(24-11-2013 17:35 )Digital Dave Wrote: [ -> ] (24-11-2013 16:52 )bytor Wrote: [ -> ]Seeing Tom Baker made me yearn for his return. Pertwee and Baker were by far my favourites. Their Doctors had a depth of character and used their brains to resolve problems logically, rather than run around all over the place and coming up with bizarre and seemingly random resolutions.
Exactly, and usually involving that bloody sonic screwdriver. 
I did like John Hurt taking the p**s out of that - "What's with the pointing ?"
I hope Elizabeth the 1st is not going to be a recurring character. That stuff was just embarrassing.
And haven't we already done to death the comedy potential of Matt Smith falling out of the TARDIS while flying over London, wasn't that in his first story ?
I didn't mind a lot of the other comedy between the Doctors - the 10th and 20th anniversary specials also made play of grumpiness and comedy interaction between the different versions of the Doctor as part of his character; and you got the sense it was also done in a spirit of putting the words of the fan criticisms into the mouths of the various Doctors themselves - particularly John Hurt taking the mickey out of Tennant and Smith for being juvenile; so I thought that was reasonably well done.
The "stasis paintings" were a nice way of inventing a plot point to justify a 3D gimmick.
But I agree the Zygon plot was totally unresolved. They seemed to be a bit wasted - I think they were very well reimagined but deserved to be reintroduced in a story wholly about them and not as a kind of filler for a story which was really at the end of the day much more about the Doctor's own personal moral choice in the Time War.
So for me the Zygons got the short end of the stick and were just perfunctorily dropped to get on with the "main event" finale of "saving" Gallifrey.
Are they all still there ? Humans and Zygons have just agreed to be nice to each other ? Zygons don't know they are Zygons anymore and all the people that were copied over hundreds of years have just got identical twins walking around ?
And as a result is Matt Smith not really piling up all these un-foiled invasions of Earth : the Silence?, the Silurians ? and I imagine there are probably a few more I haven't even seen.
Not having watched any of the last couple of Matt Smith's seasons or specials I was dreading having to follow Moffat's tortuous plotting and references to episodes I haven't seen.
But apart from oblique references to the Doctor's future death and "Trensilore(?)" (Has the Doctor been killed by Moffat yet again, is this another "death" that we're going to see magically reversed at the end of a future season - oh spare me please this is getting so old
I don't think I missed out on much.
I would say if you hadn't a clue about the whole way the mythology of the Time War has affected the Doctor's character and how that has been built up over the all the seasons in recent years you might have been left slightly wondering what all the fuss was about :
There's the odd bit of flash back to an epic looking Dalek War with John Hurt really going for it, albeit just shooting up a wall rather than any actual Daleks.
(Probably more casual viewers are expecting to see a lot more of this type of thing, as it seems more like a big epic 50th anniversary type event ?). But no instead we see quite a lot of John Hurt sitting in a shed talking to Billie Piper - John Hurt and Billie Piper being very good in my opinion, but still just basically sitting talking and then showing him a bit of his future. It's like Jimmy Stewart in It's A Wonderful Life with Billie Piper as Clarence the Angel ; or possibly Scrooge and the ghost of Christmas future ? Makes me think this might have made a lot more sense if it had been presented as the Xmas special gimmick, no ? Maybe that would have been too cute. Then John Hurt meets his two other selves in a forest for some light comedy, and then they sit in a dungeon to do some more taking the piss out of each other , while in between times some reasonably scary but possibly under-explained shape-shifting orange foetuses with fangs menance the side-lined Doctor's assistant and try to take over the Tower of London for some reason - 3 Doctors turn up and stop this in an instant in a way nobody quite knows how - but hey quick skip over that now here's ALL the Doctors , most of whom you probably can't even remember doing some whizzing about in their TARDISes and hey presto we're done. Oh look, there's that old one who used to have the hat and the scarf, remember him, he was good, doesn't he look old, haven't seen him for years, he's Little Britain Voice isn't he, oh is that the end ?
Yeah that's a fairly indigestible paragraph right there, but that's what possibly what it felt like to the uninitiated watching it.
So from the point of view of those just tuning in for it as a one-off event and it being accessible to anybody who had even half-watched the Ecclestone or David Tennant versions and have since then given up, I would say it was probably reasonably entertaining enough : but maybe not as ultra spectacular as all the hype might have suggested ? Realistically the programme couldn't have coped with THAT many previous Doctors having too big a part to play in the action, it's really a different programme now and most of the actors are either dead or too old now.
It was a reasonably entertaining bit of fluff and it did seem to move along at a pace that meant it didn't outstay its welcome, and didn't end with a cliffhanger non-ending to try to make you tune in to a future episode. And that's more than you can say for a lot of self-important TV drama these days.