I bring you petty annoyances

ABC is replaying season 5 of the new Doctor Who series. As much fun as the show can be, plenty of the episodes of that season annoyed me, possibly more than any other season of that show I've watched. Possibly.

The weeping angels double, for example. Despite being written by the same person who originally devised those creatures, the story comes off as a betrayal of the concept when we see them moving on screen and the ploy of someone pretending to be able to see successfully keeping them frozen until the ruse is revealed. Granted we learn in the story that the Doctor's information on the angels was incomplete in their previous appearance, but the angels' freezing being volitional rather than automatic and unresistable really seems a violation of the whole creature concept. Where the angels were perfect for Blink, I don't see why just about any other creature couldn't have been substituted for them in The Time of Angels and Flesh and Stone. Which is a shame since the first episode did a good job of adding some new, frightening twists to them before it fell apart.

But what I really wanted to right about was the current double (first part last week, second part in a couple of days), The Hungry Earth and Cold Blood. Mainly how enthusiastic the Doctor was in his praise of the Silurian doctor Malokeh, for his curiosity about humans. Which struck me as very jarring because at least one human in the story expressed terror of him on account of being dissected and examined while still alive and conscious. That the person in question survived apparently unharmed seems beside the point - any time humans do something similar to aliens, the Doctor has a tendency to verbally eviscerate them, if not worse. Incidents like that contribute to my view of the Doctor as having a disturbing madonna / whore sort of relationship with humans.