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The really funny thing is that the decision to NOT kill the moon-baby is represented by a big text screen saying,"ABORTED!"
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Oct 6, 2014 03:40
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I think the Moon gaining extra mass wasn't because of the babyspacedragon, but the bacteria-spiders that grew from the biotic fluid. I mean, call it dumb, sure, but let's try to be correct about what we're criticising.
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Oct 6, 2014 03:44
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Yeah, I mean, I don't think people seeing an abortion metaphor are out of their minds, but I don't think it really works as a parallel, since (a) there's no mother in the story whose wishes can be respected or disregarded and (b) unless you're some kind of Malthusian fanatic, the birth of a child isn't an immediate and direct threat to the surrounding populace. (Also, abortions don't tend to happen at the same time as the child is actually being born.) I mean, it could be a really clumsy abortion metaphor, I suppose, but I don't think it was meant as anything other than a variant on the classic 'is it okay to kill one person to save a thousand' dilemma (to which the Doctor's answer has traditionally been 'gently caress you I'm saving 1,001 people today').
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Oct 6, 2014 03:49
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This guy is having insta-forming mooneggs popping out of newly-hatched, mass-producing creatures. He's proven that the subtlety needed for pulling off that subtext is as much in his writing wheelhouse as coherent science. I am genuinely sorry for sounding like a broken record about that damned moon. I think that beach scene was the anvil that broke the camel's back, even if everything after that was golden.
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Oct 6, 2014 03:52
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docbeard posted:Yeah, I mean, I don't think people seeing an abortion metaphor are out of their minds, but I don't think it really works as a parallel, since (a) there's no mother in the story whose wishes can be respected or disregarded and (b) unless you're some kind of Malthusian fanatic, the birth of a child isn't an immediate and direct threat to the surrounding populace. (Also, abortions don't tend to happen at the same time as the child is actually being born.) Unless it's the Daleks, at which point he decides gently caress IT LET FATE SORT IT OUT. Little known thing about the Do I Have The Right speech. It ultimately ends with the Doctor realizing that no, he doesn't- but he has to stop the Daleks ANYWAYS. It doesn't matter if he has the right- NO ONE has the right to take another's life. But if it's something that must be done, that morally would be wrong not to do, then you have to do it. You just hope you can live with yourself afterwards-and if IT WAS the right thing to do, regardless of if you should have done it, then you will. Or luck into a Dalek accidentally doing it for you, but you know.
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Oct 6, 2014 04:11
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glitchwraith posted:I really didn't like this episode, though not because of the questionable physics. The moon being an egg, and the creature hatching from it immediately laying a new egg to tie everything up is par for the course in Doctor Who. It's silly and doesn't survive the barest scientific scrutiny, but the show's done worse while still being entertaining. Whew. I thought I was the only one who saw that as some kind of "partial birth abortion" type of deal, and it killed the episode for me, no pun intended. The science being absolute bollocks, I can hand wave. The fact that it took ten years for humanity to go back to the moon after a Mexican private company pulled it off, meaning all concept of space flight went out the window, I could hand wave. The moon being an egg (and man the Silurians are going to be PISSED about that one), and the hatching meaning a sudden increase in mass, I could hand wave. The fact that the options were "let the egg hatch and Earth dies" vs. "nuke the egg and the moon goes bye bye," I...well, my hand kind of hung in place on that one. And as soon as Earth said one thing, Clara said another, and the Doctor popped back in at THAT exact moment? That was the moment I realized that I'm ready for Moffat to move on. Danny's reassurance as well and the way it came off just sealed it for me. Then again, I may just be masking a decision in anger, no? I might be reading too much into it, but the sound of crashing anvils drowned out everything else, including Clara letting the Doctor have it. She should have cut loose on him as she did, because it was all the patronizing and comments from previous episodes finally turned from "two friends needling one another" to "by God, why do I have a friend like you?" But the way we got there just deflated everything positive about her anger.
