I'm gonna talk some shit about Doctor Who now

Doctor Who is a British Sci-fi series that ran from 1963 to 1989 and was recently revived in 2005. It is about a time traveling alien/demi-god who travels around time and space with stupid, boring, obnoxious "companions." Mostly girls, once in a while there's a guy thrown in. The secret to the show's longevity is that the main character, simply known as "The Doctor," doesn't die, he "regenerates" twelve times, meaning the show can have up to twelve actors portraying the main character.

I have an OCD uncle who obsessively videotaped all kinds of sci-fi and cult tv shows in the 1980's. He recorded a shitload of Doctor Who reruns off of PBS, and when my pot smokin' dad got a VCR, he "borrowed" the entire run of the fourth and fifth regenerations. (After my parents were divorced, we still had those tapes all the way up to 2003, when my mom moved from Wisconsin to Hoosierville - then we threw them out. Never, ever lend shit to your brother-in-law.)

So I grew up watching the adventures of the fourth doctor, probably the most iconic, played by Captain 'Fro aka Tom Baker and the fifth doctor, Peter Davison, who was most iconic in the PBS favorite All Creatures Great and Small, a boring show about boring farmers and their boring sick animals and the boring farm doctor who cures their boring farm animals. Or some shit like that. God, PBS was fucking boring. If they had such a hard on for British television, why the fuck couldn't they get some Young Ones?! (Oh fuck, Alexei Sayle was in an episode of Doctor Who. I told Rotwang that I was Alexei Sayle. Shit.)

Anyways - Point being, I grew up watching this shit 'cuz my dad would fire up and watch it. And when you're a kid in the 80's in the Midwest and your dad's watching the one TV in the house, you're watching what he's watching. And it sucked. Cardboard scenery, robot dogs that talked like dildos, paper mache bad guys...

Yeah, that's so not awesome.

So anyway, I saw a little bit of the sixth doctor, Colin Baker, (whose 'fro was not quit 'fro-riffic as the fourth doctor's) but PBS quit buying that shit because the show was going down the shitter, even by crap ass Doctor Who standards. There was a seventh doctor at some point and then the BBC canceled the show for being awful. I guess there was an attempt at a revival of the series in 1996 with a Doctor Who movie, but apparently it sucked and that went nowhere.

So in 2005, the BBC brought back Doctor Who. Shit, if they got 26 years out of seven doctors, I guess they figured they could squeeze another 18 out of the remaining five. (Oh shit, does that movie Doctor count? If so, fuck, imagine having 12 lives and having one begin and end in two hours... DAYMN!!!)

I didn't even know this until 2007, when I remember flipping through the guide one boring Sunday afternoon and seeing "Doctor Who" listed on BBC America. "No fucking way," I thought. I assumed they were simply rerunning episodes from the old series. I decided to check it out for a minute for a laugh. Instead I'm confronted by this guy all decked out in black leather being all action-y and shit. Oh and there was an alien with a baby doll face taking a dump while talking to some lady in a public restroom. I should love aliens taking dumps, but for some reason I didn't. I guess it's all in the execution. Bad Taste? Brilliant. Doctor Who? meh... I flipped it off after a few minutes.

Anyway, Rotwang, being the sci-fi nerd that he is, loves this shit. I mean, I own two different copies of The Stuff, so who am I to judge? Yet judge I do. A few weeks ago, I was watching a channel that was NOT the Sci-Fi channel, and they played a commercial for an upcoming episode of Doctor Who on the Sci-Fi channel and it had FLYING DALEKS.

What the fuck is a dalek? If you don't know, pat yourself on the back. You've gone this far in life without knowing what a dalek is and you should be commended. Daleks are pudding in a robot shell with guns and they talk like dildos. They were made by Davros, a crippled blind guy in a hi tech wheel chair. This knowledge is burned into my brain and I can't get it out. Daleks, like their master, are handicapped. They wheel around. That's it. Oh and they yell, "EXTERMINATE," even though they have a knack for never exterminating any of the stars of the show, like the Doctor or any of his companions.

SO ANYWAY - I see a 30 second spot advertising Doctor Who and there's Daleks flying around space and launching an all out air assault on Earth. Bullshit. The next time I saw Rotwang at work, I was all like, "SO I SEE THAT NOW THE DALEKS ARE FLYING," and continue to disparage the show. Because I'm an ass. To which his response was, "Dude, you've got to see an episode called Blink. I might even lend you the DVD."

There are two things in life that I love. One is a throw-down, put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is challenge, and the other is ABSO-FUCKING-LUTELY FUCKING HATING THE FUCKING SHIT OUT OF SOME-COCKBUCKET-THING. OH YEAH, SNAP INTO A SLIMJIM!!!!!!!

So I took him up on it. But I didn't borrow the DVD. No, I went to YouTube, where you can probably find any Doctor Who episode ever, accompanied by comments from the uploader ranging from polite "This is not meant in any way to infringe on the BBC's copyright," to the more aggressive, "I dare you to take this down, BBC cocksuckers! HAHAHAHA"

So on to the episode.

First thing to talk shit about is the title, "Blink," which in my mind I always think of as "Blank," which rhymes with Drank, which I want to chillax with someday. But there's no Drank to drink here, so right off I'm fucking disappointed.

Next, a plot synopsis. The episode starts off with a young woman taking photos at an abandoned mansion. In one of the rooms, she sees the wallpaper is peeling back and there's writing underneath. She starts peeling the wallpaper, and finds that the writing on the wall is addressed to her. It's telling her to beware of the weeping angels, of which there is a statue of one in the garden right outside the room she's in. SPOOKY.

