Friday, January 1, 2010

9th Doctor - The Parting of the Ways (iv)

Book(s)/Other Related -
Doctor Who – The End of an Error
The Temporal Difference of Opinion 27-part miniseries on ITV
Doctor Who Parts Rose Tyler's Dimpled Knees (rated 15+)
Spatio-Temporal STDs – an information pamphlet all sexually active time travelers should have


Fluffs – Christopher Eccleston seemed bad wolfish in this story.

At one point he refers to Captain Jack as "Father Ted".

Some people say Jack refers to Rose as a 'stupid freaking bitch', but he actually says 'You stupid freaking game show contestant'. It's like a game of Chinese Bitches. Or something...


Goofs –
Lynda must be seriously arrogant to think that, out of 10,000 channels and 60 Big Brothers, that the Doctor must have been watching the Big Brother in which she is taking part.

At the end of one scene, Trin-E and Zu-Zana have activated the tools
on their arms to shag Captain Jack, and then the next scene they're in shows them back to normal, only to activate them again. Kinky.

Why is the station masking the Dustbin fleet from sonar? Sonar can't be used in space, as sound doesn't travel through it! Does anyone in stupid program know ANYTHING about science?!?

The interior of the Dustbin control room is actually the gents at BBC Wales with Dustbins poised at urinals. What's worse is that various non-cast-members regularly wander into the scene and use the facilities, leading to the moment when Rose starts choking and claiming her nostril hair has vaporized. "Warn us before you let one rip like that, ya massive, shrunken testicle!"

Where does the Dustbin casing inside the TARDIS go? Jack's bedroom?!

Rather than being guns from circa 200,000, the guns Jack and co are using are actually Heckler and Koch G36Ks, from the 20th century. (Thanks to Guns & Ammo Fetishist's Gazette for that one)

The Dustbin whose vision is impaired is never actually hit by a bullet. Unless this particular Dustbin was a paranoid hypochondriac, this doesn't really square.

If the dogs in Barcelona have no noses, then how do they smell? Huh! Answer me that one, then, smart arse!!


Fashion Victims –
Lavros II's thong. The skid marks were fucking genius, though!


Technobbable -
A Delta Wave is a wave of Van Halen energy, which can fry any living being's brain. It can be created by folding back and sequencing Game World's transmissions. The first known victim of a Delta Wave was Keith Richards. So now you know.


Dialogue Disasters -

Jack: I wish I'd never met you, Doctor. I was much better off as a cucumber. As cucumbers went, I fricken' rocked.


Doctor: If I'm very clever, and I'm more than clever, I'm brilliant, I might just save the world. Or rip it apart. On reflection, my cleverness is in doubt slightly. Maybe you should do it, Rose.


The Doctor's standard farewell to female companions -
"Ladies, the pleasure was all mine... and in the end that's all that matters"


Mickey: Have you tried that new pizza place on Meatlow Road.
Jackie: What's it selling?
Mickey: Every day I wake up and I'm glad I'm not you.


Lavros II: Hail the Doctor. The Great Exterminator.
Doctor: At last, I get some of the recognition I deserve. I'm rather chuffed, to tell you the truth.


Anne Droid: Rose Ty-ler. You leave this life... with noth-ing.


Dialogue Triumphs -

Doctor: Fan-TAST-ic!
Rose: I do not think that word means what you think it does.
Doctor: Fantastic? It means 'fantasic!'
Rose: But why do you say it all the time?
Doctor: Because it sounds a bit like a Gallifreyan word.
Rose: Really?
Doctor: Yeah. One that translates roughly as, 'absolutely super and fucking brilliant in every imaginable and conceivable way'. But that's a bit long. So I tend to say 'fantastic' instead.
Rose: And what's this Gallifreyan word, then?
Doctor: Ocjinoktihenaton.



Lavros II auditions for The Crazy World of Arthur Brown:
"I AM THE GOD OF ALL DUSTBINS!
And I bring yooooooooooooooouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu...
FIRE!!!
...du-du-du..
I BRING YOU TO BURN!"


Doctor: There's a time and a place. Stop flirting.
Jack: I was just having a threesome with two effeminate robots and a gun stuffed up my arse.
Doctor: For you, that's flirting.


Doctor: Don't be so thick. Like I was ever going to shoot.
(The gun goes off and three men fall dead)
Doctor: Oops.


Jack: Do these pants make me look like an out of bounds sort of guy?


Lynda: I don't believe in sex before marriage.
Doctor: And with that sentence you just lost the right to talk to me.


Dialogue Oddities -

(ORIGINAL SCRIPT)
The Doctor: The Human Race... Brain dead sheep. Fed on a diet of hardcore porn, Nazi sympathy and intellectual garbage. All creativity, imagination, stamped out of the demographic. The ratings war won.

