Re: The Doctor Who Discussion thread(SPOILER ALERT!)
So if your dead for a few hours you can be bought back to life, yet if your dead for about a week or so your stuffed? I'm sorry, but when your dead....your dead.
You obviously haven't paid much attention in biology - there have been reports of people being revived two <i>hours</i> after death. The human body can be quite surprising when it comes to survival. Also, remember The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances when the Doctor states that bringing someone back to life is easy, you just need the correct instructions. But generally, if you've been dead a week then rigor mortis will have no doubt set in by then and I doubt you're coming back from that one.
Ah, I get it now. Although it still annoys me how increasingly powerful the TARDIS is getting. Its starting to turn from the simple Time Machine that it was in Series 1 into a tool for writers.
It makes sense though - when at one time there would have been thousands of TARDIS's (TARDI?) connected to the Time Vortex, there is now only one. Much like when cutting off lanes of a motorway forces more traffic through one place. Besides, it's very much implied that the TARDIS has the only surviving Eye of Harmony now that Gallifrey is gone, so logic dictates that it's moved its primary location to there (whether the Doctor realises this is another matter entirely).
Ok, by halfway through Series 3 you are aware of a certain Mr Saxon.....but did you honestly expect him to be 'The Master'? I didn't (although I was much younger then, and not as nit-picky).
Pretty much any Whovian with a brain figured it out by episode... 3 I think? ("You Are Not Alone" - you were just oozing with subtlety with that one Russell
)Still, knowing didn't make the actual reveal any less awesome, because no-one expected it to be Professor Yana (a clear sign that Whovians can figure out anagrams, but not acronyms).
And I get that your supposed to be aware of a Story-Arc.....but the crack thing was INSULTINGLY OBVIOUS. Sure, I didn't understand it until Episode 3, but do you really need to keep pointing it out at the end of EVERY EPISODE.
Ah, but there's a key difference between it and the arc words of previous series: the Crack is SUPPOSED to be insultingly obvious. It's insultingly obvious to the characters (once they notice), it's insulting obvious to the audience. The reason for the obviousness is a pretty simple one - it sets up the story for the rest of the series. Had the crack been hidden like "Bad Wolf" or casually mentioned like "Torchwood," then when it finally showed up in ep 5 we would have had a reaction of "what? What cracks?"
Also, Prisoner Zero says in TEH: "the cracks in the universe; don't you know where they came from?" Had the cracks not appeared in following episode, even if only as a visual clue, then that would have been shoddy writing. Foreshadowing does not work particularly well with "subtle" plots, because you're more likely to miss it. In Russell T Davis' case, the foreshadowing apparently decided to do its own thing, because half of it was foreshadowing something far more awesome than what actually happened (I will get my epic Ragnarok-inspired finale once day!!). The rest of was the painfully obvious "she is returning" (this after Rose appears in episode 1 of series 4) and all the hints that something bad was going to happened to Donna. For the record, if I ever see a prophecy in Doctor Who again someone will get punched in the spleen ("The Pandoric will open. Silence will fall" is more "this is what will go down" than an actual prophecy because it was unbelievably straight forward for once).
There's also another likely reason for the insultingly obvious: some people wouldn't be able to find a plot if it was presented to them on a graph. I still can't get my head around the fact that people were asking how Amy recorded that video in The Beast Below when a dirty great button marked RECORD (in red, no less) was shown on screen for at least 30 seconds. Honestly, the number of times people complained about plot holes this series when the episode actually addressed them was simply staggering.
Smegging? I am so stealing that...
Then I shall command thee to go watch Red Dwarf.
I'd recommend the TV Tropes page for reading up on time travel, because it actually deals with it as it's presented in sci-fi complete with variations. As for the restoration field, think back to the nanogenes from series 1, or check out TV Tropes again, because it's bound to be covered on there too.




