in which "The Curse of Fenric" is watched

[ladymercury_10]

So I have been watching some Seventh Doctor episodes, but not particularly in order.  I have, however, been sort of saving "The Curse of Fenric" because I knew it was supposed to be good, and I finally got around to watching it tonight.  And it was really good!  And much scarier, I think, than most current Doctor Who, low-budget special effects notwithstanding.  (The haemovore makeup on the girls was really effective.  The fake rain, which fell sideways, and sometimes fell more heavily on one side of the screen, was not.  Especially since they didn't try to hide the fact that it was sunny when they were shooting the "rain" scenes. :P )

I am not sure I have anything terribly thoughtful to say about it, though.  I am somewhat confused by the whole "the baby was Ace's mum" subplot, because I wasn't sure if she realized it before they threw it in her face or not.  Because if she didn't, it seems a bit bad to go, "Hmm, here is a lady with my grandmum's name and surname and wartime occupation, and she has a baby with my mum's name, isn't that weird and kind of awkward?" and not make the connection.  Also I am confused about how much the Doctor actually knew, and how much he said he knew, to mess with Fenric/to break Ace's faith/for other secret manipulative reasons.  Furthermore, Ace seemed to recover from the whole "you insulted everything about me and only apologized somewhat vaguely" incident awfully quickly, didn't she?  

But really, I did like it quite a lot, I am just easily confused and generally nitpicky.  Mostly it would just be nice if people who have had longer to develop headcanons about these things/know the actual answers/etc. could enlighten me.  

Also, I knew going in that there were similarities between this serial and "The God Complex," but it is interesting that Ace also has a "girl who didn't make sense" sort of thing, like Amy, and that she has a mythology background where Amy has a fairytale one.  

Another question: Is "Survival" a good episode?  It seems Important, but the cheetah costumes are slightly lolarious to me and I don't know if I could take it seriously.

Comments

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

Haha, I had to do Internet research to make sense of Fenric too, but I'm glad I did, and I think it's a very rewarding serial to rewatch once you've got it all straight in your head. Because the lack of connective tissue--and the minor niggle of "Enigma machines and natural language translation don't work like that, holy hell Fenric, for such a geeky and intelligent serial that is a really embarrassing bit of Magic Science"--are really its only flaws. And once you more-or-less know what's going on you can sit back and dig into the layers upon layers of themes and allegory and gah I love Fenric so much. It's like a demented six-way chess match where the pieces keep changing sides and then they set the chessboard on fire. Twice.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

LOL, yes, I remember you saying before something about "off-label use of Enigma machines" and when they were using them to, like, Rosetta-Stone the Viking Runes it made me headdesk a bit. :P

I suppose since I am not terribly worried about spoilers, generally, I had the advantage of having read a bit about it beforehand. But I was still really confused, haha.

It's like a demented six-way chess match where the pieces keep changing sides and then they set the chessboard on fire. Twice.
That is a very good explanation of it. :D

[10littlebullets.livejournal.com]

There is so much wrong with the machine-translation bits, haha. Because quite apart from "uncovering the plaintext of a systematically-encoded enemy transmission != fuzzy natural language translation, an Enigma machine wouldn't be capable of the latter, and you'd need to know Norse to program it anyway"... it's Norse. They're not exactly running statistical analysis to crack some baffling linguistic isolate here--just pop over to any respectable university library and check out their copy of E.V. Gordon, for Christ's sake. Or write a colleague in Iceland, since Norse and Modern Icelandic are mutually comprehensible.

It just gives me inordinate amounts of rage, since I suspect that subplot could only have been written by someone with an interest in both computer science and Old Norse, and yet a passing familiarity with either subject immediately raises half a dozen reasons the machine translation bits are incredibly dumb.

[ladymercury-10.livejournal.com]

Hahaha, that is very silly. But I suppose Doctor Who doesn't exactly truck in science, even the existing kind. :P