(ON SCREEN)
Chris Eccleston: The Human Race... Brain dead sheep. Fed on a diet of... Mind you - have they still got that program where three people have to live with a bear? Oh, Bear With Me - I love that one! The celebrity edition where the bear got in the bath. Fantastic!


UnQuotable Quote –

Jack: Ladies, your ratings just went UP!!! Just the ratings, mind.


Links and References -
Hoooooo boy.
Lots. Lots and lots. Shitloads, in fact.
Here's the only one I can be bothered to record – in the Big Brother house is a painting of two Romana's two incarnations snogging.


Untelevised Misadventures -
Captain Jack rambles incoherently about a journey to Kyoto, Japan, 1336 – well, he THINKS it was Japan. Rural Japan looks identical to Welsh countryside, so they might have been in Cardiff. Again. Jack brags how he used his mighty samurai sword while Rose dressed as a Geisha Girl to pay the bills. Then the time travelers had to defend a small village from an attack by the evil Fibremen of Sprong.

Or it could have just been that yellow mellow he was smoking.


K9 Conspiracy –
Rose has an LSD flashback of the times she has encountered the name K9 – The Presuming Ed, I, Dustbin, Funky Town!, Alias of London and The Long Haul. She has another flashback to Funky Town! apropos of nothing.
Ultimately, it turns out to have been a coincidence the whole time.
Shit.


Subtext? WHAT Subtext? -

The presence of genuine logos and game presenters in The Parting of the Legs, however, raises the question of whether this is the Doctor Who promoting other programs.
On the one hand, Doctor Who can be said to have turned the tables on Endemol, Trinny and Susannah et al., by getting them to participate willingly in a story showing up their own programmes as demeaning and dehumanising agents of social control, in exchange for a modicum of publicity.
At the same time, however, they are, it must be said, gaining exposure from this: there is a school of thought, after all, which says that no publicity is bad publicity.
But, really... who cares?


Groovy DVD Extras –
An altered audio track of the regeneration scene, allowing you to hear the subliminal message from Nicholas Briggs in his best Dustbin voice: "THIS IS NOT CAN-NON! ON-LY NICH-O-LAS BRIGGS IS THE DOC-TOR!!"

Plus all the alternative endings, natch.


Psychotic Nostalgia –
"You know, I never really thought that 'Fan-TAS-tic!!' was a good catchphrase for the Ninth Doctor. I always thought that 'If I've said it once, I've said it a thousand times... you can never get enough of Cardiff, and its environs, and well, pardon my enthusiasm, Wales in general! Let's go back and watch Tom Jones being born again! There's space in the room for several of us each, so we can go back as many times as we like! That's a fun ride! And man, is this a long catchphrase!! I'm going to have to write this one on my sleeve!' It'd look brilliant on T-shirts. Of course, there was always that other suggestion for a catchprase, 'Booga-booga-booga'."


Viewer Quotes -

"I think the snog was absolutely disgusting! The Doctor is 900 years old and Jack's about 40... I don't pay my licence fee to witness surrealist paedophilia! I don't pay it at all – and it's also very misleading of the BBC to suggest that it's only okay to kiss young women when they're possessed by a time vortex..."
- Col. Sir Arthur Strong (Mrs) (2005)


"I predicted that, in this story, Rose may leave, or be captured, or die, or get married off, or become a separate time travelling agent, or have her mind taken over, or all of these. Either way something happens to separate Rose and the Doctor. Bloody good guess, eh?"
- Ewen Campion-Clarke's Unnervingly Accurate Predictions (2004)


"Yes, in Blake's 7 I often had to pull various items out of my arse to save the day and I'm glad the tradition has been picked up by Captain Jack in the new Doctor Who. Still, considering how prolifically bisexual Captain Jack is, his bum is probably as capacious as the Fourth Doctor's coat pockets. I mean, is Captain Jack's rectum dimensionally transcendental? If it is, imagine how clever that would be for the script writers? If, for example, Captain Jack hanging naked off a cliff, he'll just pull out a copy of Everest In Easy Stages out of his sphincter. Genius. Absolute genius."
- Paul Darrow (2005)


"I thought the set for the Dustbin Saucer was genius. At last we can prove that the original 1960s sets weren't DODGY - that's actually the way the interior of Dustbin ships looks!!! It's so self-referential and postmodern my head is going to explode. Whoops, there it goes."
- Matt Irvine (2006)


"What complete and utter shite! I know exactly what happens in episodes 12 and 13 AND THIS AIN'T IT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I should know, I wrote it with my good friend Eric, didn't I?"
- Ian Levine (2005)