The young woman goes home to her (female) roommate, sees her roommate's brother naked, and then takes her roommate to the spooky mansion. Stuff happens, then *poof* the roommate is suddenly in 1920. It goes back to modern day, where the photographer chick is met by a spooky young man at the abandoned mansion. It turns out the spooky guy is her roommate's grandson, and he promised his grandmother on her deathbed that he'd deliver this letter. SPOOKY. The letter talks about how great of a life the roommate had in the 1920's onward, and warns the chick to get the fuck out of the mansion.

From here, the photographer chick goes home, depressed that her roommate is gone, and goes to tell the roommate's brother that his sister loves him and shit, since she essentially never saw him again and requested she tell him that in her letter. It turns out, the brother works at a DVD store and he's geeking out over this weird DVD extra that's some guy called "The Doctor" having a one way conversation hinting at the weeping angel statues. "Don't look away from them, don't turn around, don't even blink." SPOOKY. I like spooky. Oh, btw, this Doctor is NOT ACTION MCLeatherPANTS, it's a new Doctor who is even younger - this guy. So apparently Time Lords (the official - and officially GAY - name of The Doctor's race) age in reverse from this:


to this:


I fully expect the twelfth Doctor to be this:


Moving on.

Photographer lady next decides to go to the cops. Because when statues make your friend disappear - and her disappearance is followed immediately by a letter from your friend dated at least twenty years before she disappeared warning you to get the fuck away from those statues - you go to the motherfucking PO-lice. A young detective asks her some questions, leading up to if she'd like to go out for a drink with him. Somehow they end up in the underground garage of the police station, where the Doctor's spaceship, called the Tardis, just so happens to be chillaxing. The Tardis is disguised as an old British police box from the 1950's, there's a series spanning joke about how the "chameleon circuit" of the ship is broken, so it always looks the same. (GOD FUCK IT WHY DO I KNOW THIS!!!) Note to sci-fi writers and Who fans everywhere - if you don't want RETARD jokes made about your SPACESHIP, don't name your SPACESHIP the TARDIS.

Anyways.

Photographer chick gives the detective her phone number for a date and leaves. The detective guy stays in the underground garage, and the weeping angel statues show up to steal the Tardis. The detective guy gets touched and ends up with The Doctor and his latest companion in 1969. At this point, the Doctor explains that the weeping angel statues are the "nicest psychopathic killers in the universe," in that instead of killing you outright, they send you back in time to live out the rest of your life. SPOOKY - kind of, I guess.

Whatever.

Anyways, the Doctor and his latest unnamed companion are stuck in 1969 without their time machine, so they're going to need the detective to live about 40 years and deliver a message to the photographer chick. Good thing she gave him her phone number, because in the present day, immediately after photographer chick leaves, she gets a phone call from forty-years-older detective guy to come meet him in the hospital where he's dying of old age. Turns out that Detective guy became a DVD publisher and managed to sneak the Doctor DVD extras onto 17 DVDs, which were the only 17 DVDs that photographer chick owned a copy of. So she calls up roommate's brother and they decide the best place to go to watch the DVD message again is the SPOOKY mansion crawling with weeping angel statue psychopathic killers. Turns out the DVD extra is a conversation between the Doctor and photographer chick, where the roommate's brother wrote a transcript of the conversation so the future Doctor could use it in the past to try to explain things to the photographer chick.

This is the point where a decent episode takes a shit.

1) When Doctor know-it-all explains every thing about the angel statues, how they're really aliens from such-and-such who turn to stone whenever another living creature looks at them, it just kind of falls flat. I think it'd be better if The Doctor was all, "I have no idea what the fuck, but they only move when you're not looking at them, SO DON'T FUCKING BLINK!!!"

2) The weeping angel statues are nice and spooky up until this point. Then they blow it.

Here's spooky:


This is also spooky:


This is not spooky. This is stupid:


Okay, so here's the part where I give away the ending, so if you're concerned about OMG SPOILERS you've been warned.

Anyways, the reTARDIS is in the basement of the mansion, where there just so happens to be a single light bulb on. Why is there electricity in an abandoned mansion? And who is paying the electric bill? And who is changing the light bulbs? It's not like there can be some kind of caretaker, the place is crawling with homicidal weeping angel statues of death...

Photographer chick and roommate's brother get inside the reTARDIS - which, by the way, is huge on the inside, small on the outside - where the Doctor left instructions for them to press some buttons or some shit so the TARDIS goes back to 1969, but somehow it's programmed to leave photographer chick and roommate's brother behind. I didn't know the reTARDIS could do that, but whatever. It looks like a great "screw you" moment, like the Doctor set them up to be "killed" by the weeping angel statues, but it's actually a trick, because the weeping angels are all gathered around the reTARDIS trying to push it over or some shit, so when it disappears backwards in time, they're all stuck looking at each other. Apparently when they look like they're "weeping," they're really just covering their eyes, because if they look at each other they turn to stone. At one point one of the protagonists says, "they're trapped in stone forever!" to which I say, "yeah, until that fucking light bulb burns out, DUMBASS, then they're going to hunt your ass down and send you back to the motherfucking stone age or some shit."

Anyway, photographer chick and roommate's brother end up as boyfriend and girlfriend, and obsessively chronicle and file their adventures so that one day, a year later, when the Doctor and his companion happen to run by the DVD store the brother guy works at, photographer chick can give them all the info they need because apparently this whole weeping angel thing hasn't happened to them yet. Hence the Doctor has the transcript for the DVD and knows who the photographer chick is and everything in the future - all the way to the year 1969. Or something.

After watching this episode I had to point out to Rotwang how ironic it is that the best episode he recommended to someone critical of the show has as little of the title character as possible in it. I then pointed out all the flaws I listed in my synopsis above as well as the fact that The Doctor just keeps regenerating younger and younger. To which he replied with this image macro:


So whatever.

Oh, and flying Daleks are still fucking bullshit.