I love the new Dr. Who.
I know I'm a little behind the times, the Brits are winding up their second season, but the first was only just released on DVD and I only just borrowed the set from my rabid-fanatic sister.
Sometimes I forget that my rabid-fanatic sister and I come from the same gene pool. Then something like this comes along, and I remember.
No, but really. I love the new Dr. Who. I didn't dare hope it would be as good as it is.
And this is the really great thing: not only does it not disappoint-- and there was a lot of room for disappointment-- not only does it stay true to the old show and carry on faithfully where the old one left off... but it's good. Really good. You just want to keep watching it. At least if you're me. It's not just the old show revisited; it's alive, it's rooted and growing, it's a real show in its own right. It's terribly exciting.
And that's what a good sequel needs to be. I used to be much more conservative about sequels. I wanted them to stay tied to the original, without going much beyond the bounds of what the original established. But that's no way to write a story. For a sequel to be great, it needs to make the characters and history from the original story grow beyond what they were. It needs to be organic, it needs to be true to what was established, but then it needs to go further.
Here's another great sequel: Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. And it's great for the same reason. It's not afraid to plow new ground. All three of its main characters (as well as two secondary characters) develop new qualities and new struggles... but the seeds of each quality and struggle were there in the first movie.
In a bad sequel, the characters face new problems, but they handle them in the exact same way. In a very bad sequel, characters go completely off the wall and do things utterly discordant with their earlier selves. But in a great sequel, characters face problems and situations that they can't handle in the old way, and the ways they find to handle them reveal new things about them-- to themselves and to us.
What Elizabeth does at the end of Pirates II ranks as one of my favorite character moments of all time. It's completely unexpected and shocking, and yet completely true to what she's been before. And it opens up vast new prospects on who she is and what she's capable of. I'm very excited to see what happens with her in the next movie... it's got so much potential, and I'm reasonably confident in Ted and Terry to write it out.
So yay for good sequels. And yay for the seven remaining Dr. Who episodes I have waiting for me at home.
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...And what there is to conquer / By strength and submission, has already been discovered / Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope to emulate-- but there is no competition-- / There is only the fight to recover what has been lost / And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions / That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss. / For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business. -T. S. Eliot
8 comments:
I kind of . . . *coughhatedcough* Pirates II. But I respect your opinion, so maybe I'll think about why I didn't like it and ponder the idea of liking it.
I thought Pirates II had a lot of flaws, and didn't come close to the first one's gem-like perfection... but I thought the story of it and where it took the characters was great. And all the flaws were made up for by the last 20 minutes, which I thought were end-to-end brilliant.
I kind of .... "coughhatedcough" Pirates II, as well.
I've been thinking about why I didn't like it. Leah's affirmation of my opinion gives me courage to list them.
I thought it was way too long. I got ridiculously bored, considering that this should have been a "fun summer movie."
It wasn't funny. I thought the part where they were swinging in the giant bone cages was funny, but otherwise I barely cracked a smile. Even the part where Jack fell into the grave, which made me laugh like a crazed hyena in the previews, just wasn't funny.
Jack was a total asshole! Like, not a lovable scoundrel, but a complete jerk!
And I hated the ending. Maybe my dislike for Keira Knightly and the character of Elizabeth had something to do with it . . . but I still thought it was lame. Not just the average second-act-dark-ending act lame, but plain old lame.
All that aside, I still highly respect your opinion and think you are totally awesome, Ginny! And I really need to call you, but right now I can't remember exactly why.
Not to rant endlessly, but I thought of two more reasons.
The swordfight-in-a-giant-wheel scene was really lame and it seemed to go on forever.
The undead sailors were really ick. There was a lot of ickiness in the first movie too, I know, but this was even more ick, imo.
By the way, I will also write at a later point why I wasn't a big fan of Pirates2.
This is interesting. I could not make up my mind what I thought about Pirates II for a little while after seeing it. I see Ginny's point: It does do what you require of a good sequel, and I like those criteria very much. On the other hand, I don't handle gross and gloomy too well for very long and what else was there? I also thought that the humor of the second one fell way short of the original. I laughed my tail off during the whole first movie and all the ickiness about that one was so outrageous that it was funny. But the disgusting-and-gloomy-and-desperate combination made it pretty unfunny to me. But, second movies in a trilogy tend to be dark. Should that make me look forward to the grand resolution of the third? Not sure, I don't want to see the second one again for sure. Anyway, good musing, Ginny. I always like your critic-mind posts!!
Yeah, the new Dr. Who is shockingly good. Such a spot on spiritual successor to the earlier series, and Eccleston sets a great persona for the Doctor.
As far as Pirates, I liked the Will and his Dad stuff and thought the Davy Jones animation was great, but like Molly mentions, there's Sparrow troubles. Captain Jack Sparrow is most lovably roguish when he comes off as an inaccessible, unreal archetype. We forgive him for being dastardly because "he's just being Captain Jack Sparrow."
For the love triangle to work, he has to be more accessible and real than that... and the more real he is, the harder it is to wink at his misdeeds. We start holding him responsible for being the jerk that he often is.
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