Lighting. It's kind of important.

[firefly124]

It's been pointed out that there were editing issues with Vampires of Venice. I don't have the eye for that, but I couldn't help noticing the lighting was rubbish. You see, if you're going to do vampires, or fish from outer space masquerading as vampires, and you're going to not only retain but make a major plot point of their aversion to ultraviolet light, it'd be nice if scenes that involved having them outdoors without any sort of protective gear were, I dunno, not nearly bright as day? (If you follow the link above, this is more or less what I'd said in the rather spoilery comment I since deleted.)

That aside, I did enjoy the ep. It wasn't great, but it was fun.

The Doctor turning up at Rory's stag do and completely putting his foot in it was brilliant. The, er, wedding trip was an interesting attempt at making things right. The dynamics between the Doctor, Rory, and Amy were fun to watch. It's going to take some doing to get them sorted.

This was the first time I really noticed the St. John's Ambulance emblem on the new TARDIS. ubiquirk had mentioned it a couple of times, but I kept forgetting to look for it. A bit of digging turned up the fact that it's not so much something new as something very old. Real police boxes had them, as did the original TARDIS. It's interesting to note that the library card the Doctor pulled out "accidentally" had the First Doctor's picture on it. There's speculation floating around about Eleven actually being a younger version of One, which would raise really interesting questions about time being rewritten ... how far back, exactly?

In other "echoes of the past," there was the restraint chair, which I've yet to re-check "Sleeper" to see if they look much alike beyond both being chairs meant for strapping people down. There were certain resonances between Rory's role here and Mickey's in "Aliens of London." And the business of running from the silence sounds both a bit like the bit about the impending darkness, both throughout DW S4, culminating in "Journey's End" and in TW S1 culminating in "End of Days," though that was more about "something in the darkness" than the darkness itself. And then, of course, there's the glaringly obvious "vampires" echoing the Plasmavore from "Smith and Jones."

I still don't know what to make of that stuff. It may be nothing. It may be building to something. If it's ever going to make sense, I'll bet it's not until Amy's wedding day the season finale. Meanwhile, I'll keep trying to keep track of it in hopes of finding something revealing in the pattern. If it is a pattern. Of course, it would help if I sorted my tagging system out.