Part Two Of The First Story Of The Season

[poliphilo]

Bluff, counterbluff, counter-counterbluff.

"Got you that time."  "O, no you didn't. I knew what you were doing all along and kept my fingers crossed". It took me right back to the playground. As it happens I've been reading Shaw. He's a lot like Moffat; both think the world can be changed by a quibble.

I liked it when the Doctor and Davros shared a laugh. But then Davros went back to being totally evil and was immediately much less interesting. There were moments when Missy too seemed like she was treating the companion Wassaname as a woman and a sister and then she'd spoil the illusion by doing something gratuitously mean. Why do the Who villains have to be such out and out rotters? We accept a degree of moral ambiguity in the Doctor, why can't his opponents be a little nuanced too?

I love the Doctor. That's why I'm so hard on him.

Comments

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

Yes, i tend to agree with you about Davros. Missy is so much fun though.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I know what you mean, but I thought this episode was much stronger than the first. To be honest, I was relieved when Davros turned out not to be an old softie really, and the Doctor turned out not to be a sentimental fool who'd happily give up some of his life force to restore the creator of the Daleks (what would 9 have said?). Giving Davros a history - explaining how he got that way - is one thing, but to make him a weepy old man would have been wrong, I think.

Missy, on the other hand, does have - if not depth, then a kind of iridescent variation in her glittering surface. Her real enemy isn't the Doctor, it's boredom, and she'll do whatever it takes to defeat it, whether or not it it happens to be good or bad by other people's lights. Oddly enough, the person she keeps reminding me of (I've just realised this) is John Hurt's Caligula in I, Claudius.

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

Well, we don't know yet that Davros was destroyed, or all of his Daleks, for that matter. For my part, I read a lot of bluff/counterbluff as a metaphor for the moral ambiguity that Davros, Missy, and the Doctor all share. There probably is a bit of Davros that regrets the slaughter of all of his people and wishes the Doctor well in the preservation of his race.

Did you by any chance watch the rebroadcast of the two episodes together as a seamless whole that I understand was on BBCone yesterday?

(When the character of The Master was conceived in 1971 by Terrance Dicks et al., he was modeled on Moriarty, by the way, so this isn't a Moffatt thing. And he's been escaping certain death by various timey-wimey hand-wavey devices since then, too.)

I also thought that Missy was marginally more nuanced in her performance in these two episodes, and to the degree that she is, I enjoyed her character more.