Sunday 6 July 2008

A lovely day out

I've just walked my mum and brother back to the coach stop at Uni after spending the weekend here. It was really good to see them, and we had an enjoyable day out yesterday. We went to the La Tasca tapas bar & restaurant for dinner, got a new pair of trainers bought for me, and we went to see Wil Smith's new movie, Hancock, which was a pretty good movie. Then again, I couldn't see a movie about an alcoholic superhero, doing more harm than good when rescuing people so that he's become a menace to the local population, being a bad movie. And suprisingly towards the end it turned into quite a dramatic and sad love story reminiscent of Casablanca... but i'm not gonna totally spoil for you if you happen to decide to go see it yourself.

Then in the evening I sat down to watch the series finale of Doctor Who, which, I have to say, had its moments and probably one of the saddest endings of the program so far when his assistant Donna Noble has to have all memories of him and their adventures together erased... In some ways a more tragic ending than simply killing her off. It also answered the BIG question raised at the end of the last episode with the Doctor's apparent regeneration. Last week, my housemate Sophie and I, spent ages on internet sites and forums looking for any information we could find that could hint at what was going to happen next. We knew Tennant was supposed to be signed on for numerous specials and the next series but we wondered if it may be an elaborate hoax by the BBC to suprise it's audience. Realistically we knew it would be next to impossible to cover something that big up but we had to find out, as personally I would have loved it if that were true. Don't get me wrong, I really like Tennant as Doctor Who, but I would also find it really exciting to suddenly find a new Doctor in his place, even if it was only a tempoary one for this episode.

So as the week went on many discussion were had about what was going to happen, each of us with our own theories. The general agreement was that it was likely David was going to stay and the hand may have some part to play as it has been quite a significant feature over the course of this series. I think Sophie even made quite an accurate prediction, if maybe partly in jest, that through the hand he would create a duplicate version of himself allowing one of them to live happily ever after with Rose!

The episode was by no means perfect though. It still retained much of its cheesyness from the previous episode, plus quite an annoying amount of technobabble as every two seconds a character would reveal some sort of amazing superweapon or gadget to use against the Daleks, with the explanations coming so quick and fast, you may as well be watching the episode in Spanish with the amount of words that were going over your head. And although it was quite funny and enjoyable to see Donna becoming like the Doctor it did seem a bit stupid to me that there was a control panel right next to the tardis that could remotely control the entire Dalek fleet and their reality destroying superweapon.

There was also the issue of the Doctor giving his duplicate self a telling off for commiting genocide and wiping out the Daleks - so what would you have done original Doctor? I can't see you letting them live or offering some sort of deal that would make them back down. In almost every confrontation with the Daleks, or the cybermen, or various other alien foes, he wipes them out and now he's giving himself a telling off for doing exactly the same thing.

But now there's no more Doctor Who until Christmas but at least that gives me ample time to watch all four seasons over again, or maybe I should try and get out some more?

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