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I've now seen Gridlock. Cue music:
New York, New York,
It's a wonderful town!
The Bronx is up but the Battery's down!
The people ride in a hole in the ground!
New York, New York, it's a wonderful town.
On the plus side, this was a magnificently inventive, surreal episode in places. I loved all those idiosyncratic individuals in their isolated cars (strongly reminiscent of hi-tech VW camper vans), driving for years and years to get to the next motorway junction. My favourite was the bloke in the bowler hat, but really, all the cameos were terrific. The Doctor jumping from one little "household" to the next, opening the cars like sardine tins, was brilliantly silly. I take it the cat thing was explained in the New Earth episode? I could have done without the "You have your faith and I have the Doctor" bit, because, well, yuck. The singing hymns in their motionless cars, surrounded by endless miles of jammed traffic was rather moving, though. Having been raised on Blakes 7, I initially assumed the government was still intact and was deliberately feeding the people in the fast lane to the monsters in exchange for the power to keep the city running, so the revelation that they were dead rather than corrupt was a bit of a damp squib.
On the minus side, the sentiment - oh God, the sentiment. I am as susceptible to a stoic rendition of Abide With Me in the face of grief as the next ex-Anglican, but it went on for so long that I found myself wondering why these people were singing it at all, instead of happy songs of praise and rejoicing for their deliverance (maybe they'd realized by now that their city no longer had a power source, and instead of leading comfortable lives with everything provided for them, they now had to get off their backsides and struggle so survive - human nature being what it is, I bet that made them pretty damn miserable. In fact, the Doctor-Is-Our-Hero attitude probably lasted all of 24 hours before people were saying "It was better in the old days, protein pills tasted much better than this organic muck, and if the Doctor could rip open the undercity why can't he make the trains run on time?" ). Anyway, the point of all this is to say that I could have done without the burnt orange sky and the silver leaves and the general wallowing in angst and that an ounce of subtlety would have gone a lot further. I found, for instance, The Face of Beau's (how do you spell that anyway? Bo? Bow? Boh? Since I deduce from the finale that it's Captain Jack - whose head has finally swollen to match his ego - I shall stick with Beau) formal address "You are not alone, Time Lord" far more moving than all the laid-on-with-a-trowel stuff about not wanting to go home.
New York, New York,
It's a wonderful town!
The Bronx is up but the Battery's down!
The people ride in a hole in the ground!
New York, New York, it's a wonderful town.
On the plus side, this was a magnificently inventive, surreal episode in places. I loved all those idiosyncratic individuals in their isolated cars (strongly reminiscent of hi-tech VW camper vans), driving for years and years to get to the next motorway junction. My favourite was the bloke in the bowler hat, but really, all the cameos were terrific. The Doctor jumping from one little "household" to the next, opening the cars like sardine tins, was brilliantly silly. I take it the cat thing was explained in the New Earth episode? I could have done without the "You have your faith and I have the Doctor" bit, because, well, yuck. The singing hymns in their motionless cars, surrounded by endless miles of jammed traffic was rather moving, though. Having been raised on Blakes 7, I initially assumed the government was still intact and was deliberately feeding the people in the fast lane to the monsters in exchange for the power to keep the city running, so the revelation that they were dead rather than corrupt was a bit of a damp squib.
On the minus side, the sentiment - oh God, the sentiment. I am as susceptible to a stoic rendition of Abide With Me in the face of grief as the next ex-Anglican, but it went on for so long that I found myself wondering why these people were singing it at all, instead of happy songs of praise and rejoicing for their deliverance (maybe they'd realized by now that their city no longer had a power source, and instead of leading comfortable lives with everything provided for them, they now had to get off their backsides and struggle so survive - human nature being what it is, I bet that made them pretty damn miserable. In fact, the Doctor-Is-Our-Hero attitude probably lasted all of 24 hours before people were saying "It was better in the old days, protein pills tasted much better than this organic muck, and if the Doctor could rip open the undercity why can't he make the trains run on time?" ). Anyway, the point of all this is to say that I could have done without the burnt orange sky and the silver leaves and the general wallowing in angst and that an ounce of subtlety would have gone a lot further. I found, for instance, The Face of Beau's (how do you spell that anyway? Bo? Bow? Boh? Since I deduce from the finale that it's Captain Jack - whose head has finally swollen to match his ego - I shall stick with Beau) formal address "You are not alone, Time Lord" far more moving than all the laid-on-with-a-trowel stuff about not wanting to go home.
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