I love when Doctor Who does medieval, or even alien medieval, as in the case of "State of Decay", the serial I finished watching yesterday. This one and its predecessor, "Full Circle", have been vastly superior to the first two serials of the season, maybe because "Full Circle" was written by a seventeen year-old whose greatest ambition was to write for the show and "State of Decay" is from a script originally written for the show several seasons earlier.
It's another particularly nice looking serial, like "The Ribos Operation" and "The Creature from the Pit" using a lot of greys, dark reds, blacks, and shiny golds and coppers. I loved the makeup and costumes on the King and Queen.
Though his curly beard makes him look like a model for a playing card. These two and their adviser also deliver some of the hammiest performances in Doctor Who history, and that's saying something.
The Doctor and Romana are adorable in this serial.
He's definitely sleeping with this one. That's the vibe I get--maybe also because the actors were sleeping together in real life. And I loved the call back to the Doctor's story about the wise hermit from "The Time Monster", which I think was definitely one of the best third Doctor serials.
As for the new companion, Adric . . . He's okay, I guess. It's nice to finally see a non-white companion, but he feels sort of like a Johnny Quest character.
In modern pulp animated series, I've been meaning to mention how fantastic Sym-Bionic Titan's been. These past two episodes were a terrific demonstration of the show's greatness--"Escape from Galaluna", in less than thirty minutes, presented an absolutely breathtaking story of an alien fleet attacking and taking a city, even featuring an amazing sword fight between Lance and a Basil Rathbone-ish guy, complete with nightmarishly growing shadows of the fencers.
This was followed by one of the more John Hughes-ish episodes, and done so well that the by now rather well tread territory of tension caused by a superhero unable to tell his human lover what his Big Secret is was quite effective.
Well, looks like to-day's going to be pretty short. I got up late and I have to go to bed early to-night because my cystoscopy's to-morrow morning. So I guess my next blog entry will probably either mention I have a cancer I can't afford or I wasted some money on a rather uncomfortable procedure. I keep thinking about how Gary Dell'Abate on The Howard Stern Show underwent the procedure a couple years ago. Hopefully I'm as lucky as Bababooey.
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