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Oct 6, 2014 04:19
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I thought this was a pretty bad episode. Not because of moonbaby or the mass of a new egg or all that -- I'm prepared to take whatever hand-waving sciency explanation we want to come up with for that. But I didn't feel like the Doctor's motivation or actions made any drat sense. "I'm going to pop off now because this is humanity's choice." But he's already screwed with this choice in various ways: without him, they wouldn't have had any idea this was an egg in the first place, and he's put Clara and Courtney there who shouldn't have factored into the equation. When you've already tinkered with the timeline to that extent, you might as well stay involved. Clara's attempt to get a decision from the Earth via lights didn't make much sense either, given that you have things like streetlights and also what about the side of the planet you couldn't see, or people who were sleeping, or people in poor countries who didn't have a TV, they don't get a vote, or people who just decided to read that night, or what if you just saw, like, around half the planet lit up, what would that mean and gently caress it, it just didn't make any sense but I'll leave it alone. BUT THEN, even worse, Clara and Courtney ignore all that even when it somehow gives them a definitive answer and they ignore the astronaut who is actually supposed to be there and unilaterally make the other choice. So it seems like without the Doctor screwing with things, humanity would have made the choice to blow the drat thing up. Which means it wasn't humanity's choice, it was the choice of the Doctor's Companions, two people who have already been impacted by his mindview and by traveling through space and who shouldn't naturally be there, and basically he's already messed with the whole situation so much that why the hell did he choose this as the time to gently caress off in the middle of things? Was this actually just about teaching Courtney and Clara a lesson? Was it all just to make Courtney feel special? Because she seemed to feel special enough just from being the first woman on the moon. The preservation of a space creature that may be the last of its kind isn't typically the kind of thing the Doctor (any version) would just bail on to make a kid feel special. And Clara, by this point, has certainly proved herself enough that she doesn't need this kind of tempering. So what the hell was he doing? My aggravation at all this wasn't helped by feeling like Courtney was the most wet-tissue uninteresting semi-Companion since like early days Mickey. "I'm scared, send me back to the TARDIS." "Now I'm bored." "Oh, now I'm interested, bring me back." Maybe she'll have a point eventually if she keeps recurring and we'll all grow to love her. But ugh. The only part of the episode I liked was Clara justifiably blowing up at the Doctor, and that was really good, but I think they could have set up that character interaction on top of a much more coherent story. For what it's worth, I still also really enjoy Capaldi's take on the Doctor and I think him and Jenna Coleman have good chemistry and are doing an impressive job with the material they get. But the material here let them down in a lot of ways.
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Oct 6, 2014 04:20
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CobiWann posted:The fact that it took ten years for humanity to go back to the moon after a Mexican private company pulled it off, meaning all concept of space flight went out the window, I could hand wave. I might've missed it, but I thought the idea as just that humanity stopped caring. Which is true today; space isn't something that's really a focus for most people, and the big ticket scientifically these days seems to be subatomic particles. When Doctor Who started the space race was in full swing, but at this point it's a very 'been there, done that' thing for humanity at large, so we just don't have much reason to bother. That's how I thought it was meant to be taken; Humanity could go to space, at least to the point of a moon landing, we just didn't want to. The sense of adventure was gone, and we only went up there for practical reasons, like 'mining the moon' or 'figuring out why it's making everything go nuts'. And that's the point of the beach scene, we see space pull off something so insane that we want to go exploring it again. Cleretic fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Oct 6, 2014 |
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Oct 6, 2014 04:46
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I must have learned nothing from watching a hundred hours of doctor who, because all I could think of once the moonegg thing was revealed is I would have killed it without a second thought and didn't understand why there was a debate. I don't see how one space dragon, even the last of it's kind, is at all worth risking human civilization or the hundreds of millions or billions of lives on earth that seemed at risk. I think the dilemma would have worked better if they were debating whether or not to save a moon colony or something instead
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Oct 6, 2014 05:00
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Jerusalem posted:The really funny thing is that the decision to NOT kill the moon-baby is represented by a big text screen saying,"ABORTED!" I actually missed that. Thanks for pointing it out! It really makes me like the episode that much more. As for the problems with conservation of mass, I am struggling to figure out a way to justify this. One idea I have come up with relies on energy-to-mass conversion whereby the "egg" reached a point in its cycle during which it turned its surface into solar panels and got a cross-universe shipment of replicators from the federation and proceeded to use those to turn all the electromagnetic radiation coming in to produce the new "egg". To put on 1.2 billion tons (which I believe is the number quoted. I currently don't have the episode close by to reference, but I'm pretty sure about that) by this process would take approximately 3.91*10^6 years given 100% efficiency at all stages. Given that efficiency of energy transfer is not exactly the greatest thing this could take several orders of magnitude longer. According to some sources the moon is about 4.5 billion years old. So, if it started storing energy from its inception it could well have accomplished this. However this is quite a stretch and I doubt the writer has had to struggle with comlications like the conservation laws. SikorskyOvich fucked around with this message at 05:51 on Oct 6, 2014 |
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Oct 6, 2014 05:26
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joe football posted:I must have learned nothing from watching a hundred hours of doctor who, because all I could think of once the moonegg thing was revealed is I would have killed it without a second thought and didn't understand why there was a debate. I don't see how one space dragon, even the last of it's kind, is at all worth risking human civilization or the hundreds of millions or billions of lives on earth that seemed at risk. I think the dilemma would have worked better if they were debating whether or not to save a moon colony or something instead This is a more understandable and reasonable reaction than the guy back in season 6 who got really confused why people were aghast when he said that if an identical clone of himself was created that shared the exact same memories right up to the point of its creation.... then it wasn't really alive and he would happily hunt it down and kill it for sport.
