New Doctor Who, wheee! It was cool. I love Martha already. I think I love her more than Rose (not hard since Rose became so unbearably smug in series 2 and the show became all about Rose and the Doctor's PERFECT SOULMATE LOVE which, ew; I mean, I don't mind the show having a subtext that one can interpret as meaning that they have a PERFECT SOULMATE LOVE, but shoving it in our faces is irritating). Martha is clever and curious and knows things and shows initiative and a desire to see the universe. She is, I think, more mature than Rose, more sure of herself and her own value; I think this means she's less likely to get swept up in the Doctor's wake and lose herself the way Rose pretty much did.

I like, too, the fact that Martha's family is very much present just as Jackie was for Rose, but they're a completely different kind of family. Where Rose had the idealised dead father (daddy issues ahoy!) and the slightly overprotective and utterly unambitious mother, Martha has a living and distinctly imperfect father (about whom she seems to have no issues at all; she was very casual when talking about and to him), a bossy mother who she doesn't seem particularly close to, and a brother and sister who she obviously loves and is friendly with -- but again, it's straightforward and there are no Issues. It doesn't look like the family is going to be a source of angst the way Jackie often was for Rose -- because Jackie wanted Rose to come home and to stay home; one of the first things we hear Jackie saying is that working at the department store has been giving Rose "airs and graces" -- so Jackie is positioned as holding Rose back -- and urgh, class and gender issues, but you see my point -- whereas Martha's family have, like, lives that have nothing to do with her. She, in fact, seems mostly amused by the family drama that swirls around her, and not deeply affected. She comes up with schemes to keep her father's much-loathed girlfriend away from her brother's 21st birthday party, but she doesn't seem to care very much when they don't come off.

There's an air of "let me take you away from all this" with the way the Doctor shows up while her family are bickering, looking mysteriously attractive. Because of Martha's class position (she's a medical student; her father evidently has some substantial money, since her sister is concerned that he's "spending [their] inheritance" on his girlfriend), it comes across rather less toxically than it did with Rose. With Rose there was an uncomfortable King-Cophetua-and-the-beggar-maid air to it: you, my dear, are inherently noble and therefore deserve to be taken away from your undeserving lower-class family. Which, ew. Way to perpetuate the myth that the class structure reflects the innate qualities of the people trapped in it, dude! (It wasn't just that the Doctor was taking Rose away from her family to a superior way of life: there was the way Jackie was portrayed as not just stuck in her own position but wanting Rose to be stuck, too, and Mickey's initial cowardice and bumbling gormlessness. The way Jackie would deride tubs of coleslaw as "upmarket" and complain that a department store gave Rose "airs and graces". We were invited to laugh at her and look down on her. On the other hand, I want to give RTD the benefit of the doubt, because I know that there genuinely are people like that -- I remember a lot of depressing conversations with a friend of my mother's who used to teach in a school in Islington, before Islington got posh; the kids were not only entirely unambitious, the whole idea that they might want something better was alien to them. See also Leila Berg's Risinghill: the death of a comprehensive school, which, oy. Passionate and brilliant and kind of depressing, but at least it's not 1960 any more. ...um. My point being: he doesn't have to be unthinkingly reproducing a toxically classist subtext as much as he's deliberately portraying a certain kind of person in a realistic way, warts and all.)

But here we have the same thing, essentially, except, as I said, it doesn't come across as a class thing at all: it's more "You've been to the Moon: can you come back to Earth, now that you've seen what you've seen, and get tangled up in these petty squabbles?" Which has the effect of somewhat redeeming the Rose equivalent scenes in retrospect.

...I think.

I note that she only agreed to go with the Doctor when he'd proved he could travel in time and thus could take her with him through space without making her give up her responsibilities. This is almost certainly A Lie, because we've seen many many times that travelling with the Doctor is a life-changing experience, even if, like Donna, you're only with him for a few hours. But this time he seems, if anything, more keen than she is to maintain the pretence that her travelling with him is only going to be temporary. Hm. 'Tis odd. I'd say it's not so much that he's still smarting from losing Rose (though there's that, too) as that he's overcompensating for being rejected by Donna. Because with Donna, he didn't bother to pretend, and she turned him down flat -- nicely, but it still had to hurt, especially since the life she was going back to wasn't exactly stunning. So he pre-emptively proclaims that it's Only Temporary so that if she decides to bugger off home he can pretend that it was his idea all along.

