Better Second House

Journey To The Center Of The TARDIS is a tricky episode to review. It's one of those provocative titles, one that if we're honest will never really measure up to the promise of the ideas it conjures in our minds. Not that this will ever stop us complaining of course. We're fans, that's what we do. I suppose bitching about episodes of our favorite shows on the internet is the closest we'll ever get to hatefucking anything.

Still, whilst I can easily say that the episode was not nearly as much as I was hoping for, neither was it honestly as bad as my initial impression.

What Are You Doing In That Piano?

I think that possibly my favorite time in any series of Doctor Who is part where all the pre-season hype has more or less run out, and we stop having any real clue as to what's going to be happening in the next episode. There will be a big fuss over the first few episodes of a series, and various tidbits will leak out, but eventually all that will plateau and we'll get some genuine mystery happening before the build up to the finale.

This feels like the point we've reached now with Hide. Which is kinda weird when you think about it. I mean, there wasn't really anything in the way of major spoilers for The bells Of St John or The Rings Of Akhaten. The nearest we've really had was the fact we knew there were Ice Warriors in Cold War. And the fact that the next episode is called Journey To The Center Of The TARDIS is in itself a bit of a giveaway. But still...

What I suppose I'm driving at here is the simple fact that they I was going into this episode without much in the way of preconceptions. Which, as I've discussed previously, is always a good thing. So, how would I rate this tale of ethereal terror and ghostly happenings?

All things considered, it's surprisingly solid.

Feeling Hot (Hot, Hot)

When it comes to new Doctor Who, one of the greatest problems comes not from anything in the program itself, but ones own expectations. Particularly if you're a long term beardy grognard fanboy. Like me. It's sometimes quite possible to be dislike an episode simply because it wasn't what you WANTED it to be, without really paying due consideration to what it actually IS. A good example of this is perhaps Closing Time. An episode that I wanted to be an awesome Cyberman story, and couldn't really appreciate properly until I realized it was actually a buddy comedy episode that just happened to have Cybermen in it.

I mention all this by way of introduction to the subject of Cold War. An episode that I most certainly had high hopes for. The return of the Ice Warriors has been something I've been looking forward to for quite a while. And while the memory may or not cheat the fact is that often the picture I have in my head of how a particular monster should work is not always the same as that of the actual production team.

But you know what? Cold War is basically everything I could have wanted for an Ice Warrior episode.

Except maybe more of this.

In Space Everyone Can Hear You Sing.

The Rings Of Akhaten is a surprisingly challenging episode to review. There are episodes that are clearly brilliant. There are episodes that are, in all honesty, pretty shite. But there's not many that somehow manage to be some shades of both at the same time. Sure, there are stories that are good but have their flaws, just as there episodes that are flawed but have their good points. But somehow Rings seems to transcend these usual strictures to become something new. It's fairly objectively bad, and the what little plot it has quickly falls apart into nonsensical mush. But somehow it remains fairly enjoyable despite all this. Remind you of anything?

Oh yeah, I went there.

A Game Far, Far Away...

So, to the surprise of absolutely no-one and intensely bitter disappointment of absolutely everyone it was announced the other day that Disney have decided to close Lucasarts. At least as a development studio. This has the result that 1313, the most promising Star Wars game in a long time, is now basically dead in the water. There is yet some slim hope, as it was stated that Lucasarts will be turned into some sort of licencing entity. So it's just barely possible that the various titles they had in development may yet be farmed out to other studios. Although I don't really see this as particularly likely. After all, the Star Wars licence is not going to come cheap. How many outfits have both the money to make it happen and the talent to do it well? EA? That'd be like hiring a rabid zombie rottweiler as a babysitter: you've really got no one to blame but yourself when you come home and find all the guts ripped out. Maybe Bethesda if they could get over their fetish for making the menus in everything they've ever published incomprehensibly BAD. And Gearbox certainly owes the world of franchised science fiction games a massive karmic debt. But really that just raises up the spectre of Duke Nukem Forever. A highly anticipated game that eventually had to be bought up by another studio to actually get finished and released. And look how well that went.

I'm here to kick ass and chew bubblegum. And I'm all out of ass.

My Ding-A-Ling

And so, at long last Doctor Who returns to our screens again. And, since I am allegedly a fan of Doctor Who that can only mean one thing: To relentlessly nitpick the most trivial details in each episode and generally act in fashion that does not generally correlate with actually having enjoyed the show at all. let's get started shall we?