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Oct 6, 2014 06:06
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Well that's damning with faint praise.
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Oct 6, 2014 06:19
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Well I was just trying to put their mind at ease since they said that they clearly hadn't taken in the message of Doctor Who that killing/death is rarely if ever the answer 
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Oct 6, 2014 06:29
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I have come up with two ways you could write around the whole space bird laying an egg bigger than it, and heavier than it. This took a couple minutes, though likely more than it took the writers of this episode to come up with their way of doing it. 1. It's massive parents show up to escort junior away, and lay an egg to replace it. 2. The egg is not an egg as we know it, but a container for a wormhole to another dimension where the creature is formed and slowly birthed into our plane of existence. Thus the creature when birthed opens a new wormhole, which quickly produces a new shell around it from within. This explanation would also account for the increasing mass as the creature becomes more and more of this world. Edit: poo poo, I missed Ahduin's post that literally says the same thing, whoops. remusclaw fucked around with this message at 06:58 on Oct 6, 2014 |
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Oct 6, 2014 06:52
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Well, that was a weird episode. How can something with so much good be filled with so much bad? Maybe this is the truly quintessential Doctor Who episode - lots of good ideas, only some of which are actually properly explored, mixed with lots of complete and utter nonsense that the audience has to just ignore. And yet still one of the most interesting things I've recently watched, even if I still can't decide whether or not I think it was any good. On the one hand, it pushed forward the Doctor/Companion relationship (And the broader Doctor/Humanity relationship) in new, exciting, and compelling ways - pushing Clara further as a character than I ever would have guessed at the beginning of the season and even still pushing the character of the Doctor. On the other hand, it's just littered with egregiously stupid poo poo. It's entirely subjective at what point the weight of so much nonsense finally buries all of the good, so it's not any surprise that there would be quite a divide on this episode. All I'm really left with are questions. Does the magical nonsense undercut the moral dilemma of the episode? This is Doctor Who, a show defined by its romantic idealism and celebration of individual life. While nothing about this show is every completely consistent, the idea that an innocent life should be snuffed at at the moment of birth is so clearly antithetical to what Doctor Who is that the decision could not have gone any other way. The conflict comes from giving what is so obviously the "correct" decision (within the world of Doctor Who) such serious consequences. Except there are no consequences. No chunks of the moon crashing into the planet because...egg shell? What? Not even losing the moon because somehow space baby just lays another one, identical to the first. What? Sure, we could ignore all of that because it's Doctor Who, the softest science fiction this side of Star Wars, or we could fanwank it away with something-something-exo-biology. But it's still all stupendously stupid. More importantly, it nullifies the moral dilemma if nothing negative comes from the "correct" decision. Earth got to hatch its moon and have it too. So what was the point? I could go on a lot longer about this episode, just waffling back and forth between "Great!" and "Disappointing", but I'll leave it at that for now.