"I thought that the line 'I'll wipe every fucking Dustbin from the sky' was, on the cheese scale, a vintage blue stilton. I've always thought of RTD's cheese more a soft Camembert as it has a white, downy rind and a rich buttery interior. It should be soft to the touch, and ooze thickly when cut into. I think RTD's writing oozes thickly. Don't you?"
– Wallace from "Wallace And Gromitt" (2007)


"SHURRUP, YA BIG CHINESE JOBBY!"
- Average Six Year Old Response To Nigel Verkoff (2005)


"Does RTD know "The Prize of Peril" by Robert Sheckley? No? Pity. I was wondering what it was like. Do YOU know "The Prize of Peril" by Robert Sheckley? No? Pity. I was wondering what it was like..."
- Odd guy in the pub answering to the name "Ballcock" (2005)


"Good heavens. I don't believe it. Russell T. Davies has made possibly the best, most exciting and most enjoyable episode of Doctor Who ever. I don't believe it. At all. It's lies!" – Flamingo Jones (2005)


"I heard this creepy voice during the regeneration scene. It told me to kill the American president. Then, another voice saying "Kiss the dirt, hippie scum wad! I'm gonna kick yer butt, you commie pinko!". Then, a regulation .45 to the back of my head and the next thing I knew I was swiftly and efficiently being exported to Cuba. You know, maybe it wasn't telling me to kill. It could just have been the recipe for a smashing lentil soup." – Robin Cook (2005)


"I refused to watch the rest of the series because I knew they would be crap... But when I heard there was to be a twelfth episode, my heart sank into my boots and for several seconds I lost the will to live. Damn you, RTD! And damn JST for inspiring you! My infallible expectations were rock bottom and I bet every overseas fan will hate it as well. At least because I (unlike the rest of the so-called Who fans) refuse to use the foul "inter-nation duper-sky-way" I was spoiler free for this story, but I was spoiled anyway because it was stomach-churningly awful. Tears of joy prickled these tired old eyes at the fan-orgy in the last few minutes of the episode. But I knew RTD couldn't convincingly end this 13-episode slog of audio-visual pig slop. We didn't get to see the huge CGI destruction of mankind that Star Trek, er, hasn't done either! The final episode is a study in the missed opportunity of not letting ME write the last episode! I groaned non-stop throughout the first five minutes, and why oh why didn't they scrap Rose from the start and replace her with Tegan?! Hmm? Answer me that! And the Doctor should have fried the fucker's brains! I hate Christopher Eccleston and will kill him now JUST so I can spit on his maggot-ridden corpse! JST lives! DEAR GOD, THIS IS INEFFABLE SHITE AND NO MISTAKE!" – a typically upbeat review by eyeofsauros.com.uk (2005


Billie Piper Speaks!
"I was really glad Russell T Davies ripped off every Buffy season finale he could for this. It means I've got all the reasons I need to get a musical episode next year. OK, that's enough. Officer, take him to jail and throw away the key."

(Don't worry, I was running that detention centre in no time)


Christopher Eccleston Speaks!
"A lot of factors were involved in my departure from Doctor Who. Yes, it is true I didn't want to be typecast. Yes, it is true that Tom Baker continually broke free from prison and accosted me in the street. Yes, it is true I developed an interesting number of skin diseases over the course of 2005. And it is true that my father was a devout Trekkie who believed that I had done the unthinkable in joining Doctor Who. It is also true that when I left the show I had recorded enough material for five years of my Doctor – just that half of it would never see the light of day.

But the reason, the REAL reason I left Doctor Who that I decided to stop and break away was... well, Billie.

Now, don't get me wrong, Billie is a beautiful, wonderful person and incredibly talented as an actor and singer. And she can do things with her tongue that quite defy description. But I suppose that the two of us, together, day in and day out, playing characters who ultimately shagged each other senseless... It was bound to have an effect.

When we discovered our union had produced a child, well, I had to put the career second."

"So, you left because you got Billie pregnant?"

"Sort of, yeah."

"So, why is SHE in the next series?"

"...Oh, fuck, I've got this back to front! Excuse me... Russell! Darling! It's Chris here. I've had second thoughts. There's been a terrible misunderstanding... No, don't hang up! Hello? Russell? Hello? ... Fantastic. Fan-bloody-tastic."


Jack Barrowman Speaks!
"Christopher Eccleston tastes of cinnamon. NORTHERN cinnamon."


Russell T Davies Speaks!
"It was the greatest of plans. To regenerate the Doctor, on-air, out of the blue, and leave kids reeling with shock. It was genuinely exciting, and all of us – actors, producers, agents, Controllers – embarked on the grand scheme. Ah well, it's never foolish to try. Maybe it WAS foolish to brag about it in every single Doctor Who Confidential episode and writes reams about it in my DWM column. Our plans came to naught. Oh, well. At least I still have the love of the Moxx of Baloon to keep me sane, unlike those poor, sad losers in The Bill and Coronation Street."

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