However, I do think that without some background, it reads essentially as The Amy Pond Show. Don't get me wrong, I do love The Amy Pond Show ;-) - but I also think the Doctor himself is a rather interesting character, and for all the unevenness of the previous seasons, there are a number of eps from them that - aside from simply being frelling fantastic television - really add all kinds of resonances to his actions and encounters in the present series. So, for a new viewer of a certain mindset, I think the show really does get a lot more interesting if you add that background for the Doctor.
Re: fave stories. I haven't seen The Curse of Fenric yet, so I can't say anything about that. As for the S5 finale - well, I *love* that finale, but it's inseparable from the rest of the season, really. The Rory bits in it wouldn't work well at all without knowing how he died; the River bits wouldn't work well without knowing about her history with the Doctor so far, etc. So, rather than seeing the finale as a story in its own right, I tend to group it with the entire fifth series/season/whatever you call that nowadays in DW. (I'm kind of in favour of calling it series 32, incidentally. ;-)) And yeah, that *is* my favourite series/season/etc. so far. :-)
Re: Tennant's Doctor's relative position in my affections ;-) The more I see, the more on-the-fence I am about him. Tennant did get some amazing eps and scenes, and sometimes he really knocked them out of the ballpark. And then in other eps all he does is stare melodramatically in close-up, and, I'm sorry, but that doesn't work at all. (And then, of course, there's the eps that are just disastrous from start to finish, but I tend to not blame that on Tennant but on the showrunner. So, when Tennant-Doc does something annoying in those eps, I tend to see him as RTD-Doc in those moments, rather than Tennant-Doc. ;-))
Speaking of RTD - I've watched Midnight and Turn Left today and I think I'd add Midnight to the "encore" section of my list above. That was a pretty great ep. (Turn Left was great, too, but too dependent on series 4 continuity to appear in a series-5-focused selection like the one above.) It boggles me how the same man who wrote Midnight and Turn Left could have written The Sound of Drums and The Last of the Time Lords... It's like RTD is the Dr. Jekyll of scriptwriting.
Re: vids. I'm not in a vid-watching mood right now, but will happily bookmark vids for later watching. I currently only have a handful of DW vids, so feel free to link me any and all the remarkable ones that you can think of!
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The Eleventh Doctor's run is indeed very self-contained.
Date: 2011-01-21 01:54 am (UTC)Re: fave stories. I haven't seen The Curse of Fenric yet, so I can't say anything about that. As for the S5 finale - well, I *love* that finale, but it's inseparable from the rest of the season, really. The Rory bits in it wouldn't work well at all without knowing how he died; the River bits wouldn't work well without knowing about her history with the Doctor so far, etc. So, rather than seeing the finale as a story in its own right, I tend to group it with the entire fifth series/season/whatever you call that nowadays in DW. (I'm kind of in favour of calling it series 32, incidentally. ;-)) And yeah, that *is* my favourite series/season/etc. so far. :-)
Re: Tennant's Doctor's relative position in my affections ;-) The more I see, the more on-the-fence I am about him. Tennant did get some amazing eps and scenes, and sometimes he really knocked them out of the ballpark. And then in other eps all he does is stare melodramatically in close-up, and, I'm sorry, but that doesn't work at all. (And then, of course, there's the eps that are just disastrous from start to finish, but I tend to not blame that on Tennant but on the showrunner. So, when Tennant-Doc does something annoying in those eps, I tend to see him as RTD-Doc in those moments, rather than Tennant-Doc. ;-))
Speaking of RTD - I've watched Midnight and Turn Left today and I think I'd add Midnight to the "encore" section of my list above. That was a pretty great ep. (Turn Left was great, too, but too dependent on series 4 continuity to appear in a series-5-focused selection like the one above.) It boggles me how the same man who wrote Midnight and Turn Left could have written The Sound of Drums and The Last of the Time Lords... It's like RTD is the Dr. Jekyll of scriptwriting.
Re: vids. I'm not in a vid-watching mood right now, but will happily bookmark vids for later watching. I currently only have a handful of DW vids, so feel free to link me any and all the remarkable ones that you can think of!