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Oct 6, 2014 06:58
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Spikeguy posted:In the end, I found myself siding more with The Doctor than Clara. I guess I just couldn't get behind her reasoning. I understand the Doctor was being a dick, but what you're essentially saying is I'm mad because you wouldn't "save the day" for you, even though I do it all the time. I clearly care about Earth. But no, I made you mad, and now I'm not allowed back here ever again. Sorry no. Yes, I came to the same conclusion, which interests me far more than manbaby spergs about mooneggs ruining everything. She goes from demanding he make the decisions to blaming him for forcing one one her, very much like a teenager who doesn't really want to deal with the real world as long as they can yell FREEDOM FROM PARENTS in a safe place. It's a no-win situation for the Doctor. I think the whole "protector of humanity" motif is bunkum: it's been very useful at times but it's also a dead weight on storylines. It's fine for him to intervene in situations where humanity has got itself stuck (eg The Long Game), but once we get to the more overblown Tennant era he's become the ultimate white knight. This is precisely why this Doctor is trying to tear that all down, it's a dead end. Got my Key To Time boxset, having a whale of a time with the commentary and extras. Mary Tamm is such a loss, she is so funny and bright and teasing. And now I'll never have the possibility of meeting her.
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Oct 6, 2014 07:37
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joe football posted:I must have learned nothing from watching a hundred hours of doctor who, because all I could think of once the moonegg thing was revealed is I would have killed it without a second thought and didn't understand why there was a debate. I don't see how one space dragon, even the last of it's kind, is at all worth risking human civilization or the hundreds of millions or billions of lives on earth that seemed at risk. I think the dilemma would have worked better if they were debating whether or not to save a moon colony or something instead I thought that too, and was a bit pissed off the ending wasn't the space dragon flying straight to earth and engulfing it in flames while the astronaut said "I told you so". The options seemed to be a) the thing will hatch and fly off and life on earth without a moon will be pretty poo poo, b) the thing will hatch and go and destroy the earth either on purpose or by accident and everyone will die, c) The thing will hatch and egg shells the size of meteors will destroy the earth or d) everything will be fine!!
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Oct 6, 2014 08:50
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While I wouldn't say that this season is downright horrible, it has been pretty lackluster so far. Episodes kind of zip along and then just end without anything remarkable happening. For instance, this episode should be about solving a moral dilemma, but half of it is about irrelevant neon spiders. The story would have been more memorable if they had taken time to clearly present the situation and the stakes and the characters earned their victory somehow instead of just mashing a button. Also the dilemma presented makes no sense and has questionable thematic relevance, but what are you going to do. Although none of the episodes this season would have benefited from the extra time, I hope that they bring back two-part episodes next season though because a lot of them were good and they help with the pacing of the season. Also, we haven't seen them since 2011! 
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Oct 6, 2014 09:19
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Proposition Joe posted:Although none of the episodes this season would have benefited from the extra time, I hope that they bring back two-part episodes I think we all generally agreed that Time Heist would've benefited from being a two-parter. And while I don't think it necessarily would have improved the story, Kill the Moon could've made for a really good two-parter. Have the first part be learning that the moon is freaking out, seethe effects on Earth and exactly how humans intend to solve it, and then cut it right at 'the moon is hatching'. Then, devote an entire episode to the debate on how they decide what to do about all this. Kill the Moon is definitely a story in two parts, so it probably would've done well with actually making it a two-parter.
