{"id":549,"date":"2014-12-31T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-31T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2014\/12\/31\/doctor-who-last-christmas\/"},"modified":"2014-12-31T12:00:00","modified_gmt":"2014-12-31T12:00:00","slug":"doctor-who-last-christmas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2014\/12\/31\/doctor-who-last-christmas\/","title":{"rendered":"Doctor Who: Last Christmas"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The blog&#8217;s on a little bit of a hiatus at the moment &#8211; as might&#8217;ve been apparent.   A combination of being very busy in December and wanting to get some posts written so I have a buffer between writing and posting!  It will return properly in a couple of weeks or so.  However, I wasn&#8217;t going to not write up and post about Doctor Who in a reasonably timely fashion!  We watched it on Christmas Day at J&#8217;s parents place &#8211; the toddler in the house kindly (well &#8230;) let us have the telly before he went to bed \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n<p>SPOILERS AHEAD! <span class=\"spoiler-header\">Hover mouse over text to read, or read on entry page:<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"spoiler\">I liked the episode a lot &#8211; less cutesy than the Christmas episodes often are, whilst still being Christmas themed.  And even quite dark in places, with an unsettling ending.  I did find the comedy elves tedious, tho &#8211; particularly the &#8220;that&#8217;s (not) racist&#8221; string of jokes.<\/p>\n<p>Having the film references be not just obvious but also part of the storyline was quite cool.  I&#8217;ve seen someone elseweb say they didn&#8217;t like the reveal at the end of Shona&#8217;s film viewing list for Christmas Day as they thought it was too heavy handed, but I thought it was a nice touch &#8211; another reinforcement that everything before was part of a shared dream state.  I found the references particularly fun this time too as we&#8217;d just finished watching <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/programmes\/p01yqk7d\">Tomorrow&#8217;s Worlds: The Unearthly History of Science Fiction<\/a> (an interesting series, recommended) which had talked about the isolated-science-base-wakes-something-horrific theme in science fiction as one of its topics.<\/p>\n<p>Of course the film reference they didn&#8217;t explicitly mention was Inception, which wasn&#8217;t so much a passing reference as the underpinning of the plot (tho I haven&#8217;t seen Inception to really draw parallels I just have a pop-culture awareness of it).  Not just with the popping in and out of dreams within dreams, but also the ways you know it&#8217;s a dream &#8211; Santa obviously was one here, but also the orange which we see again at the end &#8230;  That and the whole &#8220;second chances being rare&#8221; thing do make it a trifle unsettling at the end.  I&#8217;m again wondering about the dreamlike\/fairytale nature of some of the stories from last season &#8211; but again I don&#8217;t think they&#8217;d <i>actually<\/i> go there.  Probably.<\/p>\n<p>The return of Danny worked for this episode &#8211; but hopefully that&#8217;s done, bringing him back over &#038; over would cheapen the ending of the previous season.  Another thing I saw in passing elseweb was someone noting that the Clara\/Danny relationship worked better in this episode than it often seemed to in the previous episodes &#8211; perhaps a sign it was always better in her dreams than the reality (and hence the constant lying).  It was also an interesting counterpoint to the Amy\/Rory relationship &#8211; Amy&#8217;s choice in a dream where Rory died was to die herself; Clara&#8217;s dream resurrection of her boyfriend had him persuade her to wake up and live.<\/p>\n<p>Long wait till the next season now!<\/p><\/div>\n<div class=\"navi\"><a href=\"http:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2014\/11\/11\/doctor-who-death-heaven\">&lt; Previous Episode<\/a> | Next Episode &gt;<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The blog&#8217;s on a little bit of a hiatus at the moment &#8211; as might&#8217;ve been apparent. A combination of being very busy in December and wanting to get some posts written so I have a buffer between writing and posting! It will return properly in a couple of weeks or so. However, I wasn&#8217;t &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/blog\/2014\/12\/31\/doctor-who-last-christmas\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Doctor Who: Last Christmas&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13,61,14],"class_list":["post-549","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-doctor-who","tag-science-fiction","tag-television-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=549"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninecats.org\/margaret\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}