Thus revealed, the creature buried its nose in the tire-tilled soil...
July 5, 2008
What the bleeding crack was that?

Ugh.

"Journey's End"? Fucking awful. I barely got through the bloody episode. 👿

UPDATE: Since I expanded upon an even more concise forum post voicing my displeasure with the episode -- "That was fucking retarded." -- I'll go ahead and augment this entry with some of those thoughts as well. I've made an effort to avoid spoilers, so feel free to read on even if you haven't seen the episode yet! Well, the picture above is sort of a spoiler, but you knew the Daleks were coming back and you knew at least one of them was going to get blown up... so yeah.

I haven't been this disgusted with an episode of a show that I'm supposed to like since "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" Season 7 -- even "Heroes" Season 2, as terrible as it was, didn't come close to the sheer awfulness on display here. But in addition to disgust and anger -- while watching this episode, I flipped my monitor the bird at least 14 times -- I also felt a certain sadness. Not because of anything that was happening onscreen, but because it fully hit me that whereas I've enjoyed episodes of the new "Doctor Who" in the past, and whereas I continue to enjoy the classic episodes even when they are obviously bad (hooray for fat-headed minotaurs with platform hooves!), this new show really is not intended for me at all.

Seriously, I might as well have been watching "House" or "Desperate Housewives" or "The Oprah Winfrey Show" or some other program that I can't bloody stand and should not be watching for sanity's sake. Whereas no show that I like has been without bad episodes, at least those still felt like subpar episodes of a show that I liked. With "Journey's End," I felt like I was watching a particularly abysmal episode of a show that I dislike to begin with -- it's like Davies somehow accessed my brain, downloaded everything that I find hateful about television shows, and packed as much of it as he could into this script. Are there no checks and balances in production? You'd think someone would have read this script and just. said. NO. This episode makes me want to completely give up on the Doctor.

"Journey's End" is like the licorice jellybean in my packet of Skittles -- because I do not like licorice and would be like "WHAT THE HELL?!?!?" if I found one. When they start sticking licorice jellybeans in Skittles packets, that's when I'll stop buying them.

</end rambling rant>

-posted by Wes | 10:58 pm | Comments (7)
7 Comments »
  • Mickelodeon says:

    The uh-oh was before the expanded post...and I'll say it again.

    Uh-oh.

    (but then, I like licorice.) =)

    I'm still d/l #13 now and am so totally watching it today. I will not be all School Reunionish about it!

  • Mickelodeon says:

    Yeah. Uh-oh. I may hate licorice after this exercise (although S! J! S! was her wonderful self), K-9's appearance notwithstanding.

  • Wes says:

    You're not kidding -- as you might say in LOLspeak, o mah ceilin cat dat wuz terriblez!

    Rly, rly terriblez.

  • T.A.B. says:

    What was the worst part, Wes?

    (Spoilers follow)

    Was it the waste of a regeneration? Was it the sudden "Doctor Donna"? Was it the lack of coherent storyline? Was it the fact that in the parallel world of the Doctor's death, this would never have happened (Dalek Caan wouldn't have done the temporal shift)?

    Details, man! Details!

  • Ro says:

    I wanted to see more exterminations. 🙂

  • Wes says:

    TAB: It was all of those things and so many more. Well, all of those things except the bit about the parallel world, though you're right that that does complicate things a bit. Not because that wouldn't have happened in the parallel world -- as I understood it, the stars blinking out thing extended to all realities, so the events of "Daleks in Manhattan" wouldn't necessarily have had to take place in that world -- but because the fact that they were blinking out means that Caan did perform the emergency shift on some parallel Earth. Which makes "Turn Left" (ugh) even more pointless, since it suggests that events would have occurred normally somewhere regardless of what happened to "our" Donna in her separate little reality... and thus Billie wouldn't have needed to intervene in Donna's reality at all. (Assuming that things carried on normally elsewhere -- which would have been necessary for events to have led to the Daleks' rise -- some other Donna would have met the Doctor and thus been properly poised to become the utterly ridiculous Doctor-Donna.)

    But honestly? The part that most offended me was the silly victory flight in the TARDIS with everyone hugging and twirling and grinning at the camera and crap. It was like, after giving me nothing but pure shit for however many minutes preceded that scene, they then had the audacity to insert footage of the cast's reunion celebration into the episode. I kept expecting to see a bowl of chips and several 2-liter bottles of soda in the background.

    Ro: And yes, more exterminations would have been nice as well -- certainly preferable to seeing the Daleks spin in circles and squeal for help before exploding en masse. Ugh.

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