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Oct 6, 2014 09:41
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SikorskyOvich posted:As for the problems with conservation of mass, I am struggling to figure out a way to justify this. One idea I have come up with relies on energy-to-mass conversion whereby the "egg" reached a point in its cycle during which it turned its surface into solar panels and got a cross-universe shipment of replicators from the federation and proceeded to use those to turn all the electromagnetic radiation coming in to produce the new "egg". To put on 1.2 billion tons (which I believe is the number quoted. I currently don't have the episode close by to reference, but I'm pretty sure about that) by this process would take approximately 3.91*10^6 years given 100% efficiency at all stages. Given that efficiency of energy transfer is not exactly the greatest thing this could take several orders of magnitude longer. According to some sources the moon is about 4.5 billion years old. So, if it started storing energy from its inception it could well have accomplished this. However this is quite a stretch and I doubt the writer has had to struggle with comlications like the conservation laws. Already did this maths for fun so it's not a new idea, but you've hosed up the science a bit - if it's storing the energy then the gravity of the moon and whatnot will increase due to the energy stored inherently, not "nothing will happen until it turns it into mass one day". Sunlight absorption would just linearly increase the mass of the moon and not be able to make it happen in a big jump. And you didn't mention that the music on this is played by Mr Hans Zimmer
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Oct 6, 2014 09:41
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StarkRavingMad posted:I thought this was a pretty bad episode. Not because of moonbaby or the mass of a new egg or all that -- I'm prepared to take whatever hand-waving sciency explanation we want to come up with for that. But I didn't feel like the Doctor's motivation or actions made any drat sense. "I'm going to pop off now because this is humanity's choice." But he's already screwed with this choice in various ways: without him, they wouldn't have had any idea this was an egg in the first place, and he's put Clara and Courtney there who shouldn't have factored into the equation. When you've already tinkered with the timeline to that extent, you might as well stay involved. Clara's attempt to get a decision from the Earth via lights didn't make much sense either, given that you have things like streetlights and also what about the side of the planet you couldn't see, or people who were sleeping, or people in poor countries who didn't have a TV, they don't get a vote, or people who just decided to read that night, or what if you just saw, like, around half the planet lit up, what would that mean and gently caress it, it just didn't make any sense but I'll leave it alone. BUT THEN, even worse, Clara and Courtney ignore all that even when it somehow gives them a definitive answer and they ignore the astronaut who is actually supposed to be there and unilaterally make the other choice. So it seems like without the Doctor screwing with things, humanity would have made the choice to blow the drat thing up. Which means it wasn't humanity's choice, it was the choice of the Doctor's Companions, two people who have already been impacted by his mindview and by traveling through space and who shouldn't naturally be there, and basically he's already messed with the whole situation so much that why the hell did he choose this as the time to gently caress off in the middle of things? Was this actually just about teaching Courtney and Clara a lesson? Was it all just to make Courtney feel special? Because she seemed to feel special enough just from being the first woman on the moon. The preservation of a space creature that may be the last of its kind isn't typically the kind of thing the Doctor (any version) would just bail on to make a kid feel special. And Clara, by this point, has certainly proved herself enough that she doesn't need this kind of tempering. So what the hell was he doing? Well, the Doctor already pulled a Waters of Mars in this episode, it's just never mentioned. Without the TARDIS' arrival, the astronauts would have been gobbled up by the spiders nd the egg would have hatched. The Doctor's arrival changes that, throwing the timeline into chaos, and this is his attempt at a clean up. Basically, I read it as 12 not trying to make the same mistake 10 did but still wanting to intervene. His solution builds on his strategy from Deep Breath: trust that his companions are capable enough to sort it out. From his perspective, it's a sign of respect and allows him to have his cake and eat it too: he lets humanity decide, but ensures that Clara will act as his proxy. From that perspective, it's not that bad a plan. Of course, the way he presents it is incredibly bad and Clara definitely earned the right to call him out on his bullshit: this wasn't respectful at all, because he forces his companions to deal with the weight of his own actions, and the idea that it was necessary in the first place is strictly a result of arrogant Time Lord bullshit.
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Oct 6, 2014 09:42
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PriorMarcus posted:Cross posting from the Oxx thread. And is name is... DAVROS!!!! NowonSA posted:Just for fun, any of you more knowledgeable fans have any important dates or events in Doctor Who history that are going to be coming up soon, or happened in the past decade? You know, "Lets hop into my time machine and go to the distant future of 2010!" kind of stuff. The Earth was nearly destroyed by Mondas in 1986 and all of the UNIT stuff was near future at best. We're already long past "poo poo HAPPENS!"
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Oct 6, 2014 09:43
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NowonSA posted:Just for fun, any of you more knowledgeable fans have any important dates or events in Doctor Who history that are going to be coming up soon, or happened in the past decade? You know, "Lets hop into my time machine and go to the distant future of 2010!" kind of stuff. We're only about 4 years from Ramón Salamander becoming king of Australia or whatever.
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Oct 6, 2014 09:52
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Cleretic posted:I think we all generally agreed that Time Heist would've benefited from being a two-parter. And while I don't think it necessarily would have improved the story, Kill the Moon could've made for a really good two-parter. Have the first part be learning that the moon is freaking out, seethe effects on Earth and exactly how humans intend to solve it, and then cut it right at 'the moon is hatching'. Then, devote an entire episode to the debate on how they decide what to do about all this. Kill the Moon is definitely a story in two parts, so it probably would've done well with actually making it a two-parter. I think that a bank robbery episode would work well as a two-part episode and that Time Heist in particular felt like the most rushed episode of the season, but I'm not really sure what they would have done with an extra episode of that particular plot. For this episode, I don't think that it would work as a two-parter either because everything in this episode before they find out that the moon is an egg feels useless and should have been excised rather than elaborated on.
