Quote: sootyj @ May 17 2011, 8:49 AM BST
Ok lets start off at the beginning. Why does everyone keep referencing The Brain of Morbius as a classic? It's a pedestrian rip off of Frankenstein on the planet of Pan's People. And just stating that some one is the most scary timelord of all time really doesn't do much.
Especially when they turn up in a mouldy old bear suit with a fish bowl on top and get shoved off a cliff by said dad pleasing dance troupe. Tension is none existent and Dr Who suffers from the classic problem of saying
"I am the most evil thing in the universe" and utterly failing to show it.
Now I appreciate Gaiman is a rather more sophisticated writer then Whovians are used to. So I'm going to offer a little primer.
Gaiman's genius involves taking large complex ideas and concepts and reducing them to human concepts/relationships. So the whole of the Sandman isn't about eternal forces that shape our universe. It's about a man who is humiliated and humbled, realises how he has hurt those he should have loved and spends the rest of his life seeking forgiveness.
The Ds Wife is actually about loneliness and it's genius. The Dr travels to find a fellow surviving Timelord and finds only a graveyard and a cruel joke. He then find he's had a true friend all along, one that he can't speak to and can only be with.
It emphasises his intense loneliness that Rory and Amelia are like interns not friends or lovers.
It gets in 50 minutes what the rest of Who has been hinting at for maybe the last 40 years but failed to express.
And the one time Idris kisses him he recoils in shock.
Morbius has all sorts of problems. Why does Solon want the doctor's head for example - why doesn't he use the whole body instead? He could also then give Condo back his arm. It does have brilliant sound design, and the brain in the tank really disturbed people in 1976 in a way that's difficult to understand now.
The Doctor's Wife is not without it's positive points. The acting is very good - especially Surane Jone's 'victorian party girl'. Shades of Leela in her unworldliness. The effects sequence with the makeshift Tardis chasing after the real one was quite brilliant and made up for some poor SFX sequences in the series so far - especially the exceptionally poor Silence design.
You have a real hard on for this Gaiman bloke. I don't share it but I haven't read any of his books. I would probably avoid a comic called Sandman for obvious reasons.
