I'm going to try that Sticky Bun + Orange Dream Bar thing one of these days. Re: DT vs. Matt Smith... Matt grew on me eventually (took a couple years). I think they cast him a bit too young, and Moffat's convoluted scripts didn't help... so it took him a while to get a handle on how to act the material he was being given. By the end, he was good - not great. David Tennant is just in a class all his own as an actor... If you haven't seen Broadchurch yet, check it out. The role couldn't be more different that The Doctor, and yet, he does it just as well. He did *so* well in Broadchurch that Fox decided to recast him in the role for the upcoming US version. (I hope they let him keep his native accent. He does a *very* good non-descript US accent, but American Tennant would just feel odd to me.)
I'm interested to see how Capaldi handles the way Moffat writes. He's got experience Matt didn't have coming into the role, so it could be really good... but Moffat's scripts are always so "throw everything at the wall" that it might be a disaster that has nothing to do with Capaldi. I was happy when Moffat got the showrunning role, but I regretted it within three episodes... Moffat is the kind of writer who tells really good "one shot" stories. If you give him 40-90 minutes of TV time and tell him that it absolutely must have a beginning, a middle, and an end in that time, he does very well. (The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances, Blink, Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead, and more recently, The Name of The Doctor, which was a brilliant return to form.) When he has to write for a season, though, he insists on viewing it as ten hours of time to tell one story.... and then he panics and throws in everything he can think of. As a result, the overall story ends up confusing (and the payoff is never worth all the random twists and turns), and the individual episodes rarely have any actual plot... they're all in the service of his master plan. It says a lot that The Lodger, the Van Gogh ep and The Beast Below - three of the more watchable Moffat era episodes with the least amount of "Look At My Larger Brilliant Plot That I Can't Tell You About But Look, It's Over Here, Do You See My Brilliant Secret Larger Plot That I'm Not Going To Explain Till Next Year, Do You See It, Do You, Do You?!"... those three episodes were all originally written for Tennant. And I think it shows, because they each contain self-contained, well thought out plots. In The Beast Below, you can even see the seams where Moffatt lopped off the original ending and wrote his own to fit the New Doctor... poor Matt Smith has to do an emotional 180 that makes little sense and makes The Doctor look like the last person the audience would want to travel with. We've had mercurial Doctors before, but it's the out of the blue nature and breakneck *speed* at which Matt has to make that turn in that particular script that makes it terrifying... and because it's Matt's second episode, it was an episode that turned me off Matt-as-the-Doctor for a long time.
So we'll see how Capaldi handles it. He can only work with what he's given, sadly, and Moffat seems obsessed with sacrificing individual episodes in the service of his Big Master Plots that everyone has to wait a year or three to find out about.
To be clear, I *love* TV with an overarching plot... The West Wing had one long continuous plot for seven seasons. But it was not written such that you had to watch for 7 seasons and then the final episode of the series was a giant info-dump of what all these "hints" meant... and each individual episode of TWW did have a cogent plot of its own.
I'm hoping Moffat burns out soon and decides to go do more Sherlock with Bandylegs Cummerbund, or whatever else strikes his fancy that I couldn't possibly care less about.
Getting electronics I considered good enough would be my biggest concern.
I just had to throw out a brand new Iken that wouldn't wick, lost a couple mL trying to hot swap it out of a full tank & I'm almost out of that juice which is one of my daily vapes... and Quicken says I have to wait 2 more days before I'm allowed to order more. Just switched over to a dripper & it's not playing nice this morning either. Grrr.
