My daughter is attending the Houston Texans game today with a friend, who is a Patriots fan. I’m sitting at home watching the game on TV, probably getting a much better view of events without all the aggro of dealing with crowds and traffic.
Yesterday we watched Part 2 of The End of Time, the David Tennant swan song as Doctor Who. I’ll be curious to see him on the upcoming NBC sitcom (can’t recall the title) where he plays a lawyer with stage fright who coaches his clients to defend themselves.
Anyway, the finale had some wonderful moments. I always thought that Wilf deserved to be a companion because there have been few characters in the Whoniverse who have the same delight with creation as the Doctor. Delighted that he got his moment, not only in the TARDIS but in Earth orbit as well. I also thought that the manifestation of the “he will knock four times” omen was particularly inspired, as it had a certain perfect symmetry to it. John Simm chewed up the scenery again and the writers had the courtesy and clarity to draw him not as a monotonic evil character but as someone deserving of at least a modicum of sympathy, from the viewers as well as from the Doctor. Plenty of tension in the final conflicts and a delightful scene where the Doctor is strapped to a dolly as he’s pushed around, giving rise to the subject line above.
And, in the closing moments, the Doctor got to go on a brief tour of his reign, being afforded–unlike any previous Doctor–the opportunity to wrap things up with the people whose lives he touched. A veritable swan song, with enough devastation wrought within the TARDIS to allow them to remod the place if they decide to do so with the new Doctor. I’ll reserve comment on Matt Smith until he gets a few episodes under his belt. There was a lot of whinging at the end of the Eccleston era, but Tennant proved to be (in my opinion) the best of all Doctors and definitely the one who has given the best overall storyline from the moment of his regeneration when he had to decide what kind of man he was through his end of days.
Allons-y.
We then watched Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, starring Dame Joan Plowright (she was once married to Sir Laurence Olivier) as a widow who moves into a London hotel because she wants to regain control of her life and no longer wants to be a burden to (or continually observed by) her daughter. She meets up with a young writer (played by a guy who looks like Orlando Bloom) and they become surrogate grandmother and grandson to each other as he mines her life and lessons for story ideas. The Claremont seems like a glorified senior citizens’ home, with a cast of colorful characters sticking their noses into each other’s business.
The other evening, we watched the opening moments of Fahrenheit 451 and I was struck by how the story might have been inspired in part by Don Quixote. The first book Montag finds in the opening scene is that novel, which is bundled up with the rest, pitched out the window and burned in the courtyard. There is a very similar scene at the opening of the Cervantes novel, where a group of Don Quixote’s friends go through his books and select the ones that have some literary merit. The others are chucked out the window into the courtyard and burned. We didn’t watch the rest of the film, though. It didn’t age well, I’m afraid, and looked like a poor episode of The Prisoner.
