Our company gave us a floating holiday yesterday, so I had a four-day weekend. It was a nice escape, even though we didn’t go anywhere. Sometimes the best vacations are spent chez nous.
I got some work done. Dabbled at the genealogy a bit—I’m now up to nearly 700 names and made my first inroads into the 15th century, with a handful of confirmed names in the mid-to-late 1400s. I found the official apothecary to Catherine de Midici among the branches, too. Some Acadians who were expelled in 1755. A couple of filles du roi, marriageable women who were recruited under the authority of Louis XIV and sent to Quebec to boost colonization. Most of them received marriage proposals as soon as they got off the ship!
I worked primarily on non-fiction, writing and revising my next Storytellers Unplugged essay, which goes up on the 17th, and a couple of other small projects.
Law and Order: Criminal Intent isn’t usually a whodunit, but this week they did a decent job of deflecting suspicion until the very end. Goren and Eames seem to have found a comfortable detente after their friction at the beginning of the season. The final bit, with Goren seeming to sympathize and then reminding the audience exactly what this woman had done, was fantastic, though I think he should have said, “They were irreplaceable, too.”
In Plain Sight was better than average, though it insists on being silly from time to time, which ruins it for me.
I also finished out a very, very good Season 4 of Doctor Who. After a horrible first episode, the series continued to redeem itself. The final three episodes were very good, fantastic and very good, respectively.
The Season One catch phrase returns, chillingly. Bad things are coming. The darkness.
The Stolen Earth is about as good as it gets in the Whoniverse. Some think the villains from this episode have been overplayed in the new Who, but I didn’t mind seeing them, especially given the significance of their reappearance this time. The final two episodes felt a little like a family reunion or a greatest hits show, with almost every major secondary character from the past four years showing up, along with the Torchwood gang, Sarah Jane’s bunch, UNIT, Rose and her cohorts, and Marsha Jones. Oh, and let us not forget Harriet Jones, former Prime Minister (yes, we know who she is). The regeneration is handled interestingly and the cliff-hanger is a real gripper.
Journey’s End. Who’s journey ends? Alas, not someone I will miss. I do wish the Doctor had taken Donna’s grandfather for a spin in the TARDIS, though, before riding off into the starset. He is a brilliant character (I loved the bit where he was singing sea shanties in the apartment in the previous episode). No one deserved to see the stars more than him, I think. The set piece where everyone is flying the TARDIS the way it was meant to be was classic. Once Donna became elevated, though, she went from annoying to insufferable, and if she had stayed that way I think I would have quit the show. The resolution with Rose was bitter-sweet. She got what she wanted—almost. You could tell from her reaction that she knew she was getting a poor simulacrum at best. It would have to do. The Doctor gets to have it both ways—angry and destructive and simultaneously outraged and remorseful at “his” own actions. I guess having a second heart is what keeps him from wreaking havoc all the time. It’s his moral compass.
No more Doctor until the Christmas special, alas. I hear that season three of Torchwood is only going to be a five-hour miniseries airing all during one week in early 2009.
