Press tour is preventing me from giving the latest "Doctor Who" the proper review treatment, but very brief thoughts coming up just as soon as I pre-order the final Harry Potter book...I'm usually less fond of episodes where The Doctor travels far back in the history of Earth, like "The Unquiet Dead" and "Tooth and Claw," but "The Shakespeare Code" was a fun little ride. "Shakespeare in Love" covered a lot of this material already -- the meta-Shakespeare humor, not the ancient witches plot -- but the Shakespeare canon provides plenty of fodder for that kind of gag, and the notion of aliens whose power lies entirely in words was a cool one that deserved to involve the Bard.
I continue to enjoy the interplay between Tennant and Freema, and the banter about Harry Potter led to the Expelliarmus punchline at the climax. Not my favorite episode, but not bad. If I have time tomorrow, I may expand on my thoughts in the comments, but in the meantime, have at it. What did everybody else think?
Ham-net?
ReplyDeleteBelieve it or not, that was the kid's name. (Or perhaps you knew that and were just imitating Martha.)
ReplyDeleteI'm assuming that the script stayed true to most of the events of that period with just the right amount of tweaking for the story - for instance, the death of the man who built the Globe theatre. And I liked how this gave a good sci-fi reason as to why "Love's Labors Won" is forever lost.
ReplyDelete"57 academics just punched the air" made me giggle. A lot.
ReplyDeleteI thought the concept was utterly ridiculous and the villians embarassingly bad....but it was so fun, I didn't care. That's Doctor Who for you!
ReplyDeleteI kinda groaned when I saw that they would be going to the Globe Theatre and meet the Bard, but it actually worked and was fun. Nice.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, there seemed to be two competing theories of time travel in the episode, the first being the referenced "Back to the Future" theory, where the time traveler is a new addition to the timeline which already proceeded once without him or her. Then, when QEI showed up at the end, and we learned that Dr. Who was fated to meet her sometime in his subjective future but her subjective past, it seemed to contradict what had been said before. After all, if the time traveler is a new addition to the timeline when he appears, then Dr. Who would not yet have subjectively met, meaning that it would not have happened for her either and she would not know him in this episode. But, if she -had- met him even though he had not met her, then he is fated to meet her in her subjective past and his subjective future, which is somewhat contrary to the Back to the Future model.
My head hurts from thinking about it.