There were sly little references back to the previous series-openers: the grab-hands "Run!" harked back to "Rose"; Ten's "ooh, there's a shop!" harked back to "New Earth" (that one I really liked, perhaps because it was a bit of in-universe continuity as well as a joke for the viewers -- we already know that The Doctor Thinks Hospitals Should Have Shops, and now we have a further instance).

I have other Thoughts about the Ten/Martha dynamic: the flirtiness, the kissing, the CPR, the way they explicitly disavow any sexual interest in each other in a way that is COMPLETELY UNCONVINCING. (Because even if he isn't, and he's flirting a lot for someone who's not interested [but then again Ten flirts with furniture so maybe I shouldn't read too much into that] she totally is.) It could go one of two ways, and I'm going to have to wait and see whether RTD & company (important not to discount the efforts of the crew members who are not RTD!) do something interesting with it or just make it mushy and slushy and all about Martha losing herself in the Doctor.

Nitpick: the Judoon were wearing New Rocks! The costume department didn't even bother to take off the badges with the brand name on! I know they're heavy and stompy and thus the footwear of choice for the Big Scary Villain, but come on. They're made in a factory in Spain. Is it likely that aliens from another planet would be wearing them, if their feet were even the right shape for human footwear? They might as well have been wearing Levi's...

~~

I recently finished playing Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and found it oddly disappointing. The trouble is, I got spoiled for the big honking twist that comes, what, four-fifths of the way through, and without that surprise, the post-Dantooine plot is basically a McGuffin hunt. There were too many puzzles that seemed arbitrary and silly -- not arising organically out of the setting, but placed there to form an obstacle for the player. And the combat was really quite dull once I got over the "squee! lightsabers! squee!" stage. My main beef with the combat is that it wasn't possible, as far as I could tell, to turn off the AI scripts (even for the protagonist!) -- and the AI scripts were rubbish, because AI scripts always are. My gold standard in these matters is the Infinity Engine games (Planescape: Torment and the Baldur's Gate series), which allowed you either to let all your characters use scripts (and they had a good half-dozen scripts to apply to different kinds of characters), or to micromanage every battle to your heart's content. KOTOR wouldn't even let my main character consistently attack the one enemy I selected. This got really awkward during battles where enemies were coming at my party from two directions -- I couldn't control my party members enough to prevent them from running off and attacking somebody other than the person I wanted them to attack. It was very frustrating, and a lot of the time I got the feeling I was just letting the game play itself because there was nothing for me to do during combat. The characters' moves were very impressive to look at, but I had sod all control over them. It wasn't fun.

As is usually the case with Bioware, the side-quests and character interactions were a lot more interesting than the main plot, which unfortunately was too easy and completed too quickly for me to get nearly enough of the companion characters' stories or to try out as many party combinations as I would have liked. I didn't really do much with HK-47 or Canderous Ordo, for instance, who seemed really interesting, and sneaking peeks at the UHS hint file tells me that most of the companions had some kind of quest associated with them, of which I only managed to complete a couple.

On a technical level, the game was good-looking, with a nice, intuitive interface. I could have done without the turret-gun minigame -- actually, strike that: I really fucking hated the turret-gun minigame, especially since it makes no sense to have your character be the one to man the guns every time. There are up to ten people on the ship at any given moment! I don't even use a freaking blaster! Why should I be the one to have to shoot at the Sith fighters? And note that the first time this happens it comes completely out of the blue after a sequence of (count 'em) five cutscenes. Only three of which are skippable. It's a damned hard game to finish (bad design: the turrets aren't responsive enough to mouse controls), you don't have any choice but to finish it if you want to progress, it's a shift to a completely different kind of game (if I wanted to play an FPS, I'd have installed an FPS), and you have to sit through at least two cutscenes every time you die. This is terrible game design.

That said, there was a sequence quite late in the game where you and your companions have to walk around on the outside of a spaceship in EVA suits, and that made me go "ooooh!" This kind of thing is probably as close as I'm ever going to get to being an astronaut, and it made my heart go pitapat. I could have used more of that. But even that one dose was deeply cool.