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Oct 6, 2014 09:57
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I really liked the sheer positivity that this episode oozed. That is, the idea that humanity, as a whole, would be more than willing to risk extinction rather than kill an innocent creature. Realistic? Likely not. But the idea that humans would have a defining moment where they decide that they can be far more than they are is something that you just don't see that often anymore in a sci-fi show. Never hurts to have some naive, positive vibes.
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Oct 6, 2014 10:03
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Baron von der Loon posted:I really liked the sheer positivity that this episode oozed. That is, the idea that humanity, as a whole, would be more than willing to risk extinction rather than kill an innocent creature. Realistic? Likely not. But the idea that humans would have a defining moment where they decide that they can be far more than they are is something that you just don't see that often anymore in a sci-fi show. Never hurts to have some naive, positive vibes. That not what happened at all.
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Oct 6, 2014 10:58
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PriorMarcus posted:That not what happened at all. Yeah, humanity made the decision to kill the Moon-Baby and Clara and Courtney took it upon themselves to hit the abort switch and let it live instead. They were proven right, of course, and the message that the Doctor gave on the beach was that this "birth" inspired the human race to be "better" and spread out into the universe... but humanity here made the same misjudgement that those on Starship UK did in The Beast Below. Of course, like in that story, they were making a pretty horrible but seemingly "right" decision based on all the information they had and what they believed would happen if they killed the baby/released the whale.
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Oct 6, 2014 11:08
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The Doctor's ending monologue would have been so much better if instead of "Humanity decided to free the space dragon", he acknowledged the decision to kill it and went with someone along the lines of "Humanity tried to end the new life, but instead saw so much more than they had concieved it to be." Except better written than what I threw together at midnight.
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Oct 6, 2014 11:41
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Most of you guys have probably seen this already but I ran across the 30 Years of Time Travel documentary on YouTube, it's interesting stuff (and one of the first people to talk on it is BRIAN BLESSED): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCiAgOWj9co Also, I once ran across a documentary narrated by a proto-hefty Colin Baker about the cancellation and trouble with the BBC and stuff but I watched only a bit, wanted to come back to it but can't remember what it was called, any ideas? All I remember is Colin is talking in front of some sort of brick shed and they cut to various writers and producers and things and they're sitting in front of an ugly background of a sunset or whatever..
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Oct 6, 2014 12:37
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That was an episode of Doctor Who with a ludicrously absurd premise that Capaldi and Coleman acted the poo poo out of? They really elevated some subpar material there. The last few minutes of Clara giving the Doctor the business when they got back to the TARDIS was worth the price of admission.
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Oct 6, 2014 13:01
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SikorskyOvich posted:As for the problems with conservation of mass, I am struggling to figure out a way to justify this. One idea I have come up with relies on energy-to-mass conversion whereby the "egg" reached a point in its cycle during which it turned its surface into solar panels and got a cross-universe shipment of replicators from the federation and proceeded to use those to turn all the electromagnetic radiation coming in to produce the new "egg". To put on 1.2 billion tons (which I believe is the number quoted. I currently don't have the episode close by to reference, but I'm pretty sure about that) by this process would take approximately 3.91*10^6 years given 100% efficiency at all stages. Given that efficiency of energy transfer is not exactly the greatest thing this could take several orders of magnitude longer. According to some sources the moon is about 4.5 billion years old. So, if it started storing energy from its inception it could well have accomplished this. However this is quite a stretch and I doubt the writer has had to struggle with comlications like the conservation laws. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLSSh6G3Bx0
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Oct 6, 2014 13:38
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I'm late on the abortion talk but I think if you're looking for a labored abortion metaphor, you have to watch Amy's Choice, and even that doesn't stand up all the way because the metaphor sort of falls apart in the second half of it. I think I disagree on the ending's message being undercut by there being no moral consequences for releasing the creature, though. That's part of the general sentiment of the show and it's very present in Amy's early travels with the Space Whale or in any of the "Everybody lives!" episodes, but more importantly, it's part of the substance of what makes Clara so angry; she was left with a choice in which she could have destroyed a completely innocent and beautiful creature or in which nothing bad happened and humanity was inspired to explore the Universe, and the Doctor didn't help her, despite, to her mind, knowing which decision was the right one. It really was a "taking the training wheels off" situation for her. CobiWann posted:And as soon as Earth said one thing, Clara said another, and the Doctor popped back in at THAT exact moment? I couldn't disagree more! I think it was a very Doctor Who way of ending the episode and that it was a great way to begin introducing her growing resentment toward his condescension, and I think the writing felt more like Peter Harness writing for the RTD years than like a Moffat script. You can detect his rewrites in there, certainly, but I think they're mostly line edits and probably a lot the Danny scene which I thought was written with humanity).
