Partners in Crime: | ||
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| – | During the press conference, when the Doctor sneaks into the projecting room, you can plainly see that the Adipose promotional film is literally a film (i.e. proper, old-school celluloid) Doesn't this seem odd? It's the 21st century; why would any marketing department still be using film for a corporate PR clip? You'd expect such a setup nowadays to be a digital projector, playing a video file from a server, or even from a DVD.
[The set designer showing their age there, methinks!] |
| – | The ill-fated Adipose customer visited by Donna is consistently referred to as "Stacey Campbell" in the episode, but the end credits list her as "Stacey Harris". |
| – | There are a couple of problems with Wilf's view of Venus through his telescope: mainly that Venus wouldn't look that big through such a small telescope... you'd need something much more powerful. Also, Venus doesn't appear blue, more an orangey-yellow (especially through London's polluted skies) and it's much brighter than shown in the shot.
[Although it's not inconceivable Wilf was using some sort of filter on his telescope to reduce the brightness, but the surrounding stars show no evidence of that] |
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[For those not familiar with UK licence plates, this also means it changes from a 2006 car to a 2004 car] |
| – | Why does Donna sneak into the building first thing in the morning if she just plans to hide until closing time? Why not sneak in later in the day? OK, the Doctor did the same, but at least he had the excuse of trying to hack into Matron's computer.
[Personally the only time I can imagine spending 8½ hours in a toilet cubicle is after a really good curry the night before!] |
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[For any Fahrenheit holdouts, that's 86°F] |
| – | Donna visibly carries her handbag into the loo with her at the Adipose building — but then we never see it again. So, did she just leave her bag behind in the toilet cubicle to be found by whomever? This also meant she had to carry her keys in her pocket for the rest of the episode, as confirmed at the end when she fishes them out of her jacket pocket. I didn't hear any keys jangling while she was doing all that running about during the episode, though!
[Not to mention, lucky they didn't fall out of her pocket during her tumble off the side of the building!] |
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["De Rossi's" is the wine bar where we see Donna's mum with her friends later in the episode — lazy set department, thinking they can get away with re-using a poster from the wine bar without anyone noticing. When will the BBC realise the Internet notices everything..?] |
| – | Miss Foster says "I've travelled a long way to find obesity on this scale". And fair enough, the UK is usually ranked among Europe's most obese nations. But she's come all the way from another planet, why stop at Europe? As you can probably guess, research consistently points to the United States as having the highest rates of obesity worldwide — not to mention having a much larger population than little old Blighty. Why wouldn't Miss Foster go straight to the biggest source of potential customers?
[I'm not trying to be "size-ist" — just dealing in cold hard facts here!] |
| – | While Miss Foster is "interrogating" Penny (the journalist), she reveals the existence of the Adipose by putting one of the little critters on her desk. Unfortunately, the Adipose immediately vanishes as we cut to a long shot of Foster walking around the room — although they both keep staring at the desk as if the Adipose is still standing there! |
| – | After it's revealed that the Adipose are simply made of fat, stop and ask yourself why they require intelligent hosts? If all they need is fat, why not buy a herd of dairy cows or pigs, for example? That would require much less faffing around than dealing with pesky humans! |
| – | Just after the "mime" sequence, when Donna and the Doctor are rumbled by Miss Foster and Donna makes a dash for it, from outside the window the Doctor locks the office door with his sonic screwdriver, trapping Miss Foster and her henchmen in the office. So the henchmen shoot open the door with their machine guns as Foster watches — but as we see only a minute later, she has a sonic pen. Why didn't she just use that to open the door? |
| – | Also, when the two henchmen are shooting at that door, they don't hit it anywhere near the hinges or lock, but when they kick the door it just "falls" out of its frame, as if the hinges and lock had instantly given way! |
| – | When the Doctor and Donna are in the window-cleaner's cradle, Miss Foster cuts the cable on the side the Doctor is standing (right of screen), but in the wide shot it's Donna's side of the cradle that breaks instead (left of screen). |
| – | As Donna hangs off the cable, when we have a cradle's-eye view of her, she's hanging in relatively open air: 6 feet or more away from the building. But when we cut to a shot from inside the building, she's much closer: near enough that her feet touch the window as she hangs there. |
| – | During the first proper face-to-face encounter between our heroes and Miss Foster, she says "Oh, in a crises, the Adipose can convert bone and hair and internal organs". Um, the word 'crises' is plural: it should be "a crisis"! |
| – | When the Doctor points the two sonic devices together, we see windows smashing around the office due to the effects, but the glass panel right beside the Doctor remains perfectly intact!
[Miss Foster's specs didn't crack either] |
| – | Immediately after this, the Doctor and Donna escape downstairs to the janitor's "cupboard". As the Doctor says "the matron's got a computer core running through the centre of the building", we can see the door of the room swing shut behind Donna — then we cut to a shot from the corridor outside, to show the door completely open. |
| – | It's mentioned multiple times in the episode that there are 1 million Adipose customers in London, and as Miss Foster cranks up the "inducer" to forcibly convert them all, she says that it'll be "1 million birthdays". Er, it'll be a lot more than that: hasn't she noticed that each human produces multiple Adipose? Surely that means several million "birthdays" at least? Then, after the Doctor foils her plan, she says "We've still given birth to 10,000 Adipose". Where does THAT number come from? They have a million customers, and each customer has supposedly been producing an Adipose every night. Why aren't there a lot more than 10,000 by now?
[Even allowing for customers who didn't take the pill, threw away the pendant, or where the Adipose wasn't produced for some reason or got lost on the way back to Adipose HQ, etc. etc.] |
| – | When Miss Foster falls to her death from the levitation beam, her scream continues (briefly but noticeably!) after you hear the "thud"... |
| – | Have a closer look at the final scene with the Doctor and Donna in the alley (onwards from the point where Donna is standing in the TARDIS doorway). It visibly alternates from raining to "not raining", depending on the camera angle. |