I had completely forgotten Simon Pegg was ever on Who until last week’s preview reminded me of this episode. I agree with ValueSubtracted that he’s not used well here. Simon’s only 35 here, and I was struck by the thought that he could have made a better Adam. We’re really running short on reasons to care about our Adam, so casting somebody who could give us equal parts charm and smarm could only improve him. You’d probably want to lose any suggestion of a romantic subplot between them in a Pegg-centric rewrite, but I’m getting way off-track at this point.
Behind the scenes, Adam was originally given a more sympathetic reasoning for wanting knowledge from the future. His father was suffering from crippling arthritis, which he discovered had been cured by this time. His actions in this episode would have been all about alleviating his father’s suffering. I wonder why that was removed. It doesn’t really change much; maybe they felt the Doctor refusing to allow this relief made him seem too cruel? But it leaves us with no reason to like this guy. Oh well.
The look of this episode reminds me of nothing more than Roger Christian’s quasi-Scientology epic, Battlefield Earth, adapted from the novel by founder L. Ron Hubbard. Couldn’t you imagine this guy as the Editor?
That’s really not the comparison you want to invite. In fairness, I’ve watched a couple of Christian’s films, but only because they’re bad. I’m not really opposed to bad sci-fi, but that’s a separate (albeit overlapping) thing to cheesy or low-budget sci-fi, which is what I like to see in Who.
The cast really is stacked for this one, so it’s such a shame that this episode isn’t more fun. Almost everybody here is either just off the back of or about to do something seminal (Pegg’s Spaced and Shaun of the Dead, Tamsin Greig’s Black Books and Green Wing, Christine Adams’s Pushing Daisies). Anna Maxwell Martin is a decade and change away from Motherland, but is nice to see in her early career retrospectively. If all I knew about this episode was the cast, I’d be really excited to see so many of my favorites in one place.
And yet, there’s just no meat here. I just want a moment that I love somewhere in the episode and there simply aren’t any. I’m a broken record but the snap fight once Adam gets back home could have been a lot funnier with Pegg. Overall, disappointing.
I had completely forgotten Simon Pegg was ever on Who until last week’s preview reminded me of this episode. I agree with ValueSubtracted that he’s not used well here. Simon’s only 35 here, and I was struck by the thought that he could have made a better Adam. We’re really running short on reasons to care about our Adam, so casting somebody who could give us equal parts charm and smarm could only improve him. You’d probably want to lose any suggestion of a romantic subplot between them in a Pegg-centric rewrite, but I’m getting way off-track at this point.
Behind the scenes, Adam was originally given a more sympathetic reasoning for wanting knowledge from the future. His father was suffering from crippling arthritis, which he discovered had been cured by this time. His actions in this episode would have been all about alleviating his father’s suffering. I wonder why that was removed. It doesn’t really change much; maybe they felt the Doctor refusing to allow this relief made him seem too cruel? But it leaves us with no reason to like this guy. Oh well.
The look of this episode reminds me of nothing more than Roger Christian’s quasi-Scientology epic, Battlefield Earth, adapted from the novel by founder L. Ron Hubbard. Couldn’t you imagine this guy as the Editor?
That’s really not the comparison you want to invite. In fairness, I’ve watched a couple of Christian’s films, but only because they’re bad. I’m not really opposed to bad sci-fi, but that’s a separate (albeit overlapping) thing to cheesy or low-budget sci-fi, which is what I like to see in Who.
The cast really is stacked for this one, so it’s such a shame that this episode isn’t more fun. Almost everybody here is either just off the back of or about to do something seminal (Pegg’s Spaced and Shaun of the Dead, Tamsin Greig’s Black Books and Green Wing, Christine Adams’s Pushing Daisies). Anna Maxwell Martin is a decade and change away from Motherland, but is nice to see in her early career retrospectively. If all I knew about this episode was the cast, I’d be really excited to see so many of my favorites in one place.
And yet, there’s just no meat here. I just want a moment that I love somewhere in the episode and there simply aren’t any. I’m a broken record but the snap fight once Adam gets back home could have been a lot funnier with Pegg. Overall, disappointing.