Thoughts on "The Day of the Doctor"

If you haven't seen "The Day of the Doctor", the following will contain spoilers. I will put in a series of line breaks then try to mask the text so it appears when highlighted in a browser. Hand-helds are SOL. Sorry. Stop reading if this is a concern.































Still there? Okay...

I've now watched "The Day of the Doctor" three times. The OCD nerd that inhabits the place where my soul would reside feels a need to sound off: First of all: Ian Chesterson is now the head-honcho at Coal Hill School? HELL YEAH! Wonder what happened to Barbara Wright? Awesome sound off to the First Doctor's era. And I'm curious what happened to the Dalek time machine they used to get home.

Now that my squee is out of the way, let's deconstruct the episode a bit:

So UNIT snags the TARDIS out of an open field. Just like that. What the hell? Since when does UNIT go about stealing the TARDIS? What if the Doctor needed it? Hell, why didn't the Doctor just dematerialize from the helicopter's grasp?

Kudos to explaining the Elizabeth I references re: the 10th (Tennant?) Doctor, but it felt... forced and weird. I would have been happier if they'd never tried to explain all that. And Elizabeth I had a hidden gallery of subversive art that lasted into the 21st Century? Um...?

So, the War Doctor was present for the Fall of Arcadia. Yeah, okay. So this is the "Warrior" Doctor. He's got no gun. He's wearing an empty bandoleer and sounds like a flavor of the First Doctor with his crotchety behavior. If he's been fighting in the Time War, why isn't he armed with something? Grenades? Demat gun? I mean, just some kind of token weapon would have set him apart as the "Not-Doctor" he was built up to be. And using the TARDIS to smash Daleks doesn't count.

While on that topic, why the hell aren't there more TARDISes or Gallifreyan war-vehicles in-play around Gallifrey? I mean, c'mon! The Doctor's got an antiquated TARDIS. It's not armed. He's dicking around on Gallifrey during the final fighting and nobody's touching him in an obsolete bit of technology. You'd think up-to-date Time Lord TARDISes would be in better shape to mess-up the Daleks.

Hell, the entire "final day" was a disappointment. All this talk of the Time War being such a huge thing and all we see is Daleks blasting Gallifreyans. We never see the evil the Time Lords do. All we see are Gallifreyan soldiers firing "pew-pew" guns at Daleks or running around and getting blown up. If Gallifrey can master multi-dimensional technologies and time-travel, I'd expect more surreal and weird crap being hurled-about.

On the topic of multi-dimensional things, so how the hell did the Zygons get the dimensional art thingie in the first place? What, were Gallifreyan artists dinking around on the Zygon homeworld before it was destroyed? And how did those Zygons get out of the art? If it's so easy, why hasn't Gallifrey just popped-out of its alternate universe? Hell, why didn't Gallifreyan refugees and/or Daleks pop out when the Doctors and Clara popped out in the Black Archive?

WTF happened with the Zygons at the end? What kind of negotiations were even possible at the end?

So shout-outs for having the Moment take the form of Rose Tyler as "Bad Wolf". It was ridiculous fan service, but made a vague connection to Rose's tie-in with the Eye of Harmony make more sense. Kinda. Maybe.

Loved Oswald's scarf. That was improved upon with "The Curator", though that made so much of no-sense that I just shut my brain off at that point.

And kudos for having Capelli do a cameo.

Bits of things

• If you've accessed this site and get hit with some kind of weird popup/redirect thing, leave something in comments (if you're so-inclined) so I can report this to Blogspot. I have so many script-killing things in my Firefox setup that I'm not sure if this site still has the problem I saw earlier this week.
• Still tweaking and updating things to get the PC working at the level it was at before the grand crash. So far everything is working well. We'll see how this goes.
• Now reading "This Book is Full of Spiders" by "David Wong". The sequel to "John Dies at the End", this novel remains at the same level of bizarre entertainment of "Wong's" style.
• Also reading "Stormdancer" by Jay Kristoff. Japanese steampunk. Yeah. Despite that genre name, it's pretty damn entertaining.
• I've washed my hands of the hope of getting anything constructive done this weekend. After a week of being stressed-out over the PC and other things, I've decided to just fuck it all and chill out. I need decompression time, which is why I took Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday off. Time to just chill and drink a beer or two.

Adventures in Computer Disasters: Part Five

The PC is running.

Long story short: the power supply crapped out, causing the PC to shut down. This cascaded the issue by causing critical errors on the hard drive, making it nigh-impossible to boot.

Once the power supply was replaced, I was temporarily able to get into safe mode, but unable to run any kind of repair utility thanks to the errors on the hard drive.

Cue the heroic music as Ubuntu came to the rescue.

With Ubuntu loaded on a flash drive, I was able to boot an Ubuntu instance and eventually get it to the point where Ubuntu fixed the disk errors well enough that I could run the Windows Repair utility. From there, everything appears to be working... thus far. The PC passed a virus scan, so that's out of the way. Now I just wait for the other shoe to drop as I try to get to the projects I'd postponed...

Avoid this site for a bit

Seems to me someone's got a bit of malware infecting this blog. I'd suggest staying away until this get sorted out.

Adventures in Computer Disasters - Part Four

My PC is possessed by the Devil. It's the only real explanation.

I replaced the power supply. I can boot in safe mode. It technically works, but I can't get the goddamn OS to boot properly.

Won't boot from a recovery disk. Hell, it won't boot from a bootable Ubuntu flash drive.

Won't let repair mode work. Essentially all it will do is boot in safe mode. If I'm lucky.

My repair guy is out-of-town for the holidaze and I'm... filled with all sorts of holiday joy.

Since it's a goddamn Dell, it's got no installation disks. Everything of use to reinstall the OS is squirreled away on some inaccessible partition. So what I've learned today:

• I can't restore a system image from a backup in safe mode.
• I can't boot the damn PC in anything other than safe mode.
• I can't reinstall the OS.
• I've got a giant paperweight.
• I'm never buying a Dell again. Ever.

Adventures in Computer Disasters - Part Three

Got my PC back this fine morning. Needed a new power supply. $50+ later plus payment to the repair guy, I brought my baby home and fired it up.

And it won't boot.

I swear by all the gods, I am... not happy.

At least I can now get into safe mode. It's possible I'll be able to save it. I may have to reinstall the OS. Not sure. Still, it's an improvement.

If only I knew what sacrifices the technology gods required...

Adventures in Computer Disasters - part two

Bit the bullet and took the PC to my repair guy. I have hopes he can save it. I'd rather pay a couple of bills for a repair than more for a new machine at this juncture. With luck, I'll know later today whether I'm drinking in celebration or in memory of my PC. It's possible the data on it can be saved, but I'm not really holding out that much hope.