to let the show feel alien and overtly Sci-Fi, only for her to turn out to be the "big bad" at the end.
She's also human, not alien at all. As a supporting character, she's interesting if arresting to look at - kudos to the f/x team, though it's amazing there's no automatic humidification machine that can fuse surrounding molecules into water. But that's not really needed, she clearly needs "body"guards either way. So between shifts she constantly gets her water bath.
I did do some "extra credit" reading ahead, and apparently she's supposed to come back later, which I'm not sure I can buy given the way she got dispatched by The Doctor.
As was said, some villains/monsters in DW - classic and new - come back with no reason. Not even a line of tie-in dialogue for some cases. A fan of the classic era, it was nice to experience in the present the context people in the past complained about. Since, like back then, casual viewers aren't going to care about strict continuity. Yet all those review books that gripe about the Master and Omega returning for no reason... I stand corrected now that I understand the deeper nuances, I'll admit.
Speaking of, I continue to really like Christopher Eccleston in the role; even when the character is trying to be distant and a bit standoffish, he just oozes charm and warmth. I also think his chemistry with Billie Piper continues to climb, especially in the scenes where he rejiggers her cell phone and later admits that he's the last of his kind.
It's a lovely juxtaposition. The on-screen chemistry does rescue a lot of bad material throughout the season.
This episode had a very "classic Sci-Fi" feel to it overall, which I liked, and was a nice way to follow up the previous episode in terms of developing the characters and showcasing some of the series' core concepts that weren't really touched on there.
"The End of the World" did start out great, even fitting into long-term continuity the way "Frontios" (1983) and "The Ark" (1965) had, but when they brought up the "let's put the emergency rescue button down where nobody can get at the thing" trope combined with ripping off big cooling fans from "Galaxy Quest" (1996)... the story is a lot better than "Rose", but 2005 DW is not any improvement on classic Who of any season
so far... and, yes, there's a story or two coming up that are legitimate all-time bests...
