Weekend In Review

Despite the suspicious time, this is actually a blog posted at precisely this time - by an urge to get this done before midnight, and nearly succeeding.

Yesterday saw Rachel come over for the evening for dinner, a chat and theoretically a movie. We'd originally planned to go out to see something at the cinema, but as there was nothing actually worth seeing, we decided that an evening in would be better. As it turned out, it definitely was - we had a long conversation veering from serious to trivial matters, from holidays to the past, and was good company, a pleasant time and not the least bit therapeutic. The fact that we had been talking for two hours before we remembered to put the food on is probably a good sign!

Having done that, we thought it was too late for a film but did decide to watch the evening's Doctor Who episode, A Town Called Mercy. As a proposition - frontier town besieged by a lone gunman - it was both a nice nod to the Western genre, and almost a token reference for the American audience. It was also a nice set of sci-fi homeages - Doctor Who! Cyborgs! Ben Browder from Farscape!

While the plot seemed moderate, and the riff on the alien doctor being someone different was nicely laid out, for me I struggled to take it seriously from the halfway point - the reason being that Adrian Scarborough playing Kahler-Jex looked remarkably like Edward Hibbert, better known as the actor who plays radio restaurant critic Gil Chesterton in Frasier. This took the edge off his menace - but on reflection it was a much grittier episode full of a lot more moral puzzles than an initial glance.

We also see a much darker side of the Doctor this season, with two consecutive episodes now where he has been seemingly dismissive of his foes and tires of mercy. This seems a build-up to the mid-season point, likely around the departure of the Ponds.

A final aside though, for which I cannot take credit but instead borrowed from the Guardian series blog, is a comment on caps lock which I will now remorselessly appropriate: "WHEN YOU WRITE IN CAPS! I READ IT LIKE A DALEK! EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE!"