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Oct 6, 2014 14:15
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That was an impressively stupid episode. When your premise depends on basic physics/biology, you're obligated to have at least some of it be coherent and logical. Even in Doctor Who.
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Oct 6, 2014 15:42
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And that's not even mentioning the mexican moonbase. loving serapes and cacti. Jesus christ. Why not just paint mustaches on their suit helmets while you're at it.
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Oct 6, 2014 15:43
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Espilae posted:Most of you guys have probably seen this already but I ran across the 30 Years of Time Travel documentary on YouTube, it's interesting stuff (and one of the first people to talk on it is BRIAN BLESSED): Aww. They get so melancholy and wistful at the end there. And hurt. I kinda wish I could go back in time and show them the revival.  Apart from Pertwee, he just don't give a gently caress.
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Oct 6, 2014 15:44
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PriorMarcus posted:Cross posting from the Oxx thread. As has already been noted, it's jarring because it's way, way, way out of character for Donna, and it's even more cringeworthy when they steal the Usual Suspects bit at the end. (Though possible points for referencing a character who pretty much described himself as worse than Satan, given Ten's moments of cruelty)
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Oct 6, 2014 15:47
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I grew up watching and enjoying Jurassic Park, where halfway through the film Grant shouts "But how do you interrupt the cellular mitosis?!" which is among the least egregious of its biology flaws, but still enjoyed it, and that film had more responsibility than the show which coined "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow!" Until science literacy gets a hell of a lot better, expect your popular fiction to contain magic with science buzzwords thrown in, that's just the way of things.
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Oct 6, 2014 15:48
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Bicyclops posted:I grew up watching and enjoying Jurassic Park, where halfway through the film Grant shouts "But how do you interrupt the cellular mitosis?!" which is among the least egregious of its biology flaws, but still enjoyed it, and that film had more responsibility than the show which coined "Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow!" The difference being that the Jurassic Park quote is a throwaway line. Everything vaguely important to the plot in this episode is broken beyond belief. Middle school students should know enough science to pick apart the resolution to this episode.
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Oct 6, 2014 15:54
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As for the "new moon" thing being the same size as the old moon. Maybe it was smaller but birthed closer to the Earth? That would keep it the same size, just make it closer. Over time it then grows and gets farther and father away. It's an rear end pull, but it works. It's interesting looking back at the mentions of the moon in the series and how it's "arrival" already didn't jive with it's real age and creation. There was a mention of the Silurians going into hibernation originally when it appeared in the sky. Of course the Third Doctor already had a shaky grasp of Earth's ancient historical periods when it came to them.
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Oct 6, 2014 16:01
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| # ? Jun 3, 2024 09:49 |
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e: If you try to discuss the moral choice in this episode it becomes obvious pretty quickly that the debate has nothing to do with abortion and everything to do with militaristic "should we pre-emptively destroy potential threats" ideas.remusclaw posted:1. It's massive parents show up to escort junior away, and lay an egg to replace it. I think the easiest rationalization is that it gave birth to a small creature then pulled the shattered "shell" of the moon together around it once again to form an egg. That would also explain why rocks didn't come falling down to earth. SirSamVimes posted:The Doctor's ending monologue would have been so much better if instead of "Humanity decided to free the space dragon", he acknowledged the decision to kill it and went with someone along the lines of "Humanity tried to end the new life, but instead saw so much more than they had concieved it to be." Except better written than what I threw together at midnight. Irony Be My Shield fucked around with this message at 16:10 on Oct 6, 2014 |
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Oct 6, 